TOC 2 with chop sticks

The wake up call came at 6 a.m. I always fumble around with the phone until I finally remember it is a wake up call. In that sense, wake up calls are rather creepy. It is a "Twilight Zone" thing, the phone rings and there's nothing.

If there's one thing I wish I could do better at conferences, it is network. I am told that regular attendees at the big academic conferences, such as AAR, ignore the planned sessions and spend the entire time just reacquainting themselves with friends and fellow scholars. I always forget my business cards, and I'm never really in a position to need to frequent all the vendor booths. That would actually be some kind of torture from hell: be assigned to a cool conference but have to spend the entire time suffering one vendor pitch after the next. A subcategory of that hell is when you are confined to your booth. I did some booth work for EP. We went to this cool performing arts conference. I spent the entire time sitting bored behind our table.

Inevitably, my kind of networking is, "So who are you with?" or "I notice that you are with Random House." It always helps if the conference organizers make everyone's place of employment so small as to be nearly invisible. This is especially handy when you are trying to figure out what company or organization a woman you are talking to is affiliated with, as it looks for all the world like you are making great efforts to stare down her blouse. It also says something when people don't keep their badges visible, or allow them to twist around as well. What, are they so important or unimportant that no one needs to know the usual info? Is the conference just a wrap up for them from here on out?

Here's another moray to observe during conferences. I made the mistake this trip on day three (so I'm getting a little ahead of myself here) to engage a vendor in conversation during lunch. I'll wait until a future post to spell out the details, but, suffice to say, it was hard to get a bite in with so many people talking at once.

Conferences should break for an afternoon nap. I say this because around 2:30 p.m., I get so tired. My butt has long since gone to sleep in three places, and my legs ache. Even worse, I've lost complete interest in the speaker, no matter the topic, for psychosomatic reasons. The first time this happened, I was at a conference at Villanova in Pennsylvania. The speaker was saying something about Lévy-Strauss or Lacan or somebody, and I realized with absolute clarity that not one cell or fibre of my body gave a crap. TOC on day one was made worse by a pallid afternoon lineup.

One cool thing to happen during the conference was that I met up with Carlo and his boss, Jorge. Carlo is TN's publisher in Brazil, and he is such a fun human being to be around. He is well traveled, and has lived in several countries, including the USA, where he received a degree in publishing in New York. Carlo is a huge photography buff, and he knows all the international-traveler workarounds for phone outages, the awful U.S. wireless system, or Web sites blocked or governed by country of origin. This time, Carlo told me all about Skype, which sounds great. I hope that one day L and I will be able to take Carlo up on his offer and visit he and his wife in Rio. I'd never met Jorge before--a tall, good-looking man with an excellent speaking voice and an educated and interested demeanor. I wish there had been more time to spend with him. Carlo and I saw one another at the conference, but he was always busy meeting international friends to do anything afterward.

It bothered me that I had no idea how to edit the video I'd shot the night before. Just because you own the software doesn't mean you know how to use it. I also felt that it wasn't really very good. When you are speaking into a camera it is hard to keep your thoughts. You are so aware that you are being filmed. I ramble and go on about this or that. It is hard to remember to make an argument or support a point. I wanted to shoot more video, but I wasn't sure just how to organize my thoughts or, with five pages of notes, exactly what my thoughts were.

Hunger put all doubting aside. I wanted to go a little further out, and I wanted Japanese food. So I consulted my map, did a little more research, and set out for Ocha. By the time I got there, I was so excited that I called L and said, "I'm in Manhattan at a Japanese restaurant eating with chopsticks. How cool is that!" Unfortunately, it was too cold to do any more exploring. Satiated, I went back to the hotel and read the help files on Windows Movie Maker until after one in the morning.

Times Square and the TOC conference

By some stroke of mad luck, my company decided to send me on a whopper of a business trip. They decided to fly myself and a few of the VPs to New York to attend the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishers conference. I'd rabidly followed the news bits from the first installation of this conference in 2007. Now, amazingly enough, I was going to be able to attend the second one!

