Has anyone had a good STC conference experience?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Jessica Pease has <<...been reading the thread, "Well, I Sure Won't Be in
Chicago," and I'm starting get worried. I've never been to an STC conference
and my work is sending me this year. The sentiments expressed in the thread
are making me
think it might be a waste of time and money. Has anyone had a good STC
conference experience?>>

I've been to four STC conferences and always had a great time--and came back
with tons of new ideas and even more enthusiasm to implement them. The
sessions themselves obey Pareto's law: I typically get 80% of the benefit
from 20% of the sessions.* The best sessions are often the "progressions",
since they're like buffets for the mind: you get a single broad topic
(food!), but with several tables each filled with a variety of dishes to
edify the mind. After each speaker says their piece, you continue with a
related discussion that can be customized by the participants to your
heart's content simply by asking questions and getting the 3-4 others at the
table to elaborate. The personal contacts are great too; you can generally
steal a few moments (and sometimes even join a small-group meal) with some
of the leading lights in the field, and pick up on some of their excitement.
The networking and SIG luncheons are also great, since it's much the same
experience but with a broader group of people. Even the breakfasts are fun
if you can get your mind in gear well enough before or during the
caffeination process to talk to a bunch of strangers who suddenly turn out
to be not so strange after all.

* Once I learned to look at the conference proceedings before making my
final choice of sessions to attend, I greatly reduced the number of
inappropriate sessions I attended. My recommendation: Use the preliminary
program to pick your top three sessions for any given time slot, then use
the proceedings to put them in final order of preference. Keep this list
handy in case you have to change trains in mid-journey.

To have this much fun and benefit from the experience, you have to go with
an open, enthusiastic mind, and not expect to be passively illuminated in
some cosmic form of force-fed satori. To build (weakly <g>) on the buffet
simile, attending is much like going to a buffet: the waiters won't feed
you, so you'll have to seek out the really good stuff on your own and bring
it back to your own situation. Try to remember the excitement that got you
into this line of work in the first place, and go expecting to share that
excitement and fuel it with the excitement of others. If you're having
problems at work, you'll find a sympathetic audience too; as Spider Robinson
noted (paraphrased), "Shared pain is diminished; shared joy is enhanced."

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
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"I vowed [that] if I complained about things more than three times, I had to
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