If you missed RIAdventure, you missed some truly inspiring stuff, some truly cool tech talks, and Sam Rivello tearing it up on Karaoke!

First the inspiring. Doug McCune and Sam Rivello rocked the house. Doug spoke about data visualization, but not in the typical, here’s how to create the latest, hottest chart/graph/heatmap but in terms of what data viz is, where it came from “The Bar Chart was Invented”

I’ve never been a data viz guy, but his talk was great. I think the group really got a lot out of it. I think enrollment in the McCune school of DataViz is open too, there’s a suggested reading list :)

Sam Talked about life… building life in code, and how the concepts of life (the 7 requirements for something to be “alive”) can be expressed in code. We’re not talking AI, more a comparitive discussion, with cute smiley faced amoeba’s to back up the talk. (You can check out his project here) It was a great talk, and another where you’re left with that “hhmmmm” look on your face.

Of course we talked tech too, and got into code!

Ryan Stewart, Greg Burch, Faisal Abid, and even Nate Beck (Not a speaker, but jumped in to present) rocked the mic and the flat screen with awesome tech talks.

Ryan and Greg rep’ed Adobe awesomely, talking about Catalyst, mobile (Slider and iPhone), Flash platform, you name it we talked about it, including some sweet stuff we had to turn the camera’s off for :)

Faisal showed us Android and talked about Android and CF playing together. He also showed us Chrome OS, which (not surprisingly) doesn’t work if you’re not online. Seeing Android truly in action, was pretty dope, I’m more impressed now than I was.

Nate stepped up on the last day to talk about the Push Button Engine, and building Flash games. Very cool stuff!

I’m working on the videos now (Waiting for more HDD space in my drobo, UPS man is on his way), we’re going to post as much of the session video as possible.

Ad of course it was a cruise!

During the time inbetween sea days, everyone spent the day hanging out, doing excursions, whatever they wanted. Most nights we all got together for drinks, sometimes dinner, and whenever possible, karaoke.

You’ll have to ask Sam about the stair case the next time you see him :)

I have to admit, the entire experience of a cruise, with awesome tech talks, great networking, and cool people, and of course, sweet destinations, and beautiful ocean, is a great way to conference. It’s certainly not gonna replace 360|Flex, but we were on the boat with a group of almost 700. That’s a lot of people in one place for the same reason, on a cruise!

Of course everyone who joined us on the boat is coming to 360|Flex San Jose Free of charge too, so it’ll be a cruise reunion :)

Don’t miss 360|Flex, you’ll regret it, I promise :) Register now!