Sunday meet & greet photos

A couple of shots from the Sunday evening meet & greet. Dave Gash is immensely proud of his t-shirt, while Sue Heim is just proud.

And here...we...go...

Joe's doing his introduction. Turns out he has a sense of humor. His opening comment included the memorable quote "The theme this year is 'plenty of elbow room,'" a nod to the economy's impact on attendance.

From what I hear, however, the WritersUA conference is doing better than other, similar, events (cough, STC). The year-over-year drop here is less than 40%, from last year's 500 to this year's just over 300. While it's never good to see either an economy like this or drops in attendance at events such as this one, the amount of the drop speaks volumes about the value that this event provides.

Sunday, aka Murphy's Law Day

I had it all planned out. Really, I did.

The plan was, go out for a little R&R after stuffing bags on Saturday, then wake up Sunday, take my car up to Steven's place, take the #5 bus back, and plunge into the conference.

But I got slightly waylaid, then started the day later than I planned. Of course, it's easy to get waylaid at Fry's. I was disappointed that they didn't have a better selection of paper, nor did they have decent prices. I settled, basically, on a fairly white 24 lb. stock. And I passed by the toner cartridges, saw that they had the ones for my printer, and on impulse, decided to grab a set--at full price. I didn't want to get stuck short.

Getting out of there late, I relaxed with a burger from Red Robin, where I read about another place I thought I'd try some poker. It turned out to be dead, but there was one $4/$8 table. I played for too long, played not up to snuff, and got back later than I planned--only to find the cordless phone over the bed not working, so my wakeup call (for 8:30am instead of 8:00am) would literally get me out of bed.

Stayed at my friend's place for a half hour to chat, rather than catch the right-way return bus, which put me at the hotel at 11:00am--when all hell broke loose.

Consider this: It's just past 10:30pm now, this is the first blog entry I'm had time to make, and I'm eating he first substantial food I've had all day (although I had planned to skip breakfast and do a good lunch), which isn't anything more than bad-for-me fast food, pretty much the only thing available to me nearby this late.

I walked in and Joe was frantically juggling. Turns out some of his friends who were flying in to help were late. He had some notebook cable locks for the Internet stations, but wasn't able to figure them out, and had other things that needed doing as well. So I jumped in, figured out the cable locks (not an easy task), and set up the notebooks--only to find another problem, with the wireless routers on that floor. I did a workaround until the routers there got fixed.

That bumped me right up into the start of the afternoon sessions. I had wanted some time to tweak my template, but now I was going to have to do that while I was taking notes.

But I ran into more problems, this time software-related. InDesign just wasn't working. Styles were not being given the fonts or the colors they were defined to use, line spacing was all over the map, it was becoming a real mess.

Finally out of frustration ,sitting in the middle of a session, I gave up. I opened Microsoft Publisher, which I had used last year, and began searching for a template. I found one. I wasn't crazy about it, but I had some criteria in mind. I wanted 4 columns, and I wanted a style that would be easy on toner.

Got that set up fairly quickly, to my relief. Didn't get quite as many notes as I wanted in the 3 sessions, but heard some interesting stuff. I stopped also at the Doc-To-Help Day session for a little bit. Not as many people in there as I would have thought--and most of those were leaders in our field (Paul Neshamkin, Char James-Tanny, Sue Heim, to name a few) who were asking the ComponentOne reps tough questions.

And then the fun really started. I got my printer set up in my workspace, got it connected, and tried to print out what I had so far to take a look-see.

And nothing printed.

The beginnings of troubleshooting didn't help. I thought it might be the print spooler, but restarting that didn't help.

I went to the HP site, downloaded the latest firmware and the printer driver. Updated the firmware. Nothing.

Reinstalled the printer driver software. Although it didn't finish the install with an error, it still didn't work.

I decided to try a drastic measure, something I had never done before: try to restore my computer from a restore point. I went back to before the first time I had installed the printer driver. It took a long time, close to an hour--only to fail.

I was feeling panicky, desperate. It was approaching 7pm now. I had been struggling with this issue for a good 2 hours with no end in sight.

Finally, I hit on an idea. I swapped out the brand spankin' new USB cable for the little short one I had been suing at home.

