This one’s in DC, and while attendance is higher than last summer’s conference held in New Orleans (that I skipped, with the happy result that I got to see the Madison fireworks that are always before July 4, when I’m almost always at conference) it’s down for a DC conference. Normally conferences held in either Washington DC or Chicago get the highest attendance.
I’m having a pretty good conference, I think, although I seem to have missed some good stuff, especially Sunday.
Like I said I arrived early Friday with two suitcases, one mine and one stuff for the iSchool booth and reunion. I dropped mine at the hotel then trundled the booth crap over to the Convention Center and got registered.
I saw a few things, got the booth set up, hung out at the booth for exhibits grand opening, then went to dinner with Mark and the LITA Board at a place called matchbox. It was OK – kind of industrial chic, and we had a really in-your-face waitress. It was the typical awkwardness of a work dinner, plus we had two tables. While we filled one of them, the 2nd one only had 3 people. Mark & I split a pizza and a salad, and walked back down 14th St. to our hotel.
Saturday Mark was up and out first; I got to go second. More meetings, and I went with Suzanne to a vegan joint for lunch – I got a curried tofu wrap that was enormous. I only ate about 1/3 of it – but it was good. They called it a Massaman wrap, and it did have some of the flavors of Thai red curry. Booth shift, then another couple of meetings, and another dinner with a crowd of LITA folk – the Top Tech Trends panel. This one was at Farmers & Distillers, part of the Founding Farmers empire (or three-restaurant group, anyways). Unfortunately, I wasn’t that hungry because of the lunch. Mark and I split an order of chcken dumplings and I had a kale salad: 2 colors of kale, hazelnuts, dates, radish, pecorino, lemon vinaigrette. Not as good as the Ottolenghi salad I like to make with kale instead of spinach, but I cleaned my plate.
Sunday Mark got to stay in bed a little later, and I headed off to conference. I went to Chinatown first because I knew there was an Aveda where I could get some travel-size shampoo & cream rinse. I thought I didn’t need to take any with me, because I usually only wash my hair once a week, and I just washed it before I left for our week-long trip – but it’s hotter in DC than in Wisconsin. Anyways, the two sort of funny coincidences were there actually was an Aveda a lot closer to the hotel that I didn’t see until we went for Thai on Monday night, and Mark was also in Chinatown – no doubt we were minutes apart. I got a banana & coffee and went to do a booth shift before my 10:30 meeting.
Where I met my friend Kevin and we went to get tacos for lunch. It’s a tradition.
Bamba Taco in Washington – next to the Renaissance
Then it was three more meetings, LITA’s big show, top tech trends, a session about privacy, with speakers from the Library Freedom Project, and finally LITA prez, with Meredith Broussard. Her talk was called “Artificial Un-intelligence” about the bias in computer science because it’s based on math, and tempering quantitative data with qualitative observation. Later at dinner, I couldn’t convince Mark of her example, which was two guys who jump from the Titanic, one lives, because he jumped away from the boat and didn’t get sucked under; the other dies because he jumped straight down. Mark called it a terrible example, because it’s pure math – it’s all about angles. But her point was that the only reason we know about the angles was because other people in the lifeboats saw them, providing the qualitative data.
In between the program and dinner, I met Allison at the booth where we collected the suitcase full of booth schwag and took a Lyft to another hotel for our reunion. Which was rather poorly attended, off in a remote second floor meeting room, about 16-18 people and we had food for 35. So of course I ate some of the fancy cheese and crackers, and bought a beer and a bottle of club soda that were both the same price, $9, and ate one each of the butlered tomato tarts and shrimp tempura. And had some good conversations with the folks who did show.
Dinner Sunday was at the original Founding Farmers. Like Saturday I wasn’t all that hungry, but felt like I should go through with it anyways. It was just me and Mark, not a big group, but it was crazy noisy. I had the Crazy Corn Chicken, a big salad with mixed lettuce, roasted sweet corn, hominy, caramel corn, avocado, mango, cotija, cornbread, chipotle buttermilk & cilantro lime vinaigrette. Mark got crab cakes.
Because I was at the reunion, I missed Mark’s retirement cake at LITA happy hour.
Monday I went to a 10:30 meeting, OCLC research, then a session on big library systems, then I went off to work at the Northwest One DC Public Library, that’s in a community center. I wanted to go to the Mies van der Rohe one, but it’s closed for renovation.
DC Central Library designed by Mies van der Rohe, closed for remodeling
I worked until I only had four assignments left to grade, then I moved down to A Baked Joint, where I got a cookie and iced tea. It was a more pleasant (privileged) environment, even though I had to use my iPhone personal hot spot to connect to finish grading, because no WiFi. I said privileged, right?
Our last dinner in DC was Thai food, at Baan Thai, light enough that we went out for a scoop of gelato after, at Dolcezzo. I had noodles with chicken and Mark had a chicken and rice dish. Mine said crispy pork skin which turned out to be a spray of thin sticks on the side of the dish.
A few more DC photos – the old Carnegie Library that’s now an Apple store; peanut butter toast at A Baked Joint; a flower that fell from a hanging basket; mesh fencing around a construction site that reminds me of John.
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Tuesday we had breakfast at a Belgian place – waffles – Mark took a picture, but I did not. Then drove down to Colonial Williamsburg. That’s going to have to be another post.