What I learned hanging out at the vascular surgery conference

My girlfriend, who is a landscape architect, has a subscription to Interlocking Concrete Pavement magazine (http://www.icpi.org/node/745). On average, I probably spend twice as much time reading it as she does. Most recently, there was an article that described different parking lot geometries designed to prevent rainwater that lands on the parking lot from making it out of the parking lot, carrying lots of toxic crap with it. I also learned recently about horseshoe swales, which collect runoff from things like tennis courts.

I've previously read issues of Appliance Design and American Laundry Digest and found similarly interesting stuff.

[Edit: In trying to find a diagram of a horseshoe swale, I discovered that there exists a social network for landscape architects: http://land8lounge.com/ Looking at the source, I think it's a Ning site branded to look independent (or at least there are a bunch of ning.com assets linked).]

A friend of mine in grad school in Atlanta, which hosts a bunch of conferences in the big hotels downtown (partly due to the well-connected airport), used to crash them mainly for free food, but found some pretty interesting conversations as a result. One pointer was to go to "boring-sounding" biz conferences where people are mostly there because their company sent them. The novelty of you not being from the conference makes it fairly easy to talk to people, they don't usually care about you crashing it (unless perhaps they're the organizers), and it's a good way of finding out what people in an industry/sector think is broken in their industry (by the 2nd or 3rd day of a conference on Subject X, many attendees have a lot of rants about Subject X collected on the tip of their tongues).

Last week, I was talking with a guy at a cocktail party who was reading "Ways of Seeing" by Berger and studying physics by reading The Feynman Lectures. He was one of the most fascinating people I have met in a while because he was genuinely interested in your life (even though we only talked ten minutes, I was left wanting more...). And he was a marketing guy.

My grandpa once advised me to read a new book or magazine about something I was unfamiliar with every month. Terrific advice, I have so much more general knowledge that lets me interact with customers and new people than many of my peers.

I used to work for a surgeon and was tangentially involved with some conferences. I'll confirm they're like he described. The only person I've ever heard of being asked to leave was a malpractice lawyer digging for dirt.

Surgeons, like developers, tend to be very particular about their tools. The one I worked for designed a few of his own and worked with medical device companies to produce and sell them.

The sales reps are an interesting mix of "sales-ey" and technical. One medical device sales rep I knew became one after having sold his business stocking sandwich vending machines. Other sales reps were practicing PAs (Physician Assistants) who were known to scrub in and sometimes perform parts of the surgery.

Hmmm, I've always said if I quit programming I'd probably go into Civil Engineering. Perhaps it's time to look for some magazines next time I go to the library. I'll read just about anything, for precisely the same reason Andy crashed the conference - gaining new knowledge is fun!