notesgoddess

This is the second attempt at a blog about my week in Boston.  I won’t tell you what happened there because you already know.  Here are my details.  I had planned to visit my colleagues in Littleton from Sunday to Tuesday, then speak at the ViewAdmin 2013 in Cambridge from Wednesday until Friday.  That happened.  I was in the lockdown area near the police shootout with the bad guys.  I got home on Friday night after the roughest, most turbulent flight I’ve ever been on – and I’ve been on hundreds of them.  In every way, it was the perfect end to a surreal week, one that will be remembered by everyone directly and indirectly impacted.

Nothing horrible happened TO me.  Things happened around me.  There was no escaping the emotions and the energy of the people around me.  What I’d like to do is simply to thank some people.

Firstly, thank you to WIS (Wellesley Information Services), the organizers of the always incredible ViewAdmin conferences.  You let me speak for you, you kept this conference together, running on time, kept us informed and made us feel safe.  So to Celia, Susie, Mike, Scott, and the rest of the crew – thank you.  And Bennie, thank you for subjecting yourself to whatever body search they put you through to get over to us through the lockdown on Friday just for hugs and a checkin.

Thanks to the incredible Hotel Marlowe.  You have a classy, quirky, almost kinky hotel and it rocks.  You hosted the conference, fed us, you had leopard spot and tiger stripe bathrobes in the room and then you locked the doors and wouldn’t let us leave.  And sent guards to keep any bad guys out.  We never felt afraid even a little bit.  I will come back and will encourage other people I know to come back.  You run a nice (and dog friendly) place.  A few blocks from the early morning shootout.  But I digress.

Thank you to a group of people who have become very close friends over the years.  We’ve had adventures traveling the US and Europe for these conferences and others, and I would have felt far less safe if not for the presence of these very cherished friends:  Gabriella and Tim Davis, Andy Pedisich, Rob Axelrod, Mary Beth Raven, Kathy Brown, Francie Tanner, and Chris Miller.  I couldn’t have chosen a better bunch of people to be locked into a hotel with.  I love you all.

Thank you to the conference attendees.  You paid to see a show and we felt obligated to put on a terrific one, especially since your families back home were probably going as crazy as everybody else’s.  We felt like friends talking to friends by Friday.  Come back. I hope you got your money’s worth in education.  You certainly got your money’s worth in adventure.

Thank you Facebook.  As much as I love to hate you, you let me keep Nina, Mom and Dad, my siblings, nieces, nephews, friends around the world, and acquaintances updated easily without dozens of calls on a cell system that was swamped anyway.  And you let me know they were checking up on me.  It felt good.  Most days I don’t like the controversies that show up on Facebook, but as a communications tool for non geeks, it rocks.

And a tip if you’re ever IN something like this:  Turn off the 24 hour TV.  It only makes you jumpy.  We didn’t watch it.  We got our news from the hotel staff, the LOCAL news channels, the security guards, the very loud emergency management alerts from the cell phone carriers (I was sitting in a room when 4 of ours went off at the same time.  We jumped.  High.) And we looked out the windows.  What we didn’t get was wrong news.

Thank you Boston – and Cambridge.  For being normal in the face of horror, for carrying on, for stopping when asked and for getting involved to help catch the bad guys.  You never flinched, you ran toward hurt people and your police force kicks serious butt.  I feel almost privileged to have been there this week.  I surely will never forget it.

My heart goes out to the people who WERE affected.  The injured, the families of the dead, the police and the proud people of Boston.  I wish none of this happened, but am glad I got to experience how you reacted.  You are amazing.

Home never felt so good, though.

I arrived in Orlando this year after driving the 8 hours by choice.  I arrived a day early to get myself ready for what many in the ‘community’ saw as the end of Lotusphere.  I knew it would be stressful for many, including me.  I’m an insider, so I knew the messages that were on the way and wondered how they’d be received.

On Saturday, I watched the community soccer/flag football party on the beach, greeted the incoming arrivals, collected a thousand or more hugs, then participated in the blogger’s annual dinner/drinks over at the Big River Brewery.  It was there that I met a man who would be dead the next day after a motorcycle accident. Most of the men on the motorcycle ride were speakers and/or friends of mine and were and are profoundly affected by the tragedy.  This started the show with a pall, and especially for the men involved, who chose to soldier on (in spite of being offered the option of not doing so).  You know who you are, and you amaze me.

But we made it through the week, we IBMers and community and customers, and I’d like to thank some of those who made my week remarkable.

First, thanks to Gabriella Davis, who worked through the flu (or lurgi as my UK friends call it), to deliver her sessions without falling over on stage – although is was close…. And for providing the most enjoyable evening of the show again in the form of the Great Geek Challenge.  The sponsors make it possible, but Gab’s vision created it and Abigail Roberts’ marketing skills helped it run smoothly.  Also Gab, thank you for being my friend.

To Tim Clark – thank you for being and for surviving.  And for the hugs.  And for allowing me to meet your lovely wife and children on Friday.

To the remarkable Mr Graham Acres, one of my Best Practices track speakers, thank you for standing in front of a room full of mostly strangers at the Nerd Girl Sparks session and letting us peek into your heart and soul for 6 minutes.  You are an amazing man and you moved us all.  You’re also an incredible technical presenter.

Thank you to Chris Miller.  I had enough trust in you to allow you to submit a total of ONE slide beyond the required ones for a one hour session, and that slide contained only a link.  I believe I threatened you if you didn’t hit it out of the park.  The tweets and verbal reviews show that the ball you hit was somewhere over Cuba by the 4th minute of the hour.  Thank you for making me look good.  To the other speakers and speaker hopefuls, IdoNotes has set the bar.  Reach for it.

To Mat Newman – thank you for the energy and the spark everywhere you went.  For the new slogan “Lead Blue and Bleed Yellow”, and for the hugs of course.  Your presentations wowed the crowd as always and your recovery from a total computer meltdown during a demo-heavy session has made you a legend among your audience as well as your fellow speakers.  Sleep well on the plane home – you didn’t sleep in Florida.

The reason I don’t normally write thank you posts is that I know I will forget somebody.  Plus, to do it justice, the post would be days long, so in short – thank you to Joyce, Colleen, Paul, Bruce, Kristin, Mike, Warren, Kitty, Amy, Francie, Ed, the Bills, Volker, the Julians, Big Tony, Kathy, The Wookie, Marie, Duffbert, the Andys, Carl, Ben, Frank, Nate, Mary Beth, Maureen and all of the attendees who came to learn.  Also everybody else whom I just left off this list.

And its NOT the end of Lotusphere.  Before we were “Social”, we were a community.  We still are.  I love you one and all.