IGHR (Samford) 2010 — Registration Day

We arrived in Birm­ing­ham last night at about 8, and got our room at the Home­wood La Quin­ta. It’s an excel­lent hotel, and the staff is help­ful, and even inter­est­ed in my step­son’s trum­pet play­ing, but it would be nice to have wi-fi inter­net in the rooms, and not just in the lob­by.

I walked through the 93 degrees and the humid­i­ty to the lob­by of the Best West­ern to ride one of the free shut­tles over to Sam­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, as my wife and step­son had head­ed to Huntsville. (He’s attend­ing Space Camp while I attend “Geneal­o­gy Camp.” It’s becom­ing a fam­i­ly tra­di­tion.)

The reg­is­tra­tion was amaz­ing­ly sim­ple and quick. All the pack­ets and hand­outs were pre-assem­bled. You just said your name, and sec­onds lat­er every­thing you need­ed for the week was in your hands.

Well, except wi-fi inter­net con­nec­tiv­i­ty.… Although the pack­ets includ­ed the user­name and pass­word you would need to set up your account, the instruc­tions did not include key infor­ma­tion, for exam­ple that you had to join a par­tic­u­lar wire­less net­work first, sim­ply to get set up. Once you did that, then opened up a brows­er, you got a mes­sage say­ing you were con­nect­ed. But, of course, you weren’t ready to start using the inter­net. Instead, you had to find a lit­tle green Start but­ton, click it, install some soft­ware, log in with your admin­is­tra­tive user­name and pass­word, and then you were ready.

Guys, it does­n’t have to be this com­pli­cat­ed. I walk into a McDon­alds, or into a Dunkin’ Donuts, as my wife did in Birm­ing­ham, and wi-fi con­nec­tiv­i­ty is imme­di­ate. You sim­ply need to cre­ate a pub­lic net­work along­side your secure site, and serve up that pub­lic net­work.

Well, enough about that. I already spent 45 min­utes in line (the poor engi­neer had to do the same task again and again dur­ing that time, so he was the one with the raw end of the deal.)

I got to see Lori Thorn­ton (ran into her yes­ter­day at the Archives in Mor­row), Lin­da Wood­ward Geiger, Rick and Pam Boy­er Sayre, Craig Roberts Scott and Vick­ie Scott (the new­ly­weds), and Bar­bara Vines Lit­tle, who will be my lead instruc­tor this week. I als0 met Lyn­da Childers Suf­fridge (out­go­ing NGS Vice Pres­i­dent) in the net­work con­nec­tiv­i­ty line and Frazine K. Tay­lor in line at the cafe­te­ria.

As it does every year, the Insti­tute promis­es to be an edu­ca­tion­al and inter­est­ing time. It starts tomor­row prompt­ly at 8:15.