Sunday, June 28, 2009

SCGS Jamboree - Day 3 - a day of rest?

For this genealogy blogger, this was definitely a day of rest! There were plenty of opportunities to unpack the laptop, fire up IE7 and blog or tweet, but I waited until I got home to work the kinks out of my four tweeting fingers. Why? Because I could. I was tired of trying to meet deadlines and take notes and dozing off in the sessions, but never quite getting the full benefit of the dozes.

The highlights for me of Day 3 of the SCGS Jamboree included:

* After a fitful night's sleep (acid reflux strikes after a late dinner like the one last night!) I was up at 7 a.m. so that I could look presentable at the Ancestry.com sponsored Family Tree Maker 2010 Rollout breakfast for genea-bloggers. Guess what I wore!!! Oh, FTM 2010? Can't talk about it for awhile. Interesting presentation, good breakfast (bacon, eggs, french toast, orange juice for me), and fun table conversation. Thank you, Anastasia, Michelle and Mark for the invitation!

* Another swoop or three around the Exhibit Hall to say goodbyes to my society, vendor and blogger friends. I've only been "meeting folks" at conferences for one year now, but it was really great to meet and share with folks in the genealogy world.

* Somehow I avoided going to all of the sessions today. Some I wanted to attend were full, so I backed off and went to the geneabloggers lounge or the exhibit hall. Finally, I figured I would probably embarrass myself by snoring in the sessions so I stayed in my two favorite places!

* At 11, about 12 genea-bloggers were in the geneabloggers lounge (the Internet hookup area next to the coffee service) to participate in Miriam Midkiff's Scanfest. You can see our sterling comments in Miriam's transcript of the chat. Thomas tried to insert a video from his Netbook webcam into the stream and brought down several systems, we think! Susan let me write a few bits for Scanfest, but I was feeling pretty fried by now - although the blondies livened it up a bit with some songs and dance moves. Rather than get food crumbs all over everybody else's photos and negatives in Scanfest, we went to lunch!

* Back from lunch (I went over to Subway in 100F heat to get $5 footlong sandwiches for lunch and dinner on the train home), I went to the GB lounge and chatted with everyone there. We probably had 15 or 20 geneabloggers at one time or another. Occasionally I walked through the exhibit hall for exercise, but resisted buying books and things.

* We said our goodbyes to everyone, and got the shuttle to the train platform (there was some shade!), the train was on time (4:25 p.m.) but packed - I stood until Glendale - and we made it to San Diego right at 7:45 p.m., and were home by 8:15 p.m. Pretty efficient way to go to L.A. I read most of the syllabus on the way home, and caught two catnaps besides!

* Spent some time waiting for Linda to check her email, unpacked, found everything, then checked my email, read 200 blog posts from the last two days, and then wrote this post.

I feel really guilty that I didn't attend more sessions (I went to 4, counting the blogger Summit). Being with my geneablogging colleagues was much more fun and entertaining than watching endless Powerpoint presentations with small print. Thank yous to Thomas and Denise for really organizing the geneabloggers, and to everyone for making this so much fun that even non-bloggers wanted to join in the activities.

I will post some pictures (found my camera USB cable - it was hiding in my laptop bag), and try to post the Bloggers Summit tweets on Monday. I'm collecting all of the blogger comments about the Jamboree and will try to summarize them unless someone beats me to it (please, please, my fingers are cramping...).

Best of the Genea-Bloggers? Tomorrow - I found those notes too in my laptop case!

2 comments:

Elyse said...

Great post Randy, but more importantly, it was so great to finally meet you face to face this weekend.
It was such a pleasure to meet you and it was so much fun talking to you. You and your wife are just sweethearts. I enjoyed going to lunch with you on Saturday and really getting to know you. It was wonderful - thank you so much!

GeneRooter said...

Getting to meet you was worth the price of admission. Getting my picture "took" by you was better than dessert.