So, Monday was the conference. It was two days of symposia and two days of workshops and, like last year, I had no interest in doing group projects with strangers for two days, so was just there through Tuesday. Everything was pretty much the same as last year, in the exact same conference space. From the hotel to the north side of the convention center, up escalators to the bridge, over the railroad tracks to the south side, down down down to the convention floor a couple of levels below the lobby. Checked in, got my badge and goodies. (I will say, haughtily, that the blank journal and pen they gave us this year was not nearly as nice as last year’s.)
Grabbed a seat in the keynote room, and a picture.
Then back out to grab breakfast (they provided) and coffee. And I did the ‘party’ thing of pretending to be extroverted and talking to other participants, who were mostly locals. “I’m from London.” “ENGLAND?” “Ontario”. “Oh”.
The first keynote was Helping Teams Thrive in a Complex Changing World and honestly, I don’t remember a lot about it except I liked it.
For the breakout sessions, my bosses had instructed me to do as many AI-related sessions as possible, and I did. The main message seemed to be “You are not going to be replaced by AI, but parts of your job might be” and also “If you don’t use AI, you will be replaced by those who do.”. Hmmm. But I did get a lot of good tips and fun things to try when I get back. The most mindfucky thing was ‘ask AI engine #1 to generate a prompt for you to ask AI engine #2 to do something’. Why not just have them talk to each other and eliminate the middleman?
Lunch halfway through, of course. There really isn’t an opportunity to go away and come back, and you don’t need to.
The closing keynote was an hour of really quite awesome keyboard shortcuts and other tricks in Microsoft products (Outlook, Word, Excel, Powerpoint), which were really useful and reminded me of a maxim I’d learned a long time ago – it really is worth the time to learn thoroughly the software you use every day. The statistic that was really interesting was that something like 90% of new feature requests are things the software already does, it’s just that no one’s bothered to learn the software.
I skipped the booze reception afterward because I was having dinner with my G&S buddy Risa, who I’d just done Mikado with last summer. I was trying to get together with all my Toronto G&S buddies, but Ron O (Scaphio to my Phantis my first time at the festival) was out of town and Laura S (who runs one of the G&S groups) ended up being too busy to join us. Risa had picked a fun place called Hemingway’s, not far from the ROM. There were cocktails and she had tacos and I had a burger and we got all caught up, it was very fun. She does lots of different types of performance things, lots to talk about. She’s not joining us this summer in England, unfortunately, but will no doubt be back at some point.
Afterward, we walked around the neighborhood for a bit, but I begged off pretty early because….
Tuesday had to start really early, as I had to clean up, pack up and check out, then schlep my stuff over to the conference, which started at 8:30. Goodbye, fancy room-with-a-view! Did all that, got breakfast again, etc.
The conference started with a keynote about office politics which was good in content, but presented by a guy whose public speaking skills were kind of clunky. But he was nice and at some point, was talking about the Canadian prime minister and said, ‘for you Americans, that’s like a president, but younger and more handsome’. I catcalled, ‘not a high bar!’.
More sessions. More keynotes. Good stuff, mostly – three of the AI sessions I went to were delivered by the same person, the appropriately-perky Jamie Champagne but even though there was overlap in content, she was great and those were my favorite sessions. More lunch, more ham-handed schmoozing. Before the final keynote, I met and chatted with the presenter, who it turns out is from Queens (Bayside, actually), so we had that conversation. Good keynote too, more on AI.
Still a great conference, I’d totally go to another one. As with last year, struck by how much I did not feel like a fraud at this conference, it was very well suited to what I do and what I know.
Off to the airport. I’d booked the flight late enough that I actually had more time than I needed, but better to be early than late. I know the drill now – across the bridge to Union Station, then buy a ticket for the UP train. (Oh, yes, I remember now, I walked right by unused ticket machines on one end of the platform so I could go to the end with the ramp, then the machines on that end were being used by people who were not used to the process, or even maybe how ticket machines work at all. *sigh*)
Big train to airport, little train to Terminal 3. I don’t think there was a problem checking in, or going through security. They had a special US section of the terminal (and I realized afterward that they way they’d done customs on the Toronto end meant I didn’t have to go through customs on the NYC end).
Found my gate. I remember last year my flight had been leaving from a nest of related gates for small planes and it was a crowded rabbit warren/nightmare, but I flew a different airline this year and that wasn’t an issue. I shouldn’t have been hungry, but I had time and knew I wouldn’t get dinner on the plane and may be getting home too late, so ordered a drink and a salad with chicken and ended up cleaning the plate. Huh, guess I was hungry.
No broken seat on the flight home. Fun part was getting the Uber – one of those ‘watch the car on the map and watch it go in every direction but toward you for no apparent reason’. (which reminds me, I took a cab home from orchestra rehearsal last night and he did the stupidest route and it took forever and cost a lot of money. Grrr.) But the Uber showed up and I got home at like 9:45 pm and did the minimum of unpacking since I had to go to the office the next day and get out of the way of my cleaning lady.
And I still had my wallet.
THE END
It was a great trip and I really need to make Canada trips more of a regular thing. I’d love to go back to Ottawa, haven’t been since high school. And give Montreal another chance, didn’t have a great time the one time I went.
Next trip: two weeks visiting my dad (and brother) in July. Then off to England in August.
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