Kscope16, day 1

Yes, it’s another Kscope, another round of incredibly busy madness, and another round of learning and fun.  I’ve bored many (all?) of you with my love and advocacy of this great organization and what it’s done for me and so many others.  

I’m going to try to again make the case with up to date, almost live, posts on Kscope16, assuming of course that my laptop batter makes it.  Failing that, it may be an update on a nightly basis.  We’ll see.

If you don’t follow me on Twitter, now would be a good time to do so on @CameronLackpour as I’m going to be actively Tweeting as well as using Periscope to live stream events.  If you have a Twitter account, you’ll see these videos go out as Tweets – I believe you can view the video for 24 hours.  If you have an account (100% free), you’ll be able to watch it all in perpetuity or whatever passes for such in social media.

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

To give you a flavor of Kscope, yesterday was the volunteer day.  We helped with some cleanup and beautification at Cornerstone Community Outreach, a really fantastic place that tries so very hard to help the less fortunate.  It was humbling to see the need of their homeless clients and the incredible dedication of the staff to help them.  Making a difference, however small, by a bunch of people who have been extraordinarily fortunate, is what this day is all about.  

I wouldn’t miss the chance to do this for the world.

Volunteers were given the chance to self-select their area of work.  Yr. Obt. Svt. chose gardening, not because I hate plants and wanted to give my black thumb a chance to kill plants with neglect and ineptitude but because I knew the rest of this conference will almost certainly be indoors.

To give you an idea of what we did, have a look at the below.

Here are my copresenters Tim German and Jason Jones commiserating over the fact that I’ve suckered convinced them into working with me.  I believe Tim’s laughing because to not to do so would be to cry.  I rehearsed with both of them last night.  You see gallows humor at play.

On a happier note, here we are beginning to weed, plant, and water.

And lastly, here’s an example of the derring-do that Kscope volunteers evince:

Standing on a gas main to help weed Morning Glories.  Dedication or madness?  Probably the latter but in a good way.

Brekkers

There’s Natalie Delemar, Dan Pressman, and Celvin Kattookaran breaking bread.  It was pretty good grub.

EPM Sunday Symposium

This, alas, is the part of the conference that I can’t show much or share.  I can show the kickoff.   Want to see this stuff for real and for true, come to Kscope17.

The room – it was pretty croweded.

Tim German and Opal Alapat kicking off the Symposium.

Speaker reception

ODTUG telling us not to forget to prep for our sessions.

Chicago area meetup

We held a meetup in my suite (it’s my last year as an ODTUG board member and I thought it would be a good to use my space to host a meetup) for local Chicago Kscope16 and attendees.  It was quite the party.  I think I’ve almost recovered.

At its peak, we had 35+ people in the room.  Security only came once to tell us we had noise complaints.  EPM geeks party, but not too hard.

That’s all for now

For Day 1, I’m done.  

As I said, keep checking back.  I’ll tweet out today’s conference.

Be seeing you.