My flight left on Sunday. I was seated next to one of the VP's, PN. He had brought a stack of Publishers Weekly, and I had my iPod. For awhile, we didn't say much, but then we hit it off and I'm afraid I filled his ears for the last half hour with some of the training preparation the Editors Guild has been doing. When we got to LaGuardia, I sort of followed PN. I felt like a child, there was so much noise and people were everywhere. We ducked through hallways and passed through doors. Everything seemed stuck together, as if we were in the innards of a giant robot. Finally we popped out into the dark to wait in line in the cold for a taxi.

We stayed at the Marriot Marquee in the center of Times Square. The taxi seemed to come up to the hotel from nowhere, and an army of african-american men in thick coats ushered us like spanish bulls to the eighth floor where I nice young indian man gave me a room on the fortieth floor looking right down into the Square itself. Standing at the window looking down, I thought of all the people that I wish could be there with me to enjoy the moment. And then I thought of how ugly New York is when you take your eyes off the neon. (Strange isn't it that human beings should make things more artificial the closer they live to each other. Strange that we should make things out of such inhumane materials: things that bleach and fade, crack and peel, without mercy. But maybe there is something human in that.)

The TOC conference is not cheap; I was committed to squeezing every bit of value out of it, both for my own sake and as an expression of value to my company. Remember, everyone else that was slated to go either was directly IT related or had "VP" on their business card (or above). One thing I wanted to do was videoblog the conference. I had brought my webcam for exactly that purpose. I set it up the laptop and unpacked.

Now, business requires a sense of nerdiness these days. The kind of thing that would have landed you straight in the chess club (ahem, SWR) is now expected. Admittedly, there is a fine line, but computer saavy is usually a plus no matter what department you hail from. Emboldened by this, I took the time the previous week to make a Google map of the few blocks surrounding the hotel and to mark recommended restaurants and points of interest. I was determined to make the most of the experience, both the conference and the city, and the conference wasn't until the next day. That meant dinner out. First stop: Carmine's on 44th for Italian.

Now the map says that Carmine's is only a block south, which is true. The problem is that the elevators on the ground floor of the Mariotte are arranged in a circle, which means that the people coming out of them could shoot out from anywhere like ping pong balls from the top of one of those chance contests at fairs. Mine came out pointing north, though I thought it was south. The wind was icy cold, and people were wrapped to their ears in coats and scarves. I had on a windbreaker and, for awhile anyway in the face of that icy blast, my face. Seeing the stack of jumbotron TVs, I assumed I was heading correctly, not realizing that the Square is bordered on both ends by those gaudy advertisements. Can you imagine what Edison would think if he could see those! I went past 47th and, realizing my error, turned West at 49th.

By the time I had oriented myself and turned around (walking south along 8th Ave), L. called to see how things were going. Actually, I was glad she did, not only to hear her voice (but who can hear anything with the speakers in the RAZR phones?), but also because yacking on your phone is a fantastic way to blend in and look like all the other freezing New Yorkers. "You're outside? You're walking outside? You're on the street? You're lost? And where are you going?" She was a little nervous, but I was pretty high with just being there. I stopped and asked a cop for directions--that freaked L out a little bit. But she felt better, and so did I, when I finally found what I was looking for.

Carmine's looks like a speakeasy. You can paint all the people in twenties-era clothing, give it all a faded yellow color, and it looks like any other big city crime photo on PBS. This means, of course, that it has atmosphere to burn. The portions are so large that the waiter steered me to the bar for a sandwich. I felt a little foolish at first, but a cappuccino took care of that. And, hey, turns out I was sitting not three stools away from Sarah Jessica Parker, who was absorbed in conversation with a girlfriend. Hmmm...celebrity sighting: check!

It was nearly midnight by the time I made it back to the hotel. By now I had my bearings and knew how the street numbers ran in this part of town. I knew now that I was in the theatre district (giant ads celebrated HairSpray, Spamalot, the Little Mermaid, and Phantom) and that it is sometimes called the Middle West side. I knew that Times Square is flanked by those giant glowing CRTs. And I knew I still had work to do.

Back in my room, I turned on the webcam, adjusted the lighting a bit, and started talking. It took about an hour to get enough usable footage, what between me blinking, licking my lips (it was dry in there), wiping my nose, yawning, or simply forgetting what I was saying and rambling on about "digital" and "future" and "business models." I fell into bed at two o'clock, so happy to be where I was that it didn't even matter that wake up was in four-and-a-half hours. It was hard even then to convince myself that a few hours of sleep mattered more than exploring this giant new continent called Manhattan.