Warning: grousing ahead!
3 nights of not sleeping in a strange place, 4 days of the reality of geekiness not matching the image at all.
The image (everyone else or so it appears):You look fabulous, already have an iPad 2, it's always connected along with all your other beautiful iStuff. You seamlessly tweet, blog, post, check out websites as teh speakers mention them. You can read 20 point type on PowerPoint at 100 feet.
The reality (me): I look 54 years old and haven't slept a full night after an 8 hour train trip, then hobbling around from walking too much while having too much fun at the zoo. wireless comes and goes of its own accord. I'm darn lucky to have the use of an iPad 1 with the older iOS and no decent note taking app. Discover that you need iTunes to install certain apps, sorry, that's in Connecticut. I mostly log in, log in, log in, type some gibberish, log in some more. The Blackberry sometimes gets cell signal. I'm lucky to have both. I can barely keep up taking notes much less get the good bits out to the social web. There's always something in the hardware or software to fight with. I always type teh. My eyes are supposedly corrected to 20/20 and I can barely see half of what's on people's slides.
Actually I'm probably not the only one at Computers In Libraries thinking it's time to give up and become a Luddite. Really, this stuff isn't glamorous or easy, especially when it's brand new and in perpetual beta. And we're not going to make it perfect for ourselves OR our users, but need to be honest about technology's fails to get them fixed in the future. And get spell checkers to recognize that Teh also could mean The. In spite of all my Frisbee threats (worse yet, I'm on a high floor with openable windows - the machines better behave themselves up here !) this is a great conference, I'm learning a lot about people, technology,and the whole environment we're working within, meeting a lot of interesting people, and getting ideas.
