On Wednesday, I was invited to a breakfast with Dr Duane Szafron at 8AM. I showed up right on time but had difficulty finding the proper room. Eventually I ended up at what seemed to be the proper place, but it turns out that I was attending the Jerry Cuomo breakfast instead. Actually it worked out OK, because my speaker didn’t actually show up for the conference!

Afterwards, I attended the keynote. The speaker talked about power consumption in chips and where the future is going. Overall informative and interesting. I skipped the paper presentations that came afterwards and hung around my exhibit at the Technology Showcase. I again grabbed some lunch when the Showcase opened and showed my demo a couple of more times. Everyday’s lunch had a certain theme: Monday was supposedly mediterranean, Tuesday’s was Chinese and today was supposedly “seafood”.

My afternoon workshop was about Social Computing Best Practices. There were a variety of speakers, one of which included Joey deVilla, the guy behind the well known Toronto blog, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. He said a variety of interesting things such as how he gets 4-5k hits per day, and has enough AdSense income to buy a new MacBook each year. Another interesting talk was about “Writing on the Web”. Listening to this talk, I realized that there is a world of blogging (such as niche blogging) where SEO and writing matter, and then there are blogs like orangefever where those ideas are thrown out the window.

The night activity was a CAS alumni dinner at the Estates of Sunnybrook. Keeping with the CASCON theme of “meeting of minds”, a mixed selection of people (i.e. alumni, profs, students, etc) were seated at each table and we were given a quiz to complete. The hope was that we would collaborate within our table and pay attention to a repeating slideshow in order to answer the questions. Being resourceful, we successfully stole the laptop running the slide deck in order to search for answers (and to prevent others from finding answers). Of course we were quickly discovered and had to hand the Thinkpad back.

Later, someone (who I realized later was one of the judges) came to our table and said they would answer one question from the quiz free of charge. So we asked him to answer the question as to who’s retired from CAS: Is the first person retired? No. Is the second retired? No. Are you sure? Yes. Oh wait, you’re Jacob…

In the end, we won the most competitive table award, due to our aforementioned laptop-stealing and our quiz stealing from an adjacent table. We unfortunately didn’t even have the most correct answers! Also, at some point during dinner; someone brought out some sort of weird contraption that did the following:

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: @work, cascon, diary