Well, I made it back home late last night. Thankfully, the border agents didn’t grill me as hard as they normally do, otherwise I probably would have started with the smart ass responses.
I gotta say, WordCamp Portland was a really amazing event, so major kudos to everyone involved in pulling it off. In fact, with each WordCamp I attend, I think that bar is getting progressively pushed higher and higher. For example, prior to my talk someone came and fitted me with a wireless microphone in addition to a normal microphone, the former being for the live stream. In addition, they exported all my slides to JPG/PDF such that the people watching on the internet could go through my slides while I was talking. Apparently the live stream was nearly flawless as well, which is great.
One thing that still bothers me about conferences in general though is sort of the lack of tact on Twitter sometimes after the fact. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I hate seeing people dish out insults or negative opinions and then add the conference hash tag to the tweet so that everyone sees it. I didn’t see much of this in Portland thankfully (way to go Portland!), but I’ve been to a few conferences where that’s the case. It must be hard as a speaker spending all that prep work (or traveling) only to be greeted with a pile of negative comments on your presentation or your content after it’s all done. I think some things are better said offline or in an email, but that’s just me.
But anyways, Portland was great, and everyone I met was super nice. The conference went awesome, and I learned a lot of cool things. But, as I pointed out before, I’m happy to be past it, since now I can focus on taking a bit of a breather at home. Dale’s flying in on Thursday and hanging out at my place for the weekend, so we’ll probably just take it easy, grab a movie or two, and maybe hit a restaurant or two. I also have to write an article this week for a Europe magazine (I’ve been putting it off), but hopefully that won’t take me too long.
Sounds like you’ve been doing a lot of traveling! That can be exhausting!
Sorry to hear about the negative stuff on Twitter… I haven’t seen any of that yet, thankfully! But yes, sadly Twitter does encourage those spur of the moment tweets. I’ve definitely had a few bad ones of my own!
Would you see Portland was a cooler, funkier Vancouver? I’ve read some articles lately that speak to how much better Portland is than Van.
It’s pretty funky. I was downtown, so it’s hard to say how representative that is. But seemed like there were lots of little pubs and taphouses and what not, which is pretty much in stark contrast to Vancouver. The technology scene there is pretty rad as well.
Yeah, I read somewhere that because of Vancouver’s zoning laws we don’t have any many social places around… but apparently in Portland there are lots of places to go out and drink on every corner without blowing a ton of cash.
Glad to hear it is like that!