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shannon_aTPAC 2023 occurred in Seville a week ago. It's a W3C meeting, which means that people are working closely together to advance projects, somewhat like we do here. There were more than a dozen cases of COVID that came out of it, including two of our planned workshop attendees, who couldn't attend as a result.
We talked about that a bit at the start of RWOT12, and someone asked, "What protocols did they have to stop the spread of COVID?" The response: pretty much the same as ours, which means that masks were not required or even encouraged, but that all attendees were sent home with testing kits to test at the beginning of each day (and not come in if they tested positive). The "pretty much the same as ours" should have been the warning sign. (In fact, the TPAC website actually claims they require masking, which is at odds with what I heard, but if that's true, they had much more stringent restrictions than we did, which would've been even more of a warning sign.)
So Monday I stayed masked up for the Poster Night opening ceremony of RWOT. I was literally the only one, but I knew that people had just been through a bunch of airports and train stations and that most of them hadn't taken COVID tests yet, so it seemed prudent.
But Tuesday I decided to trust the process. I mean, this is literally the rest of our lives. And if I was going to stay and eat our group dinner that night (and I did), then it would be ridiculous to mask the rest of the day. So, with no positive tests overnight, I trusted the process and worked without mask all day.
We had a positive test result this morning, so that seems a bit more foolish today. I mean, seriously, we can't stay masked up forever. I mask on public transit, which seems the most high-danger spot, and I masked on Monday when it seemed like there was more danger, but ...
Simultaneously there are virulent new variants out there (again!), COVID _has_ been surging, and I haven't had a booster in more than a year, with the new one just out in the last few days (weeks too late for this trip). But I'm still not sure how we live with this long-term, though I have a suspicion that there will be a younger generation that just shrugs their shoulders at it, which is apparently a prevalent attitude in Europe right now.
Anyway, the positive test result was apparently "weak", so hopefully that means we didn't have spread yesterday, not just because I don't want to see these people I've met and like get sick (or me!), but also because it'd be incredibly disruptive to a working conference to have more of our members go missing.
==
This morning, the trains were a mess when I got up to take the train in to Hürth for RWOT. My whole 10 minutes away by train plan has in fact been a bit more troublesome than I expected.
The first problem seems to be that for whatever reasons, German trains have gotten to be a mess over the last few years. So almost every train I've taken has been delayed a few minutes, but this morning that train I took in to Hürth was delayed 15 minutes.
The second problem seems to be that there's lost of construction going on, our local friends say both in response to the increasing problems with the trains and causing more of them. As a result of that, when I made my plans for this trip, I chose this apartment because there were three train lines running between Köln West and Hürth. Now one of the lines is skipping Köln West entirely, for (this is the best part) a detour that's scheduled for this week only.
But, not a big problem this morning, because I actually got the _previous_ train, which was a different line, but still one that took me to Hürth, so I was just a few minutes late. I'd have mostly missed breakfast if I had to wait for my train.
==
This was one of the main work days at the workshop, with everyone scribing hard on their papers. For a variety of reasons we didn't have any of our original board members there, but we fortunately did have producer Z., who is also one of our newer board members, so she led morning plenary and I helped out with some advice on where papers should be today.
And then I spent the day working on our media and our plenary records.
It felt like everyone was having a good day's work at the time, other than some natural concern when the COVID result got announced. But at the afternoon check-out we had I think two of our six groups saying they were having problems with their momentum and one that we'd expected to dissolve yesterday had mostly dissolved.
So tomorrow I need to see if any of the groups might be served with problem-solving (it'll depend on whether they want it or not).
==
The evening was supposed to be our "Mandatory Fun", where we go do stuff as a group. But, organization on it had already been wanting. We'd played around with an Eventbrite for a while, but ultimately just decided to do casual signups and even those were delayed.
This was our third "Mandatory Fun" and it's been hit-and-miss all three times. We try to give people choices what to do, but then some people just prefer to kick back (and giving people a break in the middle of a tough conference is part of the point), and it's hard to get commitments, and ... Some of the events inevitably dissolve at the last minutes, and this time it felt like many of them did. I think a city tour turned into a pub crawl and likely the river cruise happened and maybe the climbing did. But I'm not entirely sure because _everything_ sort of dissolved and there was no way to track the other groups.
I'd settled on the Chocolate Museum tour that we'd added at the last minute, but the other people interested in doing it wanted to do it as an adjunct to something else (mostly the river cruise, but also the city tour), and I was convinced that timing wouldn't work well.
So I ultimately decided to just do the Chocolate Museum on my own. Yeah, I probably should have hung out with people from the workshop, but most of them were doing lunch before their events, and I was even less enthused with that because of the COVID floating around, so a solo-evening it was.
==
I actually followed in the occasional footsteps of my beloved wife by saying, "If the train actually takes me home, maybe I'll just get home, but if I get one of those detour trains that skips Köln West" I'll go to the chocolate museum.
So I ended up taking a train that blew right by Köln West for no apparent reason and landed in Köln HBF, and from there I had a nice walk along the river to the Chocolate Museum.
==
The Chocolate Museum was fun.
