America on fire

May 10, 2007 by Lesa Snider

I arrived in Orlando the other day to teach at the CRE8 Conference (otherwise known as the Adobe Acrobat & PDF Conf). During the flight, it looked like half the continent was on fire! Every morning when I leave my room, the air is thick with the smell of smoke. It's very odd and makes me crave roasted marshmallows.

This is a relatively small conference, maybe 400 or so are here. The coolest thing was that Al Gore was our keynote speaker! He talked for about 2 hrs yesterday and it was really a neat experience. He was very funny and truly a good speaker, just as I'd heard. He made jokes about losing the presidential race ("There's winners and losers and that little known third category...") and jokingly bragged about his powers on Apple's board ("In Keynote 3, they took out the ability to make things bounce. I liked that. Now it's back..."). Then he did the environmental talk complete with up to date information on what all these fires are doing to the atmospheric carbon levels. Pretty scary stuff! Everyone was scrambling afterwards to calculate their own personal carbon emissions.

They've got us at the Disney Coronado Springs Resort, which has some beautiful architecture and a honkin' big lagoon which I pass each day on the way to the convention center (this picture is the little pool right outside my room). The weather has been perfect and warm enough for mini-skirts (thank Thor because I didn't pack any pants!).