I have just completed my crazy month of three conferences. I’m hoping to not travel again for a while, but the month was quite informative and (sometimes) fun. A few notes/highlights:
In terms of traveling:
– BWI is a great airport, and IND is pretty nice too. My fave aspect of BWI: the daily parking garage. It’s designed so well. The ramps are on the outside of the structure, without parking spots, so you’re never stuck on the ramp behind another car as it’s parking. More importantly, they have sensors at every spot with dynamic signs showing you how many empty spots there are on every floor and in every row. Result: no driving around aimlessly for hours.
– Amtrak accepts digital tickets on your cell phone, but most airlines do not. Seriously, Southwest, I’m disappointed.
– I know Yelp is problematic, but man is it helpful! Pretty much every meal I had – other than the horrible award dinner which I will spare you the description of – was quite good.
– Wifi is still so spotty. I just don’t get it. Expensive hotels don’t offer it, some restaurants/stores have it, but it’s so slow it’s almost worse than not having web access at all. And yet other places, particularly airports, have generally great wifi. What gives? Is it really that expensive to set up?
In terms of content:
– Twitter is fast becoming one of my fave conference tools. My most recent conference had incredibly active tweeting throughout. It allowed me to find out important information from sessions I couldn’t attend, and also gave me and others a powerful sense of community. The social media session at the conference also made it clear it is gaining the respect of many, and is becoming widely used. Even the official site prominently featured tweets. Huzzah!
– Raleigh was great to visit, and it’s always nice to go to NYC, but I was really surprised by Indianapolis. The bike/ped facilities, particularly the wayfinding, were exceptional. I’ll likely write about those more in a preservation-planning themed post, but in the meantime I did see one particular piece of public art in Indy that was *begging* to be turned into an animated gif. I took the hint, and learned to do it from this site using photoshop. It was surprisingly simple, though of course I didn’t add any fades or text or anything. Still proud of my first shot at it, though. Behold the result!
Overall: a productive month. Now I need a nap.
How about the spotty wifi in France 🙂