My meetings went very well. This is surprising as hell. You see, normally a meeting that has more than four people is useful only for brainstorming. Once you hit the magic number it's just about impossible to get actual constructive work done. Monday's meeting had 7 people and we actually did everything that we had to do. Admittedly it got a bit flighty toward the end when everybody was starting to burn out but overall it was an exceptionally well behaved crowd. Sunday's meeting was with project people instead of product people and we didn't get anything done except some brainstorming. This was okay though as the purpose of the meeting was to actually meet each other (my division is spread all over the States) and do some brainstorming.

More importantly, I met up with Elizabeth and Clancy. Elizabeth is a beanie (or "Chicagonian" if you prefer) and Clancy happened to be up there on his own business trip. We went out Monday and had a great time. Elizabeth is like a professional tour guide and showed us all around the fancy and touristy parts of downtown. A free tour was pretty cool because if I took a regular one I wouldn't have been able to expense it. Here are some of the tour highlights. Incidentally, I forgot to bring the camera so I don't have any pictures to post. Instead, I've just made helpful links for each of them:

A hundred years ago Chicago burned down. Now the natives take great pride in pointing out buildings that survived the fire. They point out every building. I'm pretty sure the whole Chicago fire thing was just a story they let out because they were jealous of Atlanta's burnt city street cred.

The architecture in Chicago is very impressive. There's all the old stuff that "survived the fire" and right across the street are brand new glass faced sky scrapers. The dichotomy of architecture is very cool.

There are loads of artwork and other statuary. I saw the fountain from "Married With Children" and a metal Picasso structure that was either a duck or a horse. It had both of its eyes on its head though, so there's a chance it's a counterfeit.

Millenium Park has lots of art. There's some ginormous crashed spaceship looking thing, people who spit at you (although they weren't spitting when we were there) and the world's biggest chrome coffee bean. Unfortunately the bean was all covered up so nobody could take pictures of it. They say that it's for maintenance but we all know it's really about the Chicagoland Copywrite Kerfuffle.

The K-Mart Sears Tower is really tall. I never realized that the architect was a kid playing with Legos but a quick look at the top of this sucker makes that very clear.

After our tour we cabbed over to Harry Caray's. Don't confuse this Harry Caray with hari-kiri; the Japanese art of stabbing oneself in the gut. They are almost completely different.

The cab drive was where I learned a very important lesson. You know those dotted lines in the road that run parralel to the sidewalks? Down here in Georgia we use those to mark where the traffic lanes are. In Chicago they are just more of the art you find sprinkled all over the city. They don't even take them as a suggestion of where lanes should be. We came upon an intersection where there was a cab in the left and middle lanes and another cab in the right and middle lanes. This left about 3 feet of middle lane left. Our cabbie took it without hesitation. I lost count of the number of miniature heart attacks I had on the drive.

A lot of people walk in Chicago. These are the people who couldn't get a driver's license because they are sane.

Harry's was great. We had some excellent conversation over beer and appetizers. Except for Elizabeth, of course. She was pounding rum drinks.

I had fried ravioli. In Chicago they dip raviolis in batter and fry them. In Chicago they dip everything in batter and fry it. When they run out of things to dip in batter to fry, they just fry the batter all by its lonesome. The waitresses are also trained in defibrilater use.

I had a great time with great people. The only thing that could have made it better is if we were in the same town for more than a day. And if that town was Atlanta 'cause no matter how cool Chicago is, Atlanta is where this guy wants to be.