Okay. It’s now 10:07 PM and we’ve just returned from the Four Seasons at Aviara where we successfully infiltrated the surprisingly intimate D: All Things Digital Wall Street Journal Executive Conference. On entering we walked straight into the D Anniversary Celebration and Nightcap Gathering (slipping past someone who looked like Six Apart’s Mena Trott) then took a right to go check out the conference rooms. The stairway in the back was lined with monitors and a woman was video taping something. Down below I saw a cadre of men in suits coming up the stairs from below and I was approaching to go down.
Now, saying you’re going to go barge a conference, take some pictures and hang out is one thing. Doing it is another. We discovered this while standing face to face with the shockingly ghost-white John McCain who was surrounded by several aids and a team of Aviara’s finest security men. Before we could even think about getting our camera out they moved past and down the hall.
We got no photo of John McCain, but we also didn’t get thrown out. Which is good. If we had, we never would have snagged this lovely photo of the 5th Anniversary cupcake tower.
Having been to dozens of industry conferences we can add that barging is 100 times more fun than paying, wearing the lanyard and standing around with a bunch of geeks pretending to have a good time.
Stay tuned: we’re making plans for another foray into the digital world tomorrow. Carlsbad has never been so tech.
ADDED 10:50 PM: Just heard via Jason Calacanis’ Twitter post that George Lucas was in the lobby talking to Chad Hurley (Youtube.com co-founder) and it is obvious that we left too early.
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