My two sessions at the Canadian University Press' 72nd annual national conference went pretty well.
In the afternoon I met up with Matt Atwood who works in media relations for Bioware [wp]. After I signed a non-disclosure agreement he showed me around their Edmonton office, which is conveniently connected to the Radisson hotel that the conference is being hosted in, and then we went over the game plan for the first session. The session had morphed from me doing a solo thing on tech writing to a talk about tech writing and dealing with corporate PR firms as a part of that.
It was a really good seminar I think and I even learned a few things that will help me further down the road. Matt was really friendly, had some cool Mass Effect 2 swag to give away to people who asked questions and I think that everyone in the session kind of wanted his job by the end of it.
The next session was right on the heels of that, in the same room, so I missed the first bit as I was talking to Matt afterwards. It was a four person panel though, so my absence probably just helped keep everything coherent for the first few questions until I returned. We had not really prepared anything, though I think it went all right.
The subject was "New Media" and I was glad that we all seemed to agree that there's a false distinction between "new" and "old" media that gets in the way of actually talking about it. Since it was four people talking instead of just one or two there was not much to do, and since most everyone else had achieved more in both old and new media I tried not to talk too much.
That night while the delegates went to a bar in Edmonton, I headed off with some former Gateway types Dan Lazin, Matt Frehner (who was also on the New Media panel) and Don Iveson and went to a pizza / coffee /gelato place for dinner. It was good to see both Dan and Don again, and to get out into the city as opposed to stay trapped in the Radisson. Afterwards Dan and I came back and went to Bioware for another tour of the studio and so Dan could do some work that I'll just assume is covered under the NDA I signed earlier in the day.
Then to bed and up early to claim the free bacon I was told that there would be. There was none, just eggs and sausages.
