Hello, I’m your guest blogger! I volunteered to do some on-the-ground posts about the CIDM CMS/DITA 2013 conference in Providence, Rhode Island. This is the first installment.

It’s Sunday April 14 and I got up this morning at 330am to catch my 600am flight from LAX. I arrived at my hotel in Providence this afternoon. Providence is an old and gorgeous little city. Here is the view from my hotel room:

The conference starts tomorrow, but tonight I attended a reception for attendees with drinks and light food. Here is the swag they passed out as I signed in: a nice backpack sporting the CIDM logo, and my attendee badge.

There was a lot of drinking, eating and talking going on. I really should have taken some pictures of the room. I will make up for this later. I had a beer and ate a lot of green and red peppers while walking around the room introducing myself to people and exchanging cards. I’m here to learn things and promote my services. It was very fun to meet Radu Coravu and George Bina of SyncRO Soft, makers of the excellent Oxygen XML editor. They are from Romania. I also talked to Eliot Kimber, markup wrangler par excellence and one of my heroes. He had flown in from Austin and was wearing a kilt. I also met and talked to Don Day, co-chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee. He was one of the original people working on the DITA standard, and I enjoyed discussing using DITA on-the-fly for websites. I’ll guess the room had over 200 people in it at its peak.

Tomorrow morning starts at 7am for a provided breakfast, and then the speakers and presentations start! I’m excited! More tomorrow.