12:15 PM - Day two of the trip started with a sore neck and back due to an uncomfortable pillow. I bought some coffee and got to the first keynote. Half asleep and working through my coffee, I was greeted by a southern dressed woman on stage shouting "Howdy" into the microphone. She asked in a southern drawl how we were all doin and if we saw Reba last night (I did not). She then introduced a group of children who played fiddles. For the next 15 minutes of my life, I wanted to kill myself as I sat through both children fiddlers and grown men dancing to it. They then topped it off with a rendition of Rocky Top, which I refused to acknowledge and thought of the Iowa fight song to myself in my head.
We then had the keynote for the day called Dealing with Darwin. This really didn't have as much of an impact for me at the ITS Help Desk as we are not really in the business world. I did take some decent ideas of not trying to be great at every aspect of IT, but to start by focusing on one or two things to set an organization apart. Again, not really something we can use at the Help Desk, but interesting nonetheless.
My first breakout session was about ITIL. Tracy had asked in a recent meeting that I become more familiar with ITIL, and since I had no real idea what it was, the ITIL at Warp Speed session seemed to fit. I am really glad I went, the presenter was entertaining and did a good job of presenting the information. My dad said that at a conference, if one session is really good, it is probably worth it. I would say this first session was just that, it gave me basic information about ITIL and got me interested enough to learn more about it on my own.
The second breakout session was Developing an Effective Support Structure. This was not as interesting as it went over some stuff I am familiar with already, however there were some interesting formulas that could be used for staffing at the Help Desk. The presenter also went into some detail about how to best staff as smaller Help Desk, so that was also useful. The presentation wasn't great, but I think some of the tools that come out of it will be pretty good.
I am now on lunch for awhile, then have another breakout session and a featured speaker this afternoon. One thing I am learning about the conferences, there are some people who are here just to network. I notice they arn't paying attention through the presentations and are more concerned about finding people to talk to afterwards. I suppose this isn't bad, just not my cup of tea at this point in my career. More updates after this afternoon's sessions.
6:10 PM - I just got back from dinner and figured I should post before I forget some of the stuff from this afternoon. The only breakout session of the afternoon was Analyzing and Reporting Call Center Performance. I am pretty sure this couldn't be interesting if the presenter tried. With that, the presenter didn't try and spent most of her time talking down to us. The presentation had some decent information, but tough to implement in a smaller situation such as the Help Desk where we can't have 4 different analyists looking at data. The best part of the presentation was when the group in the next room over was making a racket, she had our group make some to distract them back. It was mildly amusing.
The final presentation was a featured speaker, the man who created HDI. He gave some vague "state of the industry" stuff that wasn't too surprising and really could have been found by anyone looking at information on the Net. The second part was supposed to be Ken Jennings, the Jeopardy guy, however his flight was cancelled out of Denver, so we got Marni Vos, a comedian who did a different breakout session, but who was very funny. I am actually probably happier that I got to see her than Ken Jennings.
That wrapped up the conference stuff for today. I did figure out how to get some of the pictures off of my PDA, so I am going to work on posting them tonight. I will add a link then. One last note, I am glad that I got registered last night because I didn't have to carry the bright green backpacks they handed out with me all day like most of the folks did today, so that was a bonus.
8:45 PM - I have posted pictures of the resort and a couple from my flight in a new set on Flickr.? I should note that the quality of the pics arn't great, but they should give you a feel of what the resort is like.
