A Week in August

 Conference, Food and Wine, Technology, Vancouver  No Responses »
Jul 242008
 

It seems that August is con­fer­ence sea­son, at least for me. More pre­cisely, one week in August. First Bal­is­age in Mon­tréal (for which the online regis­tra­tion is clos­ing next Fri­day) August 12–15, and then Vinocamp here in Van­couver, at the UBC Botan­ic­al Garden, on August 16th. I’m speak­ing at the former, and help­ing organ­ise the lat­ter (for which num­bers are lim­ited to 120, so don’t wait too long to register). The premise for Vinocamp is a friendly con­fer­ence about wine, put on by a bunch of tech­ies; this is its first year. Both con­fer­ences should be fun! Enter­tain­ing as well as edu­ca­tion­al, and a cer­tain amount of good food and wine in both loc­a­tions. I can cer­tainly think of worse ways to spend a week in August.

Montréal in August

 Conference, Crafts  No Responses »
May 272008
 

Sum­mer would­n’t be sum­mer without a sum­mer con­fer­ence or two. There’s some­thing about walk­ing the streets or sit­ting in cafes, talk­ing about tech­no­logy, in balmy weath­er (well, when it does­n’t rain like it did at last year’s CSW XML Sum­mer School in Oxford). This year I’m off to Mon­tréal for Bal­is­age in the middle of August. Even if the weath­er decides to be nasty, and the streets are too unpleas­ant to stroll, there will be lots of inter­est­ing people to talk tech­no­logy with and cafes near the con­fer­ence hotel to fre­quent. If you missed the dead­line to speak, there’s no need to pan­ic just yet. There is still room on the sched­ule for late-break­ing talks as long as you get your pro­pos­al in by June 13. I was one of the review­ers of the main batch of talks so I got a sneak peek at some of the sub­mis­sions. There is thought-pro­vok­ing stuff on the pro­gram and I expect lots of hefty dis­cus­sion, at the talks and in the cafes after­wards. Warm weath­er, inter­est­ing people, good food — I guess I should brush up on my French a little for those restaurants.

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