I took it pretty easy this morning, sleeping in until after 8 and not getting to the conference hotel until 9:30. My first presentation was on EbscoHost (see previous post for links, I’m lazy…) and went pretty well. My part was not terribly polished and on the short side, but overall there were lots of good questions and lots of head-nodding, so things were fairly well received. My boss was in the back row, threatening to make faces at me as I talked until water shot out of my nose. I made eye contact with every person (around 50 or so) in that room – but him. No water leakage!
The second presentation – the one I did with Bobbi went REALLY well. It was our second time doing it and we were very comfortable with the material and each other. I did manage to make eye contact with everyone in the room again (even my boss, who just looked proud that we were on his staff, as opposed to making crazy faces) and got even more good head-nodding feedback (and great, sometimes hard, questions, too!). At the end of the presentation, one woman came up and asked us if we could do this program at her library for her staff. It’s not official yet, but we are hoping to be able to take this dog-and-pony show out on the road soon!!
After the presentations, and lunch at Red Lobster, we separated and I went out to the “Library Central” building of the Springfield-Greene Library. It’s a beautiful building with LOTS of cool features (including a permanent Friends shop and a cafe). I noticed they used the SAM PC Management Software – the same one we use – and so I got to speak to the head of Reference (who selects which software is used for their public computers) about their experiences with it. It was all-in-all a great use of my time – even if I did miss a few sessions at the conference. After that, as I was driving back to the hotel, I detoured at the world famous Bass Pro Shop and went through their museum, shopping areas and arcade. It was fun! Now I’m back at the hotel, checking email, posting this and killing time until 9, when the “Hollywood Librarian” movie will be shown.
Even at 11pm, so I definitely ate too much at dinner – but it was sooooo good! We went to a nice Japanese Steakhouse (the kind where they cook your food in front of you) and we ate very, very well! After that we went to the “Ernie Biggs” dueling pianos event – cash bar, though I was good and remembered I have to present tomorrow – and very funny performers. What more could you want? Now I’m getting my final “read-throughs” on both the Ebscohost and RSS and the Library Learning 2.0 presentations. Natasha just called and informed me that she and Letitia were bringing me back a donut from the late-night donut party that I skipped out on, so I’m outta here. More tomorrow!
I’ve arrived in Springfield and have already gone to one really interesting session on Microsoft’s next version of the shared toolkit – SteadyState. It looks really interesting, and may save us some money if I can make it work at least as well as Centurion Guard! I ate lunch at a fast-food italian place called Pasta Presto (I basically got into my car, pointed it vaguely west and drove until I saw something interesting – that’s what I found) which wasn’t too bad – the salad was great, the rest was OK. I’ve checked my email, taken care of things at work and I’m now ready to head back to the conference and spend some time grabbing free stuff from the vendor booths.
On a completely different note – I apologize to Margaret and Bobbi – their comments on a previous post got eaten by the spam filter. I’ve restored them and appreciate the time they took to reassure me that they both read my blog – though I’m not sure I buy Margaret’s claim that she has nothing to blog about…
More tomorrow! Tonight is vendors, eating, WoW and sleeping so I’m somewhat capable of doing two presentations tomorrow – one right after the other. Fun… Drinking and partying will have to wait ’til Thursday night!
Getting Nothing Done GND ™ does not compete with Getting Things Done, it complements GTD.
I’m not sure I’m expecting a lot of posts from this blog, but it’s pretty funny anyway…
Post Like a Pirate – Your Pirate Translator will take your text and post it to Twitter, MySpace, a web-based Email client or just translate it for you (as it did the title to my post here) so that you can talk like a bona-fide pirate today. Enjoy!!
Reading Library The future of Web Services isn’t the Library website got me thinking about websites in general. There will always be a need for a specific “place” on the ‘net for organizations and businesses – that’s the website. For most people, however, it won’t occur to them to go to your website for the information that they need. That’s where Karen says that web services come into play. If your site is publishing information in reusable chunks – bits of info that are easily put into other people’s websites, newsletters and profiles (in the case of social networks like MySpace and Facebook) – they don’t have to think about coming to your site to get their information – it’s already there, wherever they may be. Jenny Levine, of the Shifted Librarian blog, just posted a “tweet” that said that the reason for libraries (or any organization, really) to be in social networking site at all is to be found because people don’t remember URLs. (my paraphrase, there…) All of this adds up to the idea that, while we want people to visit us both on- and offline, they may not remember to do so if we aren’t a visible presence where they are. It’s just another take on my “go where our users are” theme, but Karen says it very well!!
Blog Day is a day where all bloggers are asked to recommend 5 blogs that their readers (hi Tab and Margaret – I’d link to you Margaret, but since you don’t have a blog yet…) may not be familiar with. So, without further ado, my 5 blogs:
- New York Times Books Section
- Newshounds – “We watch FOX News so you don’t have to”
- Consumerist – Information about consumer issues – mostly the bad, which is, of course, far more entertaining…
- Web Worker Daily
- 43 Folders – A Getting Things Done blog that is in no way responsible for my lack of getting things done
There you have it – 5 blogs that I regularly read that aren’t specifically about the content of this blog (though that last one may be rather close for comfort, considering all of the times I’ve blogged about the GTD methodology…)
I’m starting to grab posts from the cached feed at Google Reader (thanks ever so much Beth and Google’s cache!!) so that I’ll have at least some of the older posts back up and available. I won’t be recovering all of them – some were just link pointers that have outlived their usefulness, some were downright not interesting enough to go to the trouble to save. I’ll try to recover some more later, when I have time, but it does appear that some of them may be returning to make my little blog seem less bare!
Besides my utter dejection at having lost the last 3 years of work on this blog, I have had other reasons as to why I’m not posting very often. One of which I can share with you all now – I’ve accepted a new position at the library. My boss left the library at the end of the month (July) and I’ve been busy being both him and myself for the last 2 and 1/2 weeks – as well as applying for, interviewing for and accepting his job. Now I get to be both of us again while we look for *my* replacement. Hopefully, in 2 weeks, we’ll have both positions filled and I’ll be able to concentrate on my new duties as Information Technology Manager for the library. Sometime after that, I may begin blogging in a regular way again. Won’t that be fun? As for the other reason(s) I’ve not been blogging, well, we’ll just say that I’m kicking butt with a level 20-something hunter in WoW…