What Puts the Cot in ACOT?!
It was a pretty successful conference day. We started with breakfast around 7:30, and the first classes had been rescheduled from 8:30 to 9, so we had a bit more time to visit with the vendors and fill our goody bags before we got down to business.
I made the mistake of following Jason and Allen to a security class that surprisingly ended up being more of a talk about the company that rented the time slot than how to implement or improve access control, but I chickened out of the leadership class when I found out it was a round table discussion. In the future I’ll just jump right in anyway. I paid my dues.
Lunch was on them, and was barely a step above cafeteria food, but I expected as much. When we finished the day of classes, all except Jason went down to the steakhouse for dinner again, and then Jason wanted me to take him back to the liquor store because he accidentally dumped his in a drunken fit of Mortal Kombat. He, Gary, Heather, and I went to the liquor store together, and one of the guys at the store was so excited for me to buy their new mango habanero whiskey that he ran out to his car to get his own bottle to pour us a couple samples.
When we got back to the hotel, Jason went to his room and we traded him for Dale. Finally, after a brief run around the building looking for a corkscrew for Heather, the four of us sat by the fire until everyone but Gary trickled out to bed. He and I chatted for a couple hours longer before calling it a night, and I got to talk to Dad about our new guy a bit. Gary wants to see if we can get him trained by two generations of Zelnick just to see what happens, and I think that is just a capital idea!
-500 Int
After an early start, today was pretty awesome. We’re at the Arkansas Conference of Technology, and so far the classes seemed really great, and the vendors are always a great plus. While I could have learned as much just on my own given a whole day of focused playing around, this really helped to have a guided tour.
The conference was mostly a drag today. We got some neat parting gifts, but the sessions we sat in on were more or less useless. I did get to sit in on a really great speaker for a presentation on having a digital identity and how to deal with this with youth. There was nothing groundbreaking for me, but I think what surprised me the most was that it wasn’t someone up on stage with just a bunch of scare tactics trying to use fear to push control over children. He does what he can to make parents aware of what is out there, and also tries to reach out to the kids he interacts with to make a real difference in how they treat technology.
We had enough people to warrant two tables: one with Cards Against Humanity that I brought, and another with Hearts, or some other game I didn’t know how to play. We spent a few hours drinking and gaming until it was time for bed. At that point, we lost Heather and had a brief moment of panic until we finally managed to get a hold of her. She had split off, well after dark and after everyone had settled in, and hadn’t been responding to calls or messages.