Kalamazoo X Conference 2011 – Light-Hearted Recap
I’m still on the mental buzz from yesterday’s Kalamazoo X Conference. Here is a rough agenda for the last four months, from the perspective of an organizer:
1/1/2011, Midnight – 4/30/2011, 8:49 am:
- Issues
- Headaches
- Worries
- Scrambling
4/30/2011, 8:50 am – 4/30/2011, 5:10 pm:
- The Zen of Awesome
- Adrenaline High
4/30/2011, 5:11 pm – 4/30/2011, 8:10 pm:
- The after-event conversations
- Adrenaline high redux
4/30/2011, 8:11 pm
- Adrenaline high ends
- Extreme weariness sets in
I’m sure I’m not the only conference organizer in history to follow this basic agenda. I was simply amused by how clearly the boundaries were defined this year.
The speakers did an outstanding job, and like last year, there was a lot of humor throughout the day. I tried to capture some of those gems:
- "I want [to hire] someone with [a degree in] English Lit because if they could send out an email without a grammatical error, that would be so great.” – Joe O’Brien
- “The graph shows minus 30 degrees. It doesn’t say Fahrenheit or Celsius, but at 30 below it doesn’t matter.” – David Giard
- “One time I wore a sport coat!” – Leon Gersing
- “You can’t erase the internet.” – Jeff Blankenburg
- “’Great teams’ don’t mean you can set them free and let them go and spend all your time on XBox.” – Jim Holmes
- “Buy your teams foodstuffs. Be careful about food allergies. Don’t kill ‘em. That would be bad.” – Jim Holmes
- “If you could give an Oscar to a puppet, you should have!” – Leon Gersing, about Yoda.
- “And I thought following lunch would suck!” – Dan Neumann, on following Leon’s session
- “You do not want your conscious brain to make those life or death decisions, because you will die.” – Laura Bergells, on the value provided by the amygdala
Thank you to all of our speakers and to all of our attendees. Without you, it would just be me and a few guys in a room all day with a ton of caffeine but no XBox. Thank you for saving us from that fate.
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