<<It's truly unfortunate that Interex and HP remain so
California-centric. We too would like to send participants (maybe just one,
once) but the costs associated with such a trip are well beyond the pale of
the Professional Development budget of an eastern college like ours. Not to
mention the CDN dollar at all time lows compared to the Yankee greenback.
Oh, well, maybe next time...>>


Not quite, at least not in this case. IPROF is not a typical user's
conference. In most cases, the location of something like HP World, N+I, and
similar conferences is unrelated to the content. In contrast, IPROF is very
much a situation where "the users go to HP", because that's where the people
they go to see are available. IPROF is at least as much "user to HP lab
engineer" as it is "user to user", and there is not really a practical
alternative to having it close to where the HP engineers "live". In fact, up
through IPROF '95 (I think-the "Red Baron"...ok, "Le Baron" venue was
sufficiently forgettable that I'm not completely positive of the year),
IPROF was held on-site at HP's Cupertino facility. The HP engineers could
literally walk across the block/parking lot to attend IPROF sessions. This
kind of immediate accessibility and full-contact interaction is a key part
of what makes IPROF work. If it turned into just another
technically-oriented forum where users get together to talk to each other
and listen to marketing drivel, it would lose a lot of its value and many of
its attendees, including yours truly.

Steve