Wow, Tuesday was busy

Keeping this up-to-date was a challenge yesterday, as in, I didn't get to it. Part of the reason is that I undertook an idea that seemed good at the outset, but that took a lot more time that I had expected.

Let's back up. Last year, Sharon had a cool idea. She gave out these little tags that could be stuck onto the bottom of attendee badges, funny and snarky things that read "Know-it-all" or "Princess" or "Duh!" or "Internet Junkie." So for the last day's newsletter, I had the idea to make a collage of some of the tags people had chosen.

It went over well.

Sharon brought them back this year, and people again had a lot of fun with them. But for the Wednesday newsletter this year, while I like the collage idea, I didn't want to just repeat what I did last year. I had this idea to make a collage of people's faces.

But to do this right, I had to take the photos I had and make the backgrounds, behind the faces, transparent.

Well, I have a new laptop with a decent (1.7GHz) processor and a full 1GB of RAM. And my photo editing software, Photoshop Elements, will do this. But (a) it's not all that easy and (b) it takes a *large* amount or processing time.

And it also took some time and attention to block out the face part of the file, and sometimes I had to tweak the results that Photoshop Elements gave me.

Meanwhle, the sessions that I attended were also compelling, especially the hands-on double session I attended in the afternoon.

The result of all this: no blog entries at all yesterday.

Meanwhile, the conference has been so far, as far as I can tell, another tremendous success. I'd always like to see more people here, of course, the stuff here is so useful, but these days, with short-sighted companies failing to see value in keeping its employees u[-to-date, it's hard to expect anything else.

Besides getting loaded up with a whole new set of knowledge, I love getting to see friends and acquaintances that I've not seen in a long time, most wince last year's WritersUA conference. Many of these folks are on the HATT and HATT-OT lists, but electronic communication just isn't the same as actually seeing someone. For example, I finally got to meet Wade Courtney.

And then this morning I gave my presentation. I had planned to skip the early morning sessions to go over stuff one last time before spoke, and I set the alarm clock in my hotel room 15 minutes later (7:30 instead of 7:15) to get a smidge more sleep.

Actually, I have 2 alarm clocks. There's the one provided by the hotel, and then I have a backup winding alarm clock, which I set for about 7:45.

Well, I woke up at 7:45, just before my backup was going to go off. Turns out I had set the hotel alarm but not turned it on.

Oops.

But I guess my session went well. I got ahead of my slides a bit a couple of times, but I hope that wasn't perceived as too bad a thing. We'll see when the evaluations come in.

Meanwhile, it's afternoon now and I'm listening to Dave Gash talk about XML data islands. Interesting stuff.

I'm wondering if it'd be another solution for my personal sandbox web site, chuck.martin.name, where I have a little MySQL database and some PHP code to create a random quote generator on the page.