Tech Trek 2020

“The Virtual Edition.”

Today was the start of Tech Trek, which is normally when I travel to Ontario for a few days to take part in a conference with my fellow technical people at Esri Canada. (Just search for it.) But thanks to COVID-19, it is three days of virtual conference this week.

On the plus side:

• No plane travel to Toronto and then taxi to Nottawasaga.
• No sleep deprivation due to late nights and early mornings.
• Less overeating and other over-indulging.
• No standing in line for said food.
• I get to see the family each night, not on FaceTime.

On the down side:

• No golf tournament.
• No hospitality suite (with snacks and drinks and such, as well as music).
• No street hockey.
• No getting to see my co-workers from other offices this year.

But all things being equal, today didn’t go too badly. It started at 9:00 MT, and it was five hours of WebEx, with a couple of half-hour breaks. I gave a talk on using Jupyter Notebooks and System Log Parser, which went well. Except for Alexa piping up as I started to give my talk. Of all the things that could have gone wrong…

The next two days will be long. I will be moderating the Solution Architect track, which means I am hosting the WebEx sessions for the presenters. I will have to be online 15 minutes before each session, but the breaks are only 30 minutes. That means I only get 15 minute breaks if everything goes perfectly. I might be hungry, thirsty and crossing my legs by the end of the days. We’ll see.

The best part of today was the trivia challenge. There are some social events lined up each evening and tonight Jasmine and Lakshmy hosted a Canadian trivia challenge on WebEx. I put it on the bonus room TV and we all got to experience it and try to guess the right answers. Team Biickert got 21 out of 45. Not great, but the questions were hard. That was firmly mid-pack. Then Tammy and I went and played a hand of Five Crowns. That’s another part of Tech Trek that I would miss: playing a hand of cards.

Updated

Tech Trek’s over now. It’s Friday morning and I have a couple of minutes before my first meeting. Overall, it went well. The next two days were long, with me playing host in the Solution Architecture track. That meant that for every 1 hour session, I was starting up the WebEx meeting 15 minutes before, getting the presenter or presenters set up and ready to go, then introducing them and keeping an eye on the Chat and the Q & A. Then I would interject from time to time with questions and then feed questions to the presenters at the end. Then we’d wrap up, I’d get a 15 minute break and then it would start again.

But other than the schedule, the sessions themselves went very well. I am glad they’re over, though. Wednesday evening was (Internet) board games. That was interesting, because it was set up differently than we have been doing it. The central hub was Discord, not WebEx, and the moderator set up “tables” (chat channels) for the groups to break off and play in. We played a couple rounds of Skribbl.io (a Pictionary-like game) and one game of Azee, an online clone of the game Azul. That was good, but not quite as fun as the trivia contest.

Last night, the last event of Tech Trek was a Netflix Party. It’s a Chrome browser extension that allows you and your friends to watch a Netflix movie in sync. It has a chat window that people can type into, commenting on the movie or whatever. Jasmine put out a survey early in the week letting people vote on a movie to watch. I don’t remember all of the movies on the list, but there were Pacific Rim, The Big Lebowski, Groundhog Day, Crazy Stupid Love and Extraction. Of all of them, I thought the least likely was Extraction, a violent, R-rated Netflix produced movie starring Chris Hemsworth. But then yesterday they announced that that was the one. I was tempted to not join in, because I thought no one else in my family would want to (or should) see the movie, but Tammy ended up joining in and the chat was fun. There were a lot of sarcastic comments that made it lots of fun. The movie wasn’t bad, but it had a John Wick-sort of one-note flavor to it.

So what will happen next year? Who knows? This was a good way to have Tech Trek without cancelling it but it was no Tech Trek…