Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Feeling better than I did yesterday, I packed everything up for a quick getaway when the conference ended at noon.
I lucked out and attended three solid presentations today, unlike yesterday where I seemed to go to one dud after another. The first presentation featured a couple of people from Symantec who provided some real insight into their CMS selection process, followed by a presentation from some HP reps that looked at how they measure the performance of all the people that contribute content, along the way revealing much about their internal culture and practices which was interesting. The conference concluded for me with a presentation by Don D. of IBM who talked about what was in the DITA toolkit and how to use it, a presentation almost worth the price of admission of itself, and made me regret that we didn't opt for the workshop that followed in the afternoon.
Having said that, I was pretty much "conferenced out" by the time it wrapped up. Not the best conference I've ever been to, as I felt we rarely got to the sort of depth I had been hoping for in many of the presentations. On a purely informational basis, I think the Information Highways conference, though focusing for the most part on different topics, presented more new ideas and the latest information of genuine interest to those attending. The DITA track at the CMS Strategies was easily the strongest component of the conference, but not enough in and of itself to make me want to come back. Guess we'll see. ;-)
After checking out Kevin B. and I wondered what to do next. We'd pretty much seen all there was to be seen in Annapolis, and only had about 3 hours before we had to head to the airport, which wasn't enough time to head to Baltimore or D.C. and do anything useful. So we went to a local mall on the outskirts of town to kill time and have lunch instead.
Went into a BOSE shop and got a full audio demo. Sounded great, but it was far from being subtle, what with lightning crashes a lots of flash. Was highly tempted to buy a pair of noise-canceling headphones since the pair I had brought down didn't fair so well against the noise of the turboprop in the Dash 8, but found the $199 US price tag a bit too high -- and there was really no guarantee that it would work significantly better under the circumstances than the AIWA set I already have.
Ended up spending most of my time in the Borders store there after lunch. Picked up a DVD there of Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead", one of my all-time favourite movies, looking at the two hapless figures from Hamlet, whose world is ultimately no larger than their stage. Couldn't find this DVD at home, so I nabbed it immediately when I saw it. Also grabbed a pair of Gamera movies for Bill, after confirming with him via email that he wanted them. Picked up a copy of the Grandaddy's SUNDAY CD that Bill had turned me onto, and a Damned Best of (which disappointed ended up being made up largely of live performances rather than studio tracks -- a point which is only made in the fine print). For my girls I picked up a Fairytopia Barbie for Vanessa and a princess Dora the Explorer doll for Annie, but of which I figured would go down well.
Then to the airport. The addition of the printed conference proceedings made my luggage overweight -- hopefully next time they will consider making the digital content available on a CD instead. Was happy enough not to lug it around anymore though, and knew that by the time I got through customs my bag would be there ahead of me, waiting for me to pick it up. Bought a bottle of decent scotch for Erika from the duty free, and wondered at the destination of all of the U.S. army personnel milling about in desert fatigues -- were they coming or going?
Plane ride coming back was uneventful, though I did get an aerial perspective of Niagara Falls, seeing how the river empties into one great lake from another.
Was glad to get home.
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