Wishful Thinking

I can hardly believe it is almost here! Only one week until the Web 2008 Conference takes place.

The committee has been working hard on all of the last minute details in order to bring to you two days of informative presentations and other fun activities. I find it incredibly gratifying when we reach this point. The decisions have been made. The attendees have registered. The presenters have planned and practiced, and the Penn Stater and Business Buildings have our event needs on their schedules. We are now creating name tags, filling conference bags, and generally getting ready for you.

If you have registered, you should receive an email before the end of the week that will provide many details for the conference and tutorials. Hopefully, it will include everything that you will need or want to know.

We are all looking forward to our big day next week, and we hope you are as well!

P.

What a wonderful two days we had on Monday and Tuesday! I couldn't be more pleased with how everything went. I have so many people to thank for making the conference a success.

First and foremost, I thank every single person on the planning committee. It took a tremendous amount of work to pull everything together for the conference, and Penn State is incredibly lucky to have such a professional, dedicated, and hard working committee in place. I'll let you in on a little secret...the committee had a lot of fun planning the conference. The personalities of the individuals are quite divergent, and yet we all came together to make your experience the best we knew how...and had quite a few laughs along the way.

I'd also like to thank all of the presenters. Wow, what a fabulous job you all did! I was amazed and impressed by the quality and relevance of the proposals we received, which allowed us to put together an informative and very special agenda for both days.

A special thanks go out to the committed speakers from other higher education institutions, as well as Kevin Morooney. Your thoughts and insights brought a tremendous amount of value to the Penn State web development community and got us to thinking about how things might be done differently.

And what can I say about Steve Krug? I could listen to him talk all day! Hmmm...perhaps that means I should take his all day workshop some day. I feel really blessed that I had the opportunity to visit with him for a short while. Not only is he intelligent and a wonderful speaker, he is a genuinely nice man. And yes, he is humble (and one cool dude)!

Finally, I'd like to thank the wonderful staff at the Penn Stater and Business Building. Your support behind the scenes made everything run smoothly...which not only made us look good, it also gave us the confidence to try new things.

So many ideas came out of the topics that were discussed at the conference. We have some thoughts about how to continue the momentum that we hope was started there. Stay tuned...

P.