I am getting ready to go to San Francisco to attend the International Society of Bassists 2011 Convention! How about you?
Performances, Classes, Lectures
I spent about forty minutes poring over the schedule (pdf) this afternoon. You might not be surprised to learn that there are a number of times when I need to clone myself in order to see and hear everything that interests me during the coming week. A couple of events stick in my mind right now:
- Hans Sturm’s Rabbath LH Technique
- John Schimek’s Assessment and Evaluation of Private Lessons
- Yuan Xiong Lu’s Winning Strategies for Successful Practice
- Catalin Rotaru’s Thursday recital
- Michael Formanek’s Microbeats and Macrobeats
- Steve Traeger Do I Really Sound Like That
- Tuomo Haapala’s recital Comfort and Defiance
- Michael Cameron’s silent movie accompaniment to Fiddlesticks
… but there are plenty more that interest me.
Camaraderie
And I look forward to seeing old friends
- Pat Klobas
- Bruce Moyer
- Stephen Tramontozzi
- Richard Duke
- Steven Auerbach
- Jeff Raby
- Mickey McPhilips
- Jason Heath … what, he’s going to be in Peru?!
- Anton Hatwich
… some of whom are performing, some not … and many others.
Blogging and Social Media
I have also tested out my install of WordPress for iPhone, and it works (I started this post on the iPhone). I don’t plan on taking a laptop, but I will do at least some blogging via the iPhone.
I’ll also be tweeting under ChicagoBassEns. I still haven’t figured out if there is an “official” twitter hashtag for the Convention (#ISBConvention2011 or #ISBConv2011 or even #ISB2011 all seem like good candidates, as does #ISB2011SF . And note there is a tweeter ISBtweets for the Indian School of Business … just to show that choosing a hashtag isn’t necessarily easy …)
UPDATE: Jason Heath isn’t aware of an official hashtag yet, so I’m going to go with #ISBconv2011 .
For those of you who think twitter is just a way to waste time: I have found that writing a single tweet for each hour of an event is a fantastic way to focus your thinking. I did this at a design conference I attended last year (see my #Cusp2010 tweets). It really makes you think “what did I just hear? How will I tell someone else about it in a short message?” At any rate, if you use twitter I don’t have to convince you. If you don’t use twitter, I probably can’t convince you.
See You There?
Hahaha! I know this blog has such a huge readership right now — there might be three people who read it. But if you’re one of them, and you’re at the Convention, look me up! I am looking forward to a great week!