Ben's Blog

Fun fact: In the last 48 hours I’ve driven over 1,000 miles and slept way too little. My 2 hour nap this evening was wonderful.

This has been a busy week – I’m going to be in Boston next week attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference so I packed as many meetings in this week as possible to wrap up all that I could before leaving. I don’t think the schedule would be too hectic normally, but this week was not the best timing for the Spring Break conference down in Athens, OH at Ohio University. This is always a good conference for the money and well worth the trip.

Highlights from the trip:

• The random and amusing conversation that stems from being in a mini-van with 5 people for 14 hours. This year’s trip included conversations on politics, relationships, relationships on laws and media, and poor dental hygiene.
• Enjoying a drink in downtown Athens. As much as I love GVSU, I would have truly enjoyed spending time in an established college town like this. The campus is in a very picturesque area, surrounded by nature and buildings that date back to the 1800′s. My favorite stop is Tony’s – a small bar with old wooden booths and baskets of peanuts.
• Selecting sessions from a couple conference tracks: best sessions this year: CSS topics with Eric Meyer, Podcasting with the host of askthetechies.com, customer service with John Cummigs and an interesting accessibility look at rich internet applications with Andrea Hill.
• Getting the itch to twitter again – we’ll see how long I stay at this, but it was cool connecting with others at the conference via twitter. Hopefully I can do the same at next week’s conference.
• Worst part: leaving Athens at 5:30pm and getting home at 2:30am.

Today I wrapped up the whirlwind road war with a trip to MSU to present the MI-CUPA group with an online tool for their salary reporting. The group loved the tool and had some great suggestions to make it even better.

I have a full day of meetings tomorrow, mostly on the Allendale campus, and then Friday I will have some time to make final plans for flying into Boston. I am spending the weekend in Boston before the conference, originally hoping Holly could come for a couple days, but jury duty changed those plans. The new plan is to take the train to Providence and spend time with my family there. I’m looking forward to this part of the trip as I usually only get to see these aunts/uncles/cousins once every few years.

For now, I get to wind down and get caught back up with email from this afternoon.  At least I can kick my feet back and watch Ice Road Truckers while reading work email

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 4th, 2008, 7:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.