It had a lot of stuff about how chocolate is actually made and what cocoa is and all that, which was terrific.
It had some pretty pointed discussion of poor earnings for cocoa farmers and discussion of sustainability, which surprised me in what I had thought would be a pure tourist museum.
(Overall, I don't understand how chocolate is as cheap as it is, given its narrow region of viability and how little cocoa is produced per tree.)
It had some great histories including more pointed discussions of the attacks on native civilizations in America, but also including long discussions of how it was served as a drink before the point where they could extract cocoa butter, and that there were ... I forget it they were called chocolate bars or chocolate houses or what ... but places that mainly served chocolate drinks back in the day. It felt like something out of an Alan Moore story, not reality.
There were also Lindt chocolate samples at the start and end of the tour, plus a world-famous chocolate fountain.
And a pretty terrific chocolate store at the end. Thank goodness there's nothing like that where I live.
Anyway, fun and I'm glad I did it.
==
Basically, when I'm coming home by train from RWOT I have three choices.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud to Köln West, which is what I did on Monday, by luck.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud, and not to Köln West, and get off at Köln Sud and walk, which is what I did yesterday, but I didn't love the early neighborhoods.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud, and not to Köln West, and continue on to Köln HBf, and then switch to another train to loop back to Köln West, which is sort of what I did today, with a few hour detour out to the Chocolate Museum.
And I won't be doing that last one again, because the Köln HBF was a horrific mess. SOOO crowded with people (thank goodness I was wearing an N95). And just crazy masses of trains all delayed.
There were two different trains back to Köln West, one delayed by 20 minutes and then the next one by 5 or 10. So I ended up on the next one. Except two or three minutes before it was due, they suddenly changed the platform and so we all had to race down the stairs from the platform and up to another and race out to the train.
And we got in and it sat for another five minutes.
Remembering how bad the Amsterdam airport was when we were there last year, I'm suspecting the Köln HBF is the equivalent for a train station. Definitely no more transferring there. I'll either walk from Sud or just wait for a train that's not detoured.
==
When I got off the train at Köln West and headed back to my street, I found it absolutely JAMMED with techbros in suits. I remembered people had been talking about sky-high prices for hotel rooms on Wednesday only. (Meanwhile, other conference attendees were reporting it almost impossible to find tables at bars in central Köln.)
It's apparently all due to DMEXCO, the Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference, which is today and tomorrow.
I literally had to push my way through techbro marketers to get into my apartment building.
(Masked once I saw the milling crowds blocking the sidewalks.)
And the bar downstairs is blasting the loudest it has the whole visit, not even fully drowned by the previously soundproof windows. And shaking the building.
Hoping this is a one-night bacchanal
==
Halfway there.
We talked about that a bit at the start of RWOT12, and someone asked, "What protocols did they have to stop the spread of COVID?" The response: pretty much the same as ours, which means that masks were not required or even encouraged, but that all attendees were sent home with testing kits to test at the beginning of each day (and not come in if they tested positive). The "pretty much the same as ours" should have been the warning sign. (In fact, the TPAC website actually claims they require masking, which is at odds with what I heard, but if that's true, they had much more stringent restrictions than we did, which would've been even more of a warning sign.)
So Monday I stayed masked up for the Poster Night opening ceremony of RWOT. I was literally the only one, but I knew that people had just been through a bunch of airports and train stations and that most of them hadn't taken COVID tests yet, so it seemed prudent.
But Tuesday I decided to trust the process. I mean, this is literally the rest of our lives. And if I was going to stay and eat our group dinner that night (and I did), then it would be ridiculous to mask the rest of the day. So, with no positive tests overnight, I trusted the process and worked without mask all day.
We had a positive test result this morning, so that seems a bit more foolish today. I mean, seriously, we can't stay masked up forever. I mask on public transit, which seems the most high-danger spot, and I masked on Monday when it seemed like there was more danger, but ...
Simultaneously there are virulent new variants out there (again!), COVID _has_ been surging, and I haven't had a booster in more than a year, with the new one just out in the last few days (weeks too late for this trip). But I'm still not sure how we live with this long-term, though I have a suspicion that there will be a younger generation that just shrugs their shoulders at it, which is apparently a prevalent attitude in Europe right now.
Anyway, the positive test result was apparently "weak", so hopefully that means we didn't have spread yesterday, not just because I don't want to see these people I've met and like get sick (or me!), but also because it'd be incredibly disruptive to a working conference to have more of our members go missing.
==
This morning, the trains were a mess when I got up to take the train in to Hürth for RWOT. My whole 10 minutes away by train plan has in fact been a bit more troublesome than I expected.
The first problem seems to be that for whatever reasons, German trains have gotten to be a mess over the last few years. So almost every train I've taken has been delayed a few minutes, but this morning that train I took in to Hürth was delayed 15 minutes.
The second problem seems to be that there's lost of construction going on, our local friends say both in response to the increasing problems with the trains and causing more of them. As a result of that, when I made my plans for this trip, I chose this apartment because there were three train lines running between Köln West and Hürth. Now one of the lines is skipping Köln West entirely, for (this is the best part) a detour that's scheduled for this week only.
