Considering the fact that I have been using / playing with / hacking this beautiful piece of Open Source Software called WordPress for as long as I have been, it did surprise me quite a bit that it took me so long to attend my first WordCamp. Then again, I shouldn’t be that surprised - geographical remoteness of Paradise played its part to some extent. Having gotten into the city a day earlier, I had the opportunity to (eat &) walk around in parts of it (that I had never seen before - including Central Park) with a new found friend (and a long time citizen of Packers nation). Much of the evening (and night and early hours of Sunday) was spent hanging out with some friends that I have known for a looooong time and some that I got to know hours earlier.

Having camped at Latha & Vathsa’s, I woke up to a rainy Sunday morning; got the LIRR train (I know it’s expensive but it’s super fast too … using $$ to save time) to reach the Penn Station. Walking several city blocks in a slight drizzle while sipping Tall Skim Chai Lattae at times seemed like a luxury (the Lattae part, not walking).

About the event itself, kudos to Jonathan Dingman for organizing it the way he did - giving sufficient breaks between every presentation, which in turn gave us the opportunity to interact more with the speaker and/or fellow attendees. Meeting many a geeks and non-geeks alike, who use WordPress for a variety of things was fun (an understatement) and so was meeting many a people face-to-face — whom I had known as the author of a website and/or as a comment author in my blog (an understatement again). Getting a sneak preview about very many cool things to come in the November release in a His Steveness-like presentation from the legend himself (and getting to check out his GPS mounted Nikon D3 as well) was nothing short of exciting either!

Imagine, if you can - me still kinda flying high with excitement and pardon me, if you can - for if you hear it more than once from me about it. And if you realize, like me, that this post is not as coherent as it should have been, blame it on my excitement