One of the things my business does is arrange for my clients to exhibit at trade shows. I used to do more of this, but these days the only show I do is the Supercomputing Conference. This is the largest show for the supercomputing industry, drawing visitors from all over the world, yet it is held in the United States, moving between a small number of cities each year.
This year, the show was held in Dallas, Texas.
My trip started out with what were [and several years later, still are] the best aerial views of Mt. Hood I’ve ever seen as we flew out of Portland. Here are a few more photos from this flight.
Once in Dallas, I checked into my hotel then went straight to the convention center where my colleague joined me and we spent the rest of the day and part of the next getting the booth all set up.
Below is a picture of the waste we generated doing this setup. My client has a small booth — just 10 x 20 feet, and yet the setup generates a lot of waste. Now multiply that by the 400+ number of total exhibitors, noting that many are much larger than our booth by quite a bit, and you get an idea of the waste generated by trade shows.
When I travel on business, I often don’t get many opportunities to go out to take pictures. Here’s a pic my colleague took of me at the convention center. [Because Texans like to say “Everything is big in Texas.”]
And a pic of the area around the convention center as we walked about looking for a place to have dinner.
We found a neat little area with some good restaurants, and this very bizarre giant eyeball sculpture [more here about that sculpture]:
The next day was cloudy, which made for some interesting photos of the city as seen from the convention center.
The convention center itself had fun lighting inside:
Back in my hotel room, I took what is one of my favorite-ever self portraits:
And a final picture from my room:
Because I was limited to just the area around the convention center and had no time to explore, these are the only pictures I got. After just a few days working to set up the show, I left everything in my colleague’s hands, rented a car, and headed through Oklahoma to Arkansas to visit a client.
This was my second time in Dallas, and I was convinced there was nothing to see there anyway — which of course isn’t true, which I learned later.