Thursday, February 9, 2017

Day Two at #RootsTech 2017

Here is a quick summary of my Day Two at the RootsTech 2017 Conference in Salt Lake City.

*  Up by 6:15 a.m., read email and blogs on the phone, and ate breakfast in the Radisson Cottonwood Room (this is a free buffet breakfast for RootsTech registrants as part of the room rate).

*  Left at 7:30 a.m. to get to the Keynote session.  This is quite a hike from the Radisson - in on the first floor, escalator to the second floor, a climb up a ramp to a higher second floor, then an escalator down to the first floor.  They built this in two sections that shared the Expo Hall - you have to go through the Expo Hall or do the climbs.  It's big!

*  Sat with Amy, Amy and Cheri on my left and Peggy and Amie on my right for the Keynote.  Jason Hewett kicked it off with some oldies songs we sang along with, then Steve Rockwood (President of FamilySearch) told some family stories and ate ice cream in front of us, and updated us on FamilySearch.  Then the Property Brothers entertained for 45 minutes (too long?) with little family history content - funny but forgettable.  Finally, Aaron Godfrey of MyHeritage showed us 15 minutes about the features of MyHeritage DNA.

*  It was after 10 a.m. when we hightailed it to the Media Hub, which was already busy with the Property Brothers giving interviews and taking selfie shots.  I settled in on my usual table, got out the laptop, and wrote a blog post.  At 11 a.m., I packed up and did my first talk at the MyHeritage exhibit on "Getting the Best Out of Record Matches."  The microphone kept overloading for some reason.

*  I briefly went back to my Media Hub table, then headed for 355B for the MyHeritage lunch.  The lasagna was pretty good.  Gilad Japhet (CEO of MyHeritage) was the lunch speaker,  He spoke about three new features - Photo Discoveries, Consistency Checker and MyHeritage DNA, plus a short chart on the future of genealogy.

*  I was back at the Media Hub by 1:15 p.m., and updated the blog compendium and talked to my colleagues.  It was fun to meet Diana Elder and Nicole Dyer of The Family Locket blog,  I walked a bit around the Expo Hall near the Media Hub and took some photos, but not many.

*  At 2:45 I started off across the street to the Marriott for my interview with a person of interest.  That was a fun hour.

*  Back at the Media Hub after 4 p.m., I wrote two blog posts and called it a day at 5 p.m.  I walked back to the Radisson and up to the room.  Tired, but the dinner must go on.

*  We walked (well, I walked pushing Linda in the wheelchair) to JBs again for dinner - no wait and we both had the salad bar.  We were done by 6:30 and had 45 minutes to kill before we had to be at the Conference Center Theater, so we stopped in the Family History Library to show Linda the Family Discovery Experience.  Well, she needed a FamilySearch account, had to create and write down a user name and password, and an email address, created the account, signed in with the wrong password several times (a capital letter was the culprit), and then we looked at my part of the Family Tree to get her father's OD code, and got her hooked in on the Family Tree.  Whew!!  Patience is not my strong suit.  By then it was 7:10 p.m. and we needed to get to the Conference Center for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir concert.  So she didn't get to experience the FDE tonight.

*  We were inside the Theater by 7:30 and got a seat in the wheelchair row on the ground level.  There were 10 Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, plus some biography of the two Oscar Hammersteins.  I enjoyed the biography more than the music.

*  The show was over at 9:15 and we walked back to the Radisson, and I've been pecking away here for about an hour.  It's time for bed.

On the day, I took 10,229 steps with the iPhone in my pocket according to the Pacer app.  That's only 3.5 miles, but I'm tired and my feet are sore because I don't walk that much every day.

Tomorrow is Friday, and the highlight is bound to be the MyHeritage after-party at the Marriott.  I hope to walk the Expo Hall more, take more photos, and write some blog posts as stuff happens.  Then we'll party.


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