That did the trick.

As they used to say in the old Toyota ads, "Oh, what a feeling."

Fortunately, the editing Sue did was light, and the printer turns out to be fairly quick, putting out 200 double-sided copies in about 45 minutes. The printing finished just about 10 minutes ago, and so now I can go to bed and get ready for Monday, which will be packed. (I'll post some photos then too.)

I sent Joe the newsletter PDF, and he will probably post it on the conference site tonight or tomorrow.

Trip prep

Tonight the trip prep gets into gear. I've ripped most of my CDs onto my notebook, so now it's clean out the car. And as anyone who has been my roommate in the past will attest, I'm a bit of a procrastinating packrat.

The thing is, the less weight I'm carrying, the better gas mileage I'll get. It may not be much, but every little bit counts. So out comes all the extra clothes. Clean out all the trash and papers (a shopping bag full of trash, a good 10 inch stack of old newspapers and magazines).

Tomorrow, it's prep the computer bag.

Right from work on Thursday, I'll hit the car wash, then head home for the last loads of laundry. And I'll be ready to go on Friday.

Icky weather?

Not that it should come as much of a surprise, and certainly long-range weather forecasts (and we're going out a full week plus here) are about as reliable as a CNBC talking head, but there's rain, rain, rain in the forecast for the Pacific Northwest.

Looking at the forecast for Portland (where I'll be staying Friday night) and Seattle through next Saturday, there's nothing but "cloudy, "showers," and "rain" every day (well, except for a "partly cloudy" next Thursday in Seattle). Which means, if nothing else, I'm not looking forward to a particular pleasant drive through Oregon and Washington, at least.

Will it snow?

We're just 2 weeks away from the conference now, at it was snowing in Seattle today, according to a friend of mine who lives there. That's right, snow in Seattle in mid-March, with spring right around the corner.

So what will it be like in two weeks?

Only time will tell--although it will hardly matter to some. I know that I typically stay inside nearly the whole time, from midday Sunday through to Wednesday evening, going out only to forage for food or if some emergency supply is needed.

But having lived in Seattle, I can tell you, even if it doesn't snow, it certainly won't be warm. So plan accordingly. On average, during March, the high temperature in Seattle averages a shade over 52 degrees, while the low temperature averages 38 degrees. Not a lot of range there.

But hey, the conference ends in April, right? So let's look at April. Average high, 57.5 degrees. Average low, 41.2 degrees. Not a lot of difference. And Seattle averages almost 4 inches of rain in March, with another 2.5 inches in April.

So chances are, it's gonna rain, and it's gonna be a cold rain.

But there is a silver lining in all this: You're not stuck inside with overpriced hotel food. Just a block south along 5th avenue is the Westlake Center, a fairly typical urban mall with a food court and couple of anchor restaurants.

Hot deal at the Westin

If you're heading to the conference and haven't yet booked your room, there's another way to save. One of the many deals the Westin is offering is a "rejuvenate" package.

Go directly to the Seattle Westin site, click Hotel Deals, and scroll down to the "Rejuvenate this winter and enjoy rates from $159" section. As of today, it's not quite "$159," but for me, it was $177.

Hotels are desperate for business. No one is traveling, especially business travelers.

To give you an example, I'm staying in Seattle for the rest of the week for a little vacation. using the information I can get from BiddingForTravel, I bid for a hotel at Priceline and got a winning bid of $41/night (for the Wednesday through Sunday) at the Hilton at the airport. For comparison purposes, going directly through the Hilton's website, the best rate they offer is $143/night.

To be fair, using this method for the conference days itself wouldn't guarantee that I'd stay at the Weston, which is why I've not done it. (For those who want to know, the Westin is one of the top winners of reported bids for 4* hotels in downtown Seattle over the past year, but so are the Edgewater (a good 8+ block walk) and the Hotel Vintage park (6+ blocks away).

But if you haven't booked your hotel yet, or are even on the fence about going, you can reduce yoru hotel costs if you work at it.

One additional tip: If you want to try and contact the Westin directly to negotiate, try and contact a local representative. The folks on the "standard" 800 reservation line are usually less able to offer any sort of accommodation on accomodations.