away and back again

I returned from my California trip on Thursday night. It was a good time away, both personally and professionally. The official reason for the trip was to attend a conference on Content Management (an area of study that poses the question: when you have piles of information, how do you organize it so that you can find it and use it again) and to present a paper there.

The conference was quite good -- there was lots to learn and the people were smart and solving interesting problems. Unfortunately (at least it felt that way at the time), my talk was the very last session of the last day. For a while, I was anxious that no one would come, and then as the conference progressed, I was afraid that someone might actually show up. I felt like my talk was too basic and went against everything that the experts were saying.

For most of the talks I attended, the message was that before you change your whole way of working, you need to plan, work with consultants, buy expensive tools, pull people off their regular jobs, do a lot of political work to sell your message, and on and on. My talk described our experiences. We had limited resources and a "day job" which involved documenting new features. So we worked iteratively, starting small, learning as we went. And for the foreseeable future, we'll be living in two parallel universes in which we do some things the old way and some things the new way.

During the talk, only one person got up and left. People asked great questions. Afterwards, a handful of people came up to the front and told me it was the best talk of the conference. People said that all conference long, they'd heard about certain problem areas, but hadn't gotten any ideas about how to solve those problems. I gave practical suggestions which they felt would be helpful to them. One day earlier, I'd attended a great talk by a thought leader at IBM. Now this guy was telling me that he's struggled to help members of newly acquired teams come up to speed and my talk gave him some insights into a possible approach.

So I'm pleased. I'm glad I was able to offer something helpful and to get at least a few people thinking about possibilities.

While in California, I did some fun things. I stayed at a little European-style inn about 3/4 of a mile from the conference. So I got to walk through neighborhoods and enjoy sights and sounds of people who live in the city. There was a little park across the street and in the morning, older Chinese people did Tai Chi, which was fun to watch.

One afternoon, I climbed up (and it was a vertical walk) to Coit Tower and admired the murals inside and the views outside. I walked down the other side and found the Parrots of Telegraph Hill, an enormous flock of somewhat feral parrots who live on a hillside and who have a beautiful view of the bay.

But the most fun was the time I spent with friends. I started the trip with a visit to my dear friends Kevin and his partner Dick. I was supposed to stay at their house, but when they picked me up at the airport, they explained that their house renovations hadn't finished on time (gee, what a surprise!) and that we would all stay in a hotel that night. We had a wide-ranging talk that evening. The next day, Kevin cleared out some quiet space at their house, and we continued our conversation into the afternoon. I also had a chance to meet their charming and unusual Bengal Tiger cats.

I also saw new friends whom I met on our Egypt trip, Alan and Deborah. Another old friend, Jim, and I spent a lovely evening at Green's, watching a gorgeous sunset over the water and catching up a bit. And I socialized a bit with my old Rational and now-Idiom colleague, BR, and his wife S; we had a few fun and delicious meals together.

So now I'm back. It all caught up with me on Friday, so I basically laid low for the day. On Friday evening, we went to hear the Soweto Gospel Choir. We had tried to go last year, but were out of town and gave our tickets away. They put on a great performance that kept me going through all the fatigue. On Saturday, we attended a lovely contra dance with two of my favorite callers. And yesterday, we attended a live interview between Terri Gross and Ira Glass. While Terri asked most of the questions, Ira occasionally got one in and got answers. It was a fascinating afternoon.

And yes, one of these days, I'll work on my Egypt pictures. I know there are some good ones in there, and I'm as eager as everyone else to see them!