Slow first day for me. I had a stressful Sunday getting a toddler to the airport on my own and Andrew has just flown in from the US.
We weren’t very impressed with our hotel, iStay River City. For starters, it has extremely limited keys. Many, but not all, rooms have two keys, which would be hard enough with four adults per room, but one of the keys for our room is missing, which means one key (and suggests that somewhere out there a former guest still has a working key to our room). The hotel reception wasn’t even sympathetic. People steal our keys all the time! What else are we to do?!
There’s no way to leave a key with reception and get yourself back into the room unless you have a second key to the room. There are buzzers for the rooms, but the reception smilingly conceded that it does only get guests into the lobby. You have to go down the lift yourself to get them up to the room. (Interestingly, this has meant with a lot of confusion from other LCA attendees. “How hard is it to make a new keycard?” Bad assumption. They are using keys, as in, those chunks of metal with notches in them.)
There’s also several things broken in our apartment: a couple of lights, the phone, the bathroom fan.
Anyway, after a restless night, LCA! I mostly spent time at the Haecksen miniconf, although partly working on my laptop in an introversion bubble. I wasn’t really ready, after the travel and the settling in, to sit down and listen to talks well. Some talks I did catch in whole or in part:
- Pia Waugh Applying martial arts to the workplace: your guide to kicking arse
- Brianna Laugher An Approach to Automatic Text Generation
- Andrew Gerrand Practical Go Programming
- Noirin Shirley Open Source: Saving the World
- Donna Benjamin We are here. We have always been here
- Valerie Aurora and Donna Benjamin Training Allies (workshop)
I didn’t really fully follow any of them, except for Training Allies, which is of professional interest to me now. (More on that later, I guess.)