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Saturday, May 10, 2008 — posted by Sarah
I greatly enjoyed my time in Vancouver for DocTrain West.Unfortunately, the process of getting to and from Vancouver is shaping up to be one of the "typical" travel nightmares. Outbound, I missed a connection (because of weather) by a few minutes, which resulted in a six-hour penalty in travel time.
Inbound back to RDU, I'm writing this on the Vancouver to Dallas plane, which is currently parked at the gate in Vancouver and shows no signs of departing anytime soon. Now, I'd prefer that they fix the hydraulic leak before we go, but it seems as though lately, the on-time rates have gone south. (Hmmm. I live in the South and it occurs to me that this metaphor is a bit locale-ist.) let's try again...the on-time rates have gone down the toilet. (oops. That's sure to offend someone and also lead to Google search hits I'd prefer not to have.) ....the on-time rates really s*** (this is getting worse instead of better). ...the airlines appear to be having some challenges (cough, cough) with their already lousy on-time operations. [Update: We departed almost three hours late with a new, non-leaking hydraulic component.] [Update2: I'm posting this from DFW.]
Anyway, I assume I'll get back at some point. Meanwhile, the conference itself was fun. Got to catch up with lots of people, saw some interesting presentations, and did two sessions that seemed to go reasonably well.
This is only the second time I've done a hands-on workshop in a conference context. Attempting to do one of these sessions is right behind high places, spiders, and eggplant on my list of phobias.
Why? I have little or no control over installation and configuration issues. For an XSL workshop, the minimum requirements are a Java runtime and an XSL parser (both free and open source and therefore a bit challenging to install). A text editor intended for programming (such as Oxygen) would be nice, too. It's impossible to get everyone configured ahead of time, so we end up scrambling to make everything work at the beginning of class. And then we have essentially infinite possible problems ranging from problems with wireless connections to platform variations to security problems (as in, you can't install anything because IT has locked your machine down).
This time around, things actually went extremely well. We had the usual issues, but everything got resolved (which isn't always the case). Although I had rather a large group for a hands-on session, we stayed on track with the schedule and even crammed in some extra material. (Private note to participants: Sorry about the exploding brain problem.) My favorite "problem" in this workshop was in attempting to help one participant. I started typing something and got unexpected input, which was because my touch-typing doesn't work on a non-U.S. keyboard. My attempts to locate the <, >, :, and = keystrokes were truly pathetic. The keyboard owner was nice enough not to laugh at me as she pointed to the correct keys.
Anyway, I'll be attempting this particular trick again at the upcoming Trends in Technical Communication (STC UK) event in Birmingham, so if you're interested in a fun-filled day of declarative programming, you should join us!
After Birmingham, I'll be attending X-Pubs in London. At that conference, I'm presenting the live version of our Web 2.0 white paper. We are attempting to provide some insight into how technical communication and user-generated content will intersect.
If you'll be at either of these events, please let me know.
And finally, after a nudge from a coworker, I have set up a Twitter account. You can find me at okeefe_scr. I'm not sure where that experiment will go, but I thought I'd give it a try.
Labels: conferences, doctrainwest08, travel, web 2.0
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