Cats 2007

I’m in lovely Fullerton, for the annual CATS conference. The Community of Academic Technology Staff (CATS) is a professional development program that provides opportunities for California State University academic technologists to increase their knowledge, productivity, and professional effectiveness in service of their campus’s academic mission and the CSU’s educational technology goals.Its basially a chance to meet people that do the same thing you do in different campus. Often we ‘share the pain’.

Paul, Brandon and I took the new Horizon flight out of Santa Rosa at 6 in the morning on Sunday. It was dark and cold, but the flight was smooth and hassel free. Arriving in lovely LAX at 8 in the morning, we grabbed a car and made our way to Disneyland!

D-land was warm, crowded and fun. We were there for one reason, the rides. Pirates was first, but I made sure we grabbed a Fast Past for Indian Jones. Many rides were ridden and fun was had, last step was an attempt to win prizes. B mocked me about how he would win and therefore the contest was “on”. Well lets just say the prize I won is much much larger than the others. We had to left by 8 and got to the hotel in time to meet a few fellow CATS.

Next day was CATS. Arrived bright and early at 8, coffeeed up and ready for the day. I discovered that my voice was pretty much gone from the excitement of Disneyland. But I just nod a lot.

The first session was about Captioning, the process of creating and adding captions to video for the web and DVD. Formats covered was Flash, QuickTime and Windows Media. Captions require transcripitions and they can take a long long long time.

That evening we had a reception and dinner. I got to meet the evenings entertainment,
Carrie Snow, a comedian I used to watch as a teenager. We had dinner together and I got to hear all sorts of great stories. Carrie used to work on the Roseanne show and man, those stories were juicy. I would look towards the back of the room and see my group of peeps pop their heas up like a mercat every now and then, it was cute. Carrie was great.

After the show Paul and I met up with some other peeps and went out for drinking. Not much was available nea r the hotel, in fact the only place open was Fridays. But it was open and it was serving fruity girly drinks for me and manly beer type products for the men. Stories were shared and a good time was had by all. One guy mentioned that every friday he dons a hat that has hair in the back, a orange vest and carries a stick with a horsehead on top (a stick pony). He then gallops around the school. His partner will them come up to people and ask them (with a straight face) did a guy on a horse just ride by? Often the people will point to where the rider had galloped off. Ahh good times.