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Conference redux...
Nov. 10th, 2003 09:22 pmIt's tough to post with any detail in medias res, so to speak. There's just too much going on during a conference. Yet unless one makes some kind of notes - even words on the back of a business card - too much will be forgotten.
I stumbled into a number of folks who had been at my Linux/Open Source presentation, but none so memorable as the gentleman who was attending the conference with spouse and two offspring. It was Saturday morning, and I was trying to figure a way to squirrel my way past a seemingly impenetrable barrier of round tables occupied by fellow attendees to a table with some acquaintances, when I was flagged down and invited to sit next to a young, bearded man with a small child on his knee. I did.
The man proceeded to ask me a number of intelligent questions, and only then did it occur to me to look at the line below his name on his conference badge. It turns out the gentleman works for Microsoft.
Fortunately, I have a habit of embedding a slide in my presentation that summarizes what I'm going to talk about, and another slide that summarizes what my talk will not cover, and one of my stated non-goals was to turn the presentation into some kind of Microsoft-bashing orgy. Anyway, the breakfast was pleasant enough, although I am sure that if push were to come to shove, we would have to agree to disagree on the worth of Linux/Open Source, although we did agree it represented a threat to Microsoft. I asked the young man to convey my regards to some people that I believe still work for Microsoft in Redmond.
* * * The talk delivered by this year's SLD Susana Greiss lecturer, Genevra Gerhart, was fairly straightforward but entertaining as well, in an informative kind of way. She is the author of The Russian Word and The Russian Context, which one can think of as a two-volume FAQ on Russian culture. What I found particularly interesting was Ms. Gerhart's recollection of just how hard it was to have such works see the light of day within the academic world in which she apparently works.
I was particularly struck by her description of the kind of thinking she had to deal with that one can only describe as thoroughly bureaucratic: the people she was dealing with kept telling her that her book idea was worthless as it didn't fit into any convenient academic pigeonhole (despite serving a tremendously practical purpose in Russian language education, although the educrats denied that, too). A brief examination of the first tome makes me wish I had read it a long time ago.
* * * A recent issue of Prevention magazine, which has always touted walking as a fine method of losing weight, has an article on how ramping up to about 16,000 steps a day will have a beneficial effect on one's health and exercise regimen. One day prior to the conference, I decided to count how many steps it takes to walk from the store to the bank and back, and came up with 760. While in Phoenix, I picked up a electronic pedometer, to get a little more accurate feel for how many times I use my feet to translate my carcass about the landscape.
Yesterday, including the walk that Radek took me on, was about a 9000 step day. Today's count (which is not likely to increase much) stands at about 8500. Both numbers are better than the "average" quoted in the article (somewhere between 4000 and 6000, if memory serves).
* * * Tomorrow is Veteran's Day, and Drew has rescheduled the store's working hours on such days. Instead of opening at 8, we'll be opening at noon (which means 4 fewer hours of people walking in and asking for stamps or money orders) and closing at 4:30, after UPS.
I've planned to go to Durango to pick up some stuff for the store (credit card paper, toner for the laser printers, probably a vacuum cleaner), but that plan may go by the wayside if the rain that's been falling for the past few hours turns to any kind of decent snow overnight.
I may post more about the conference later; my heart isn't in it right now... I was just reminded of some additional serious wounds that are about to be inflicted on a checking account that has very nearly bled out.
Cheers...
I stumbled into a number of folks who had been at my Linux/Open Source presentation, but none so memorable as the gentleman who was attending the conference with spouse and two offspring. It was Saturday morning, and I was trying to figure a way to squirrel my way past a seemingly impenetrable barrier of round tables occupied by fellow attendees to a table with some acquaintances, when I was flagged down and invited to sit next to a young, bearded man with a small child on his knee. I did.
The man proceeded to ask me a number of intelligent questions, and only then did it occur to me to look at the line below his name on his conference badge. It turns out the gentleman works for Microsoft.
Fortunately, I have a habit of embedding a slide in my presentation that summarizes what I'm going to talk about, and another slide that summarizes what my talk will not cover, and one of my stated non-goals was to turn the presentation into some kind of Microsoft-bashing orgy. Anyway, the breakfast was pleasant enough, although I am sure that if push were to come to shove, we would have to agree to disagree on the worth of Linux/Open Source, although we did agree it represented a threat to Microsoft. I asked the young man to convey my regards to some people that I believe still work for Microsoft in Redmond.
I was particularly struck by her description of the kind of thinking she had to deal with that one can only describe as thoroughly bureaucratic: the people she was dealing with kept telling her that her book idea was worthless as it didn't fit into any convenient academic pigeonhole (despite serving a tremendously practical purpose in Russian language education, although the educrats denied that, too). A brief examination of the first tome makes me wish I had read it a long time ago.
Yesterday, including the walk that Radek took me on, was about a 9000 step day. Today's count (which is not likely to increase much) stands at about 8500. Both numbers are better than the "average" quoted in the article (somewhere between 4000 and 6000, if memory serves).
I've planned to go to Durango to pick up some stuff for the store (credit card paper, toner for the laser printers, probably a vacuum cleaner), but that plan may go by the wayside if the rain that's been falling for the past few hours turns to any kind of decent snow overnight.
I may post more about the conference later; my heart isn't in it right now... I was just reminded of some additional serious wounds that are about to be inflicted on a checking account that has very nearly bled out.
Cheers...
