I have returned safely from my trip to Long Beach, CA, and WUSS 2012! As always, it was a great conference. The opening session was really fun this year. Maura Stokes and Diane Hatcher from SAS gave the keynote in the form of a “presidential debate.” Maura’s platform was analytics; while Diane campaigned on the data side. The debate was loads of fun with a good message about big data and how SAS is responding to big data with its High-Performance Analytics (HPA) offerings. Vince DelGobbo was the moderator. The three of them got the conference off to a great start.

The next day, we had a delightful lunchtime keynote with Kirk Lafler, whose presentation was titled “You May Be a SAS Nerd if…” Turns out I’m a SAS Nerd and I got a ribbon to prove it! Later that afternoon I had the privilege of giving my paper about the services from SAS. I had a great turnout for the paper, and am still holding a 100% success rate with the challenge that everyone in the room learned something new!

At the end of this week, I head out to Minneapolis to give the keynote at MWSUG. If you are going to be there, please stop by and say hello. If you weren’t at my paper at WUSS and won’t be at MWSUG, then go to support.sas.com and do some looking around. I’ll bet you find something new there!