CATS 2006 – Monterey Bay

I am at the CATS (Community of Academic Tehcnology) conference in lovely rainsoaked Monterey. Babs and I drove down yesterday, got out hotel rooms, greeted some peeps and then we, Paul and Susan and I made our way to Bubba Gumps at the Cannery Row. The food (mostly seafood) was yummy as well as the fantastic cocktails. Before dinner we wandered a it and I found the coolest store. As Seen On TV, it just sells the crap you seen in infocomercials. We quickly had a contest, who could find the most stupid item for sale. I found an automatic food stirrer. You place it on top of a pan and it would stir the food while you cooked it. That was going to be the winneer until Paul found a talking mouse pad. You roll over it and the Three Stooges do a little shitck. He was very proud. I just thought about how many help desk calls he would get about it. After a few games of pool and such I made my way to the room and crashed, waking up every hour because it was so freaking hot.

< a href="http://csumb.edu/">Monterey is a beautiful campus, a former army base that they are slowly renovating. For example the old tank repair building is now the art and media section. The Keynote speaker concentrated on Community of Practice, of like minded people getting together to talk about issues, it can be formal or informal. Babs and I are going to try to start a new web one on campus. Not quite as formal at the web team.
The first session I attended was Community of Practice for Accessibility. I got to met a lot of people from different walks of “technical life.” Surprisingly, only a few were web people. Many were lab managers or worked for disabled students. It was nice to put a face to all the emails.

The next session was cancelled, so Paul, Susan and I walked around a but, until we got caught in the rain. Made our way back and now I am sitting in the cafeteria waiting for the next session to start and hopefully dry out)