Pumped for the PASS Summit 2009

I was just at VanPASS' chapter meeting for September, nicely convened at the Kingston Taphouse.  It gave me the opportunity to ask about the PASS Summit experiences of local PASS chapter members.
Being relatively new to this "community" thing - I'd never been to a PASS Summit before.  I "missed" last year's because I was snootily attending the Microsoft BI Conference the week prior (which was pretty good - but not great) - and I didn't know enough to twist the boss' arm to get me into PASS as well.  Since there's no MSBIC this year (next one's in 2010) I felt I should probably get to PASS.
But apparently I don't have enough influence to redirect our reduced IT budget from non-essentials like "offsite DR" and "UPS backups" in order to pay for conferences.  Isn't my continued education important?  We can throw the DR servers in my garage with a few car batteries, no?  I jest.  We're operating on a very tight budget - probably just like most of the rest of the world these days - and there's (unfortunately) no room for conference spending.
I thought this one over a lot, and eventually decided that the ten or so sessions I "had to see" warranted shelling out my own money to get to PASS.  I attempted to completely discount the fact that I'd get to meet up with some fantastic guys I'd bumped into here and there over the past year.  I had to, or the whole exercise of objectively weighing the pros and cons of going would get shot out the window.  You see, the conference is going to be a ton of fun - sharing information, experiences, and getting new tidbits of information.  And when something's fun, I immediately question how objective I can be about the business value of it.  Regardless of how beneficial all that information gathering and sharing among colleagues is in real objective terms - I'm highly suspect of putting any kind of large valuation on that.
So the practical and objective side of me says it's worth it to go in order to understand SQL logging and recovery, and definitely learn more about the next two or three steps in my BI journey: AS, RS, PPS, MDX, and on and on.  Enough said.  But taking it over the top is the spectacular opportunity to get some handshakes, beers (I hope), and conversation in with John Welch, Matt Masson, Joe Webb, JR, and whomever else that's going to be there that I've had the fine fortune to get to know.  I don't yet know where I'm staying - so if I haven't dropped you an email yet, send me one so we can not-so-haphazardly run into one another.  I'll see you in Seattle!  (I'll apologize in advance for blathering on about SSIS and bringing you up to date on the spectacular extensions to it that I'm involved with - the Kimball Method SCD component, the File Properties task, the Pause task, and the SSIS Extensibility Directory.)