June 10, 1994
Dear Everyone:
A very technical week. I spent
the first three days at ITCON. That
stands for Information Technology Conference, which took place at
Company Park. It was a
Company-wide convention for PC Coordinators and other "techie-types".
This was similar to the PC
Coordinator Conference held three years ago, except that this one was
much more "home grown".
There were far fewer outside vendors to be found, virtually no freebies
(with the notable exception of a canvas tote bag supplied by Bell
Atlantic, the company that won the computer service contract for all of
Company and would like us to remember it), no
drop-your-business-card-in-the-fishbowl-to-win-a-(Fill in the Blank).
This was mostly “Compoids” talking to other “Compoids” about "How I Used
Lotus Notes to Manage My Project and Find Inner Peace and
Tranquility". Since RACS is very
much into records management, I attended every session on document
management that I could find, no matter how stultifyingly boring they
might be, and grabbed handouts whenever possible.
That's the trick if these conventions: Get
as many handouts as you can, then mail them back to yourself to study
later when you have more time. There
is no time during the
conference. Each session is 45
minutes. Then you have 15 minutes
to find a rest room, pick up 27 phone messages from people who ignored
your "I'm out of the office" voice mail announcements, and get to your
next session, which is on the other side of the Lake.
(It's an unwritten rule at
Company Park that, no matter where you are, where you need to be is on
the other side of the Lake, which is actually a gigantic fire pond.)
I did get into a session on "The Future of
Windows".
You had to sign a
Nondisclosure Agreement to get into it.
Want to know where Windows is
going? Sounds to me like it's
going on a world tour. From what
I could follow, various versions are code-named after different cities,
like "Paris", "Moscow", "Detroit". If
you know the code, you know which version people are talking about.
(Don't worry about the
Nondisclosure clause, I changed the names of the cities.)
Yesterday, we had a meeting of all the BP&S Technical Support people who
had attended ITCON to do a "brain dump".
We went over each session and anyone who had attended that
session reported their findings. In
some cases, this led to a remarkable free flow of ideas (translation:
everyone talking at once). And
some sessions sounded so dumb that no one went to them.
“Daisy” and “Lizzy”, who
evidently were in full Conference Mode all three days, turned in a
multitude of handouts from sessions they hadn’t even attended.
They just seem to be "handout
magnets". I cornered the market
on Lotus Notes and
Document Management, which was to be expected, considering my RACS
connection.
I also discovered in this meeting that I'm considered a "specialist"
among the BP&S techies, which sounds pretty impressive, considering that
I only found out about it yesterday.
In the meantime, the
Versatile
software arrived in my office while I was in the meeting.
This afternoon, (cross your
fingers) “Daisy” and I will try installing it on the Server.
Tally
ho!
Love, as always,
Pete
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