Sunday, May 2, 2010

Day 4 at the NGS Conference

I overslept on Saturday morning, and didn't get out of the hotel until about 8:30 a.m. - too late to attend a full session. I chatted with Pat Richley-Erickson for a few minutes, then stood in the John Philip Colletta talk on "Naturalization Records: Alternative Sources and Strategies" which discussed using other type of records to find evidence of naturalization. What I heard was interesting!

The Exhibit Hall opened at 9 a.m., and I wandered through, ending up at the computer area where I checked Facebook and Twitter, plus talked to several people )I can't remember now...).

At 9:30 a.m., I attended Laura Prescott's talk on "Diving Deeper into the Unique Records on Footnote.com." Laura packed the pace (over 200 in attendance) and demonstrated, live on Footnote.com, how to navigate efficiently using the browse menu or Original Documents links, how to search by state, how to manipulate record images, the About link on each record page, how to spotlight a page, and how to make annotations or corrections to documents. This was fast paced (except when Laura had to wait for the Internet connection - never more than five seconds, though!).

I went back to the Exhibits and saw Janet Hovorka, and she said "why don't we try to have a bloggers meetup at lunch time in the lunch area." That sounded like fun - so I talked to some bloggers on the floor, and got on Facebook and Twitter to invite all genea-bloggers to attend. I had to go check out of the room at the Radisson, so I left at 11:20 a.m. and did that, and brought Linda over to the Convention Center to see some exhibits and have lunch.

Linda and I got our lunch and found an empty table before 12 noon, and pretty soon several genea-bloggers arrived: Amy Urman, Dean Richardson, Angela McGhie, Sheri Fenley, Lisa Alzo, Madaleine Laird, Janet Hovorka, and A.C. Ivory. This was a lot of fun, since not everybody knew the others, and now we do! We took a picture - I'll post it later.

We said our goodbyes at 1:10 p.m. and went back to the hotel, where the shuttle driver was waiting for us for a 1:30 p.m. pickup. We were at SLC Airport by 2 p.m., through Security by 2:10 p.m. (no lines at counter or security), and I spent an hour on my laptop in the airport using their free wi-fi - I managed to get through about 300 blog posts.

Our flight to Las Vegas left at 4 p.m. right on time, and we ate at the Burger King in Las Vegas Airport (who knew that Linda could eat their food with her allergies? We didn't!). I had a great Carvel ice cream cone, but the ice cream had soy in it so Linda didn't have one. The flight to San Diego was 100% full and left about 15 minutes late. We were home by 8 p.m., and I watched the end of the Padres game (we lost 2-1 to the Brew Crew, but we're 15-9 and still in first place in NL West) rather than write this post!

This ends the narrative - I hope to have pictures to post soon showing some of the exhibits and some of the blogger meetups.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

sounds like a fun, busy day. Am glad you got home safely.

Heather Wilkinson Rojo said...

Thanks for the ongoing posts about the conference. Up here in the other corner of the USA, in New Hampshire, I've been "virtually" attending alongside you!

Greta Koehl said...

I have been enjoying reading your accounts of the conference. Wish I had been there!