Living in San Francisco, it's getting harder and harder to get excited about conferences. I find myself at 7-10 per year, and the infrastructure events blend in with each other, as do the startup events. Generally the same people saying the same things, often in very self-serving ways .. like Mark Pincus telling everybody they will fail as entrepreneurs if they don't work for Zynga or Facebook first, or Paul Graham trying to make you feel bad if you didn't drop out of a university in exchange for $20k to build a web app.