The Edinburgh Posts – Part 2: Tuesday

Avalanche Records

And so, day two started for me in Edinburgh. It was the busiest day in terms of things I had to do, and the longest too. We found out that we had no internet access too (hence why this is being posted now, and not live as it should have been) so we’d have to find a hotspot later on. I didn’t until Wednesday. Anyway, I popped down for breakfast and met Brian down there and we had breakfast. It was a pretty standard Full English (or Full Scottish, apparently. Either way the Americans were impressed that every UK citizen ate this every day.) with some excellent fried bread, which Brian mistook for ‘Crazy Toast’.
9am arrived too soon, and we were ‘treated’ to the opening Keynote which was about what Historical Figures would have said about blackboard, and it supposedly lasted 1.5 hours, and it was boiling hot in the room. Good god it was bad. By the end Brian was playing hangman with me, and the word I correctly guessed was ‘Education’.
At 10.45 I went to a talk about reflections on a staff e-learning course held by Liz and Louise from Hallam. It was quite good and very busy, they held the crowd well and I think most people enjoyed it, a one hour gap was spent grabbing freebies from the sponsor desks and I popped out for a walk in the baking sunshine which was enveloping Edinburgh. I chanced upon the world famous Avalanche Records (home to a record label and a music store) where I picked up two Vinyl LP’s; The Album Leaf – In a safe place and Neutral Milk Hotel – In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Anyway, back to the conference and to a presentation called “Desktop to Mobile” which introduced the idea of having blackboard on mobile phones and also text messages to tell you when your courses have been updated.

Haggis and Tatties

Lunch consisted of various Scottish foodstuffs and some more well known things, but my favourite were the Tatties. I also tried some Haggis which tasted like Oaty crap. I certainly won’t be eating anymore of it anytime soon, put it that way. The rest of the meal was us sat talking about scottish things and the crap quality of the lunch, and the size of my room.

Who is Todd Gibby?

After lunch the 2nd keynote was a bit more professional than the first, and was rather impressive. The VP (Todd Gibby) talked about the new stuff coming, and how Blackboard and Rival WebCT (used by Uni of Sheffield) are officially merging. More about the VP later, but in a nutshell he looked like a cross between John C. McGinley (aka. Dr Cox) and Vin Diesel!
After the keynote, was a session about building blocks in blackboard (like, for instance the browser healthcheck, coded by a guy at Durham Uni) which I felt was quite boring as it talked more about W3C standards than about the actual building blocks, and the case study was aimed at American audiences.

Our Poster

Brian met up with me after this because I had the poster tube in my room for our presentation which we collected then set up in the poster presentation room. Not long after we’d set up the poster and talked to a few people who were enthusiastic about our support design and in particular getting people to do my job in other universities. Then the VP came up to talk to me about things, mainly how much he liked the idea of our support stuffs and our poster! He also claimed to have the worlds shiniest head, he was a top guy either way. The rest of the Hallam people were shocked he was talking to me because he didn’t really talk to anyone else in the room before he left. Brian left for home now, because he had a wedding in Madrid to get to.

Get them lungs workin!

No rest for the wicked though, because no sooner had the poster session finished I had scant 30minutes to go upstairs to my room, get ready and come back down to the front of house to get a coach 2mins down the road to Edinburgh’s “Sistine Chapel” for the Client Appriciation event, which was sponsored by Microsoft. As we pulled up in the coach two female bagpipers were ready at the doors to welcome us in, while inside servants were giving out free wine, nibbles and more interestingly for me – bottles of 80/- beer.

Pretty impressive

A meal followed, which was utterly lovely – Two Chicken Breasts marinated in Pesto with Red Onion Gravy, with Scottish vegetables, tatties and bread. Oddly, we’d been talking about pesto earlier in the day too. For afters I had Profiteroles and uber chocolate truffle mousse.
We decided we were going to leave, because it was starting to wind down somewhat, and we’d avoid the crush of the remaining people, as we approached the doors they locked infront of us! Agh! Trapped! Then, while were practically stood in front of them they swung open to reveal an army of pipers and drummers who were lead into the hall, some pictures of which are below:

We left soon after because no one in our team liked bagpipes apart from me, I was gutted because they started playing “Over the Sea to Skye” which has always been my favourite Scottish song. We were quite merry by this stage from the amount of alcohol plied onto us by Microsoft and the rest of them were hungry so we stopped by a fish n’ chip shop (which sold fried mars bar, ugh) and they had some food, while I got a free pen. Legendary!
After there we went to a rather weird pub called “The Black Bull” which was rather like the Dove and Rainbow in Sheffield, and none of us looked the part. Soon after we went back to the Guildford Arms for more drink, and finally back to the hotel room where once again I fell straight asleep from tiredness.

One more day to go…