But, not a big problem this morning, because I actually got the _previous_ train, which was a different line, but still one that took me to Hürth, so I was just a few minutes late. I'd have mostly missed breakfast if I had to wait for my train.
==
This was one of the main work days at the workshop, with everyone scribing hard on their papers. For a variety of reasons we didn't have any of our original board members there, but we fortunately did have producer Z., who is also one of our newer board members, so she led morning plenary and I helped out with some advice on where papers should be today.
And then I spent the day working on our media and our plenary records.
It felt like everyone was having a good day's work at the time, other than some natural concern when the COVID result got announced. But at the afternoon check-out we had I think two of our six groups saying they were having problems with their momentum and one that we'd expected to dissolve yesterday had mostly dissolved.
So tomorrow I need to see if any of the groups might be served with problem-solving (it'll depend on whether they want it or not).
==
The evening was supposed to be our "Mandatory Fun", where we go do stuff as a group. But, organization on it had already been wanting. We'd played around with an Eventbrite for a while, but ultimately just decided to do casual signups and even those were delayed.
This was our third "Mandatory Fun" and it's been hit-and-miss all three times. We try to give people choices what to do, but then some people just prefer to kick back (and giving people a break in the middle of a tough conference is part of the point), and it's hard to get commitments, and ... Some of the events inevitably dissolve at the last minutes, and this time it felt like many of them did. I think a city tour turned into a pub crawl and likely the river cruise happened and maybe the climbing did. But I'm not entirely sure because _everything_ sort of dissolved and there was no way to track the other groups.
I'd settled on the Chocolate Museum tour that we'd added at the last minute, but the other people interested in doing it wanted to do it as an adjunct to something else (mostly the river cruise, but also the city tour), and I was convinced that timing wouldn't work well.
So I ultimately decided to just do the Chocolate Museum on my own. Yeah, I probably should have hung out with people from the workshop, but most of them were doing lunch before their events, and I was even less enthused with that because of the COVID floating around, so a solo-evening it was.
==
I actually followed in the occasional footsteps of my beloved wife by saying, "If the train actually takes me home, maybe I'll just get home, but if I get one of those detour trains that skips Köln West" I'll go to the chocolate museum.
So I ended up taking a train that blew right by Köln West for no apparent reason and landed in Köln HBF, and from there I had a nice walk along the river to the Chocolate Museum.
==
The Chocolate Museum was fun.
It had a lot of stuff about how chocolate is actually made and what cocoa is and all that, which was terrific.
It had some pretty pointed discussion of poor earnings for cocoa farmers and discussion of sustainability, which surprised me in what I had thought would be a pure tourist museum.
(Overall, I don't understand how chocolate is as cheap as it is, given its narrow region of viability and how little cocoa is produced per tree.)
It had some great histories including more pointed discussions of the attacks on native civilizations in America, but also including long discussions of how it was served as a drink before the point where they could extract cocoa butter, and that there were ... I forget it they were called chocolate bars or chocolate houses or what ... but places that mainly served chocolate drinks back in the day. It felt like something out of an Alan Moore story, not reality.
There were also Lindt chocolate samples at the start and end of the tour, plus a world-famous chocolate fountain.
And a pretty terrific chocolate store at the end. Thank goodness there's nothing like that where I live.
Anyway, fun and I'm glad I did it.
==
Basically, when I'm coming home by train from RWOT I have three choices.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud to Köln West, which is what I did on Monday, by luck.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud, and not to Köln West, and get off at Köln Sud and walk, which is what I did yesterday, but I didn't love the early neighborhoods.
* Get a train that goes from Hürth to Köln Sud, and not to Köln West, and continue on to Köln HBf, and then switch to another train to loop back to Köln West, which is sort of what I did today, with a few hour detour out to the Chocolate Museum.
And I won't be doing that last one again, because the Köln HBF was a horrific mess. SOOO crowded with people (thank goodness I was wearing an N95). And just crazy masses of trains all delayed.
There were two different trains back to Köln West, one delayed by 20 minutes and then the next one by 5 or 10. So I ended up on the next one. Except two or three minutes before it was due, they suddenly changed the platform and so we all had to race down the stairs from the platform and up to another and race out to the train.
And we got in and it sat for another five minutes.
Remembering how bad the Amsterdam airport was when we were there last year, I'm suspecting the Köln HBF is the equivalent for a train station. Definitely no more transferring there. I'll either walk from Sud or just wait for a train that's not detoured.
==
When I got off the train at Köln West and headed back to my street, I found it absolutely JAMMED with techbros in suits. I remembered people had been talking about sky-high prices for hotel rooms on Wednesday only. (Meanwhile, other conference attendees were reporting it almost impossible to find tables at bars in central Köln.)
It's apparently all due to DMEXCO, the Digital Marketing Exposition & Conference, which is today and tomorrow.
I literally had to push my way through techbro marketers to get into my apartment building.
(Masked once I saw the milling crowds blocking the sidewalks.)
And the bar downstairs is blasting the loudest it has the whole visit, not even fully drowned by the previously soundproof windows. And shaking the building.
Hoping this is a one-night bacchanal
==
Halfway there.