re-boot

The holidays are definitely over.

Light work day; we had a conference call on the project to "shake the cobwebs out" as Dan put it. Things are going to pick up quickly, though; a draft of the next major design document is due in a week. It's a good thing Jay and Gary have started, but it's time for me to catch up.

Heavy day on the conference. It's time to start settling the conference content. Reviews on submitted material have been going on over the past two months; now it's time to select all the presentations, tutorials, workshops, and such, put the schedules together, get the contracts out to the invited speakers, finalize the speaker guidelines and acceptance letters, get work started on registration updates, and a whole lot of other details to be taken care of. Caryn (my co-chair) and I will need to review each teams' acceptance lists; that worked out to two conference calls Wednesday night for the most critical issues. Acceptance letters need to go out a week from Friday. One team is running very late. We have a new event ("Idea Markets") and we don't have any idea how many applications we'll have for it, or how many sessions to schedule. We have another new event planned to help newcomers in the profession, but planning for that has to follow on the selection process. The advance program and registration have to be ready by mid Februrary. What do we do about printed proceedings versus proceedings on CD? And my co-chair is traveling this week, and won't be available to help for several key days. Yikes!

So for the next 6 weeks, I have no life. Well, it won't be the first time I've given up having a life for this conference, and it likely won't be the last.

Oh yes, I own our church web site, too, and that needs to get moved to a new server while leaving their email services on the old server. Once it gets moved, I need to set up multiple blogs so various groups can maintain their own pages, and also set up Macromedia Contribute for other parts of the site so that office and committee members can maintain other parts of the site.

One thing that will not happen in the next few months. I am not going to get bored. I may get a little testy, though.

My partner Carol isn't going to be happy about any of this. She's never happy when I get overworked, and she's even less happy when multiple overwork periods start to collide, like they're doing now. Extra credit assignment: maintain domestic tranquility through it all. Wish me luck.

Diane