Archive for October, 2008

October 31, 2008

This Virtual Space for Rent

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Remember when Second Life was going to change the world? Nah, me neither.

October 31, 2008

Unspoken Truths for Association Leaders, #18

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Staff can’t guarantee success, but they can guarantee failure.

October 30, 2008

Thoughts On Turning 39

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So next week, I turn 39. I have never really been a “birthday” person, at least not since I reached the age of “drinking legally, living alone, and paying confiscatory taxes.” No, those birthdays slip away each year hardly without notice.

Except for one — I always thought 30 would be a meaningful birthday, but it wasn’t. 31, however — now that meant something. It meant the beginning of something (i.e., I am now in my thirties) that was also somehow the end of something (my twenties are now long gone).

And now, a mere scant eight years later, I find myself confronted with 39, an age that I never thought amounted to anything other than unbelievable (when people say they’re 39, people think they’re really 40). It has preyed on my mind for — well, to be honest, a number of months now. It is an age that feels like the end of something but not, quite yet, the beginning of something else.

That beginning, I suppose, will come later. A year from now.

Donald Justice, who is — well, I was going to say “my favorite poet” but that would imply that I know lots of other poets, and I’m afraid I don’t. Donald Justice was a poet I discovered back in college and have held, if somewhat secretively, close — a poet unusually practical, pragmatic, and simplistically profound. He didn’t write a poem about turning 39, to my knowledge. However, he did write a poem about that age that comes one year later, and for some reason, though I cling to the twelve months I have remaining, I’ve found myself returning to this poem several times over the last few weeks.

I wish I had something profound to say myself about age, generations, birthdays, or even the small act of living long enough to turn 39. But I don’t. So here is what Donald Justice had to say about “Men at Forty.”

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

October 28, 2008

I Hate PDFs

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A surprisingly inexpensive and effective way to turn cumbersome PDF downloads into speedy, elegant Flash movies that are embeddable in a webpage with zooming, printing, searching, etc. It works! And it’s only around 80 bucks.

October 28, 2008

Those Who Can, Do — And They’re the Ones I Want to Meet

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Hearkening back to this earlier post, and this comment conversation — and what the hey, probably has something to do with this one as well.

Here’s how we put together the workshop program for our upcoming 2009 conference:

• Developed a list of over 120 potential topics — generated from attendee suggestions last year, committees, a direct request to members, and staff
• Sent them out as a survey asking our contractor members to rate the topics, from “I would definitely go to this” down to “You couldn’t pay me to sit through this” (I’m paraphrasing)
• Broke the responses down across a couple pertinent industry segment categories
• Looked at the topics that were rated 80% or higher positive by the various segments, and …
• Went out and found people who could deliver intelligent presentations on these topics based on their experience.

Was this the easiest way to put a program together? Good God, no … far easier would have been to look at the hundreds of requests and proposals that come across my way each year from people (mostly consultants, vendors, and professional speakers) just dying to speak at our conference.

But last year was the first year we did it this way, and got a very positive response — and the initial program this year has garnered a lot of interest, with registrations outpacing last year’s at this time.

Of the workshops being offered at our conference in 2009, 76% of presenters and panelists will be contractors, and 24% consultants or vendors.

This seems about right to me. Certainly as an attendee of conferences, it’s a ratio I’m more comfortable with.

Not saying this is the way everyone should do it, it’s just an example of how one organization is doing it. But if half or more of your program presenters are primarily in the business of selling things to your members/attendees, you might want to rethink whatever way you’re doing it.

October 24, 2008

Geeky Point

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One thing I like about the Internet Explorer 8 beta is the “compatibility view” feature that enables you to view individual webpages as if you were using an older browser. One thing I hate is that I have to use this feature SO OFTEN.