Back Home Again

Well we did our presentation at 8:00 a.m. yesterday morning. We were up against Drew Smith (Social Networking). As a result, we had five people attend our presentation. However, this circumstance turned out to be a good thing because we again had no projector. Let me restate that. We had a projector but no cord to attach a laptop to a projector.

Thank goodness for the syllabus where we had all of the notes from the slides. Pattie was able to do the presentation (Family Survey) and we were able to do the mail merge to produce cover letters and labels at the end. We had everybody gather around our two laptops and we showed the mail merge. And because we had so few people, we were able to not only answer questions fired at us but we were able to demonstrate the answers on the laptops.

The other nice thing about having only a few people is that we were able to have conversations...not just respond to questions. Being able to do that means you can really show people exactly what they need to know how to do, which is fun. You get to see the light bulbs go off when they get what you're showing them. The trainer in me likes to see that response.

Pattie wore a running suit instead of pajamas. So we had no wardrobe issues.

The rest of the day we just went to see this, that, or the other presentation. We had a friend with us--Cathy Vance. Cathy probably got to do more than we did. It turns out that when you're a speaker at a conference, you miss quite a bit of it. I didn't count on that.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that on Friday night at the banquet Jack Butler (FSGS President) presented me with a citation for the work I've done on the FSGS newsletter. I was so surprised and so honored. The citations are a presidential prerogative; that is, a president can choose to present them or not. It was most kind of Jack to acknowledge my work on the newsletter. If you're curious about seeing the newsletters, go to the Florida State newsletter page (http://www.flsgs.org/cpage.php?pt=10). I've been working on the newsletters for about the past two and a half years.

Next week it's back to posting. I'm going to start with posting about anchors (I promise!). After a conversation with Bonnie (a follower), I'm going to start talking about more of the automated lists too. You can set up and run all sorts of lists (lists of figures, authorities, etc.) that are automatic like a table of contents. You just need to know how to add them so that you can ask Word to insert a list of them. After that I'll probably do some posting about numbering, and nesting numbering and lettering for numbered family lists.

And the conference madness continues...

I'm sitting here cutting 100 CDs...50 per class. Pattie and I are doing two presentations at the FSGS 2011 conference in Maitland, Florida this weekend. Computers are supposed to save paper. However, the opposite is true. We do a mail merge for one of the presentations and it has 24 slides of instructions. It would be awfully hard to expect any society to support printing a 24 page handout or even a 12 page handout...thus I cut CDs.

The other news I have is that it appears that I'm going to have an article published in the upcoming issue of Internet Genealogy. It's about Joliprint. The editor sent me a high resolution copy of the article. Yeah!

And...Pattie and I decided to go to RootsTech. We're both registered and have airline tickets...now we need a room. This event isn't until February. Considering the subject matter, it seemed to be a natural for us.

I'll try to post from the conference. One thing I'm going to do at the conference is talk to Bonnie because she read this blog. I'm hoping to get a reader's view point and suggestions. Of course, I'll have to park my ego so I can hear what she's saying. That task is never easy for anyone.

I promise I'll get back to really posting next week.