Here are some random thoughts about the day…

- never realised until the night before while checking out the #tedxregina hashtag on Twitter that there were only 100 seats available as part of the license the organizers had from TED as a first-time event.  That made me feel extremely fortunate to have been able to get a ticket when I expected that the event would be in a huge auditorium with plenty of seats and getting a ticket would be no problem.

- it was cool to see how many people I knew there – from my real and digital lives – and the various circles they come from.  A former RPL employee was volunteering, lots of NDP’ers, tons of Twitter folks (most of whom I only know by their handles having not yet gotten out to a #yqr tweet-up), one guy I knew from the writing community, one guy I knew from MetaFilter (who still owes me $10 from the MetaFilter 10th Anniversary party I organized a couple years ago – but I didn’t bother reminding him of that! ;-))

- also cool to recognize the shared connections we have that you only realise through conversation.  Someone who went to the University of Western Ontario, someone who is a friend of a friend from a previous workplace and so on.  As a former colleague once told me, “Conversations are where the real work happens” and chatting to various people showed that to be true.

- I know the polite thing to say is that the day was amazing and all speakers were equally good but in all honestly, it was much like every other conference I’ve ever attended – whether it was for librarians, writers, book publishers, tech nerds or whatever – in that there were some speakers who were amazing and some who just didn’t do it for me.  I won’t go so far as to rank them as I thought about doing but that’s my take.  (And as you would would also expect, not everyone agreed with which ones were good and which ones weren’t.  Talking to one attendee at the after party, one of the speakers I found lacking was the highlight of the day for someone else.  Another speaker who had a message that I found very timely for my own life disappointed another attendee I spoke to.)

- In some ways, I see the TedX local events as sort of like the farm system for the big, mainstream TED conferences in the US (someone said that once the Regina videos are up in the next week or two, they get added to the main TED site and if they generate enough interest, that could lead to someone being “called up” to do their talk at one of the big multi-day TED conferences in the US.  Not sure if that’s true or not but it sounds good anyhow!)

- if that’s the case, in my own humble opinion, Dr. David Gerhardt and his Rain Board was head & shoulders above everyone else as the highlight of the day and is someone definitely ready for the call-up to the big leagues.  From a great presentation that succinctly explained the idea of trying to make a musical instrument that was easier to learn than the piano or violin but more complex than a kazoo to his ease at integrating the piano already on set into his presentation to the awesome “reveal” of the rain board to the fact that he allowed attendees to play with the device during the break, this one had it all as far as I’m concerned.  (Oh, and the rain board isn’t being commercially produced…yet…but you can buy the related iPhone/iPad app which does the same thing, just without all the cool blinking lights!)

- Ken Haycock is a big wig in the library world and lately he’s been writing a lot about how librarians need to raise our profile in places where we don’t normally go (in this case, a municipal affairs journal read by city administrators which has only had two articles on libraries in the last decade.)  Ken’s article kept occurring throughout the day as I was the only (current) library employee at this conference filled with some of the most plugged-in people in Regina.  And during conversations, when I told people I worked at the library, I ended up answering two main questions – what’s happening with the new Central Library and what’s going on with your contract?  In fact, in my dream world, somebody from the library should’ve been ON that stage talking about e-books or copyright or the future of libraries or the role of libraries in the community or one of the zillion other things that we have expertise on that non-librarians don’t always recognize or acknowledge.

- on that note, I handed my business card to one attendee who said “Oh, you’re a Libertarian?”  ;-)

In Saskatchewan, when we have protests, it tends to be farmers rolling their tractors up to the Legislature that creates a big scene.

But the film community, as you might expect given their skills, put on quite a show today with a bunch of semis including catering trucks, equipment trucks, portable dressing rooms as well as a fleet of motorcycles lining up beside hundreds of protesters to protest the elimination of a film tax credit that helps us compete with pretty much every other jurisdiction in North America for film productions.

Here’s a song parody that’s quite appropriate given today’s event…

Our car’s a total write-off which is sad as we’ve had it for a decade and have many fond memories of trips taken in it. The most important trip was also one of our shortest – it’s the car we brought Pace home from the hospital in. (One of the slowest yet scariest drives of my life!). Pace grew to love it calling it daddy’s “race car” – more for its passing resemblance to Lightning McQueen than my driving style, I hope!

True, by the end, I’d taken to calling it the “Bionic Car” as everything in it seemed to have been either replaced or was being held together by duct tape and hope.

But it was still a car that was fully paid for and which worked well enough (most of the time) to get me to places where the bus or walking weren’t viable options.

Good-bye old friend – enjoy that big race track in the sky!

The timing is good coming in the wake of a North Carolina vote that saw the state’s citizens voting to constitutionally ban gay marriage.  Obama’s stance also immediately provoked strong opposition from conservatives.

For me, although Obama’s stance is brave, it would’ve been braver if he’d taken a stance earlier so perhaps it wouldn’t be too late for some…

My colleague said she knew someone who worked as a manager for a very large company and was frequently put in a position where they had to let someone go.  This manager had a brilliant strategy for how to handle this tough responsibility.  They would call the affected employee into a meeting and explain that they were going to have to let them go, laying out the case if necessary for why the decision was being made.  The manager went on to explain that the employee had two options – they could be fired or they could choose to resign.

If they chose to resign, the employee would get all the benefits that were available to any departing employee – a farewell party, a two week window until their departure, a chance for closure – not only for the employee but for their co-workers.  Needless to say, most employees this manager dealt with picked the “choose to resign” option.

During the farewell party, most departing employees would simply give some variation of “I’ve chosen to move on” while providing minimal details.  Some might talk of vague plans to return to school or travel or other job opportunities.

The benefits of this approach were many – besides letting the departing employee save face, it helped quell the rumour mill and helped minimize the impact of employee departures on remaining employees.

Plus the manager who’s idea it was is now able to proudly speak of how few employees he had to fire during his long career – a proud achievement for any manager!