November 2009
Monthly Archive
Wednesday, 18th November 2009
Typically, it was flyable yesterday, the one day this week where we definitely couldn’t go out. The rest of the conference reading week we are more flexible, so we went out for a fly today. Looking at the forecast, you would have questioned whether it was worth it, but since it wasn’t forecast south, the chances are it was going to work at Santa Brigida. In the end the forecast was completely wrong (as usual) and it was sunny, thermic and generally a very pleasant day.
We got to Santa Brigida and started driving up when we met a boy on a trail bike flying around the corner. He narrowly avoided us, but lost control of the bike and went over the edge. We ran down the hill and found his bike, and a few meters away, him. I feared the worst, but he was dazed, but otherwise unhurt. Thank god for trees, which broke his fall. His dad came from the house on the hill and we sorted him out. He had no memory of the incident and each time he looked at the skid marks and where his bike landed he asked “and I’m still alive?”. Given his helmet came off in the fall (the strap wasn’t done up), I think he was very, very lucky!
Once we’d dealt with that little drama we carried on up the hill. I was a little shaken, but Geoff made me see sense in that the boy wasn’t injured. We had a very nice day flying. Vincent turned up, although he is full of some sort of weird Moroccan flu. We haven’t seen him for ages, so it was lovely to catch up.
Tuesday, 17th November 2009
First day of the conference went well. We started the work to register the 348 delegates at 7.30am this morning. The 53 presenters, facilitators and organisers were registered a couple of weeks ago. It was pretty busy with postings and this is just the reading week. We don’t start the actual conference for another week. By the end of the day we had 411 participants and I expect a lot more this week.
Monday, 16th November 2009
Life isn’t just a holiday and we’ve had to work… a lot. We open the conference tomorrow and it is now officially the biggest conference we have ever run, with over 400 participants from 12 countries. It’s also the most complicated. The conference includes a number of types of media/technologies, for example, blogs, twitter feeds, live web casts with voice and video, sessions in virtual alternative worlds, as well as just the standard asynchronous discussion boards. We got it all ready by 10.30pm and are now waiting for the big switch on tomorrow.
Conferencing wherever you are…… the funny publicity video for our conference.
Sunday, 15th November 2009
Judith 17 Nov 2009 | : Walking, Work
Another hot, sunny and windy day. The postponed paramotor festival did happen and they did manage to fly, albeit early in the morning. We worked and then tried to decide what to do for the day. It was far too nice a day to waste, and on the way back from the lake at Banyoles yesterday, we tried to work out how long it had been since we were in the town itself. We think it may be five or six years. Since all the towns seem to have been sprucing themselves up a bit, we decided to go have a look.
There was an agricultural and trade fair on and we spent time browsing the stalls, getting free cheese, sausage and wine samples and looking at the animals. On walking into the old town we were thrilled to see what improvements they have made. There are now little canals and waterways built into the landscaping of the streets and parks; the buildings have been cleaned and it looks really nice.
Saturday, 14th November 2009
Geoff writes: we woke up to a sky worse than forecast – what’s new!
Loads of wave bars, and a front due to arrive sometime today. We decided to do yet more work, since the conference opens for reading on Tuesday, and we have lots to do, not least in trying to deal with the incredibly annoying inconsistencies between browsers when rendering what should be a very simple CSS/JavaScript drop down menu for use on the conference site.
But then the sky started to clear a little, so we decided to go for a walk in Banyoles, rather than try again to fly – we thought it would be too windy. In the end we had a really nice walk all around the lake, during which time both the wind and the temperatures increased. We ended up walking in quite a strong wind – too strong to fly – but in t-shirts, it was so warm, not bad for mid-November. The Banyoles council (presumably) has done a lot of work improving the area around the lake, with nice viewpoints, drinking fountains, etc. And all extremely clean, with very little litter.
So actually, a pretty nice day out, followed up by some more work when we got back home.
Friday, 13th November 2009
Another very promising forecast, another crap day. Although the picture shows sun, there was none. Just high, low and medium cloud. This time we didn’t give the forecasters the satisfaction of wasting a day proving it was rubbish. We just stayed at home and worked.