CAR conference

I spent the latter part of last week and the weekend in Houston, Texas for the annual computer-assisted reporting conference. This is the one time all year when I get to see all my fellow journalism geeks, and it's always exciting, exhilerating and exhausting all at the same time.

I have attended every conference since 1999 (my first was in Boston, and remains one of my all-time favorites!), and I'm still amazed that I always learn something new and that I always come away feeling like I have so much yet to learn! How is that possible?! There are always a handful of the uber-geeks who are racing out ahead of the rest of us learning something newer, better, faster, cooler, etc. They just stun me every year.

Thankfully I count most of them among my good friends and can call or email them at any time and get a flood of help whenever I need it. :-) They are my saviors.

My other favorite part about the conference is that I get to teach people who are newer to this than I am. For the last few years I've taught an advanced Excel class that is hugely popular. This year after the class, I got stopped in the hotel lobby or outside the conference area or wherever by at least a half dozen people telling me how fabulous my class was. Then when I got back to my office I had three emails from people thanking me! Makes me feel really good to be able to help them. After all, there are so many other people in the CAR world that helped me along the way.

Amazing that this August will be 9 years since I started at Mizzou, which is also the point in time when I really started doing CAR full-time. I can't believe it's been that long! But the conference also reminded me that there are others who have been doing CAR for 20 years. Wow.