HHC 2013



#24

Any thoughts about a location for HHC 2013? Any feedback on the Nashville conference as to location, conference site, accessability, facilities, food, entertainment, etc?


#25

Date is Sept 21/22, but location not yet selected.

Quote:
Any feedback on the Nashville conference as to location, conference site, accessability, facilities, food, entertainment, etc.

location: OK

conference site: OK.

accessibility: ?

facilities: OK. Couldn't have packed in more people. Wifi was annoying, as the captive portal kept forgetting me, and I had to log in again every 10 minutes or so.

food: catered, better than typical hotel conference food.

entertainment: HHC 2012 *was* the entertainment, as far as I'm concerned. I'm not much of a country music fan, so I wasn't too interested in the related attractions.

#26

I went into Nashville on Monday for a few hours. I'm not a big country fan either, but it was still entertaining and interesting to see.

I thought having the conference in the hotel was very convenient - no worries about a shuttle to/from some facility.

There were 4 or 5 new people at the conference this year and I wonder if that's because the location made it easier for them to drive.


#27

Having the conference in a hotel was indeed convenient, especially given the very long conference days.

Wouldn't it be nice if we could have a hotel with larger conference rooms and maybe a dozen eateries, from hamburger joints to haute cuisine, right in the hotel?


#28

Methinks you are thinking of Reno? :-)


#29

I'd vote for that... :-)

TW


#30

I can drive to Reno. (I think)


#31

Hey, if I can drive from Reno to Nashville...

#32

I REALLY like the idea of Reno. When HHC was in San Diego last year, I thought I'd be able to make it. However, that just wouldn't work out with my new job and the additional logistics involved at the time. This year, I couldn't make it to Nashville because of so much stuff going on at work, going through the sale of my old house, and additional logistics involved.

That being said, Reno is much closer to me (less than a 4 hour drive from my location in the Central Valley of California). I'd likely be able to make to Reno. So, it has my vote. Heck, if HHC can take place in or near Modesto, Stockton, or Fresno, I can make it with 100% certainty. :)

Mark

#33

A quick check seems to indicate that it is expensive to fly into Reno. Is this generally the case, or just the way they happened to look today?


#34

Check with Southwest - Reno is a mini-hub for them, I think.

#35

That was certainly my experience going to the air races this year, but I didn't book as far in advance as I should have. Vegas is usually a lot cheaper ticket from the US east coast (for me at least).

Speaking of which - any possibility of a different time of the year? The current schedule falls right on top of a couple of other tech get togethers, probably of interest to only me (and the air races!). October? Maybe February? Nice time to go to Reno/Vegas/FL/TN. Chicago, well maybe not so much, I'll grant you :-)

Apologies in advance if this has already been hashed and late Sept is fixed.

[Edit: I just remembered that this month was de-conflicted with another gathering in Europe/UK? My memory is getting like a tape-mount request in JCL.]


Bob


Edited: 1 Oct 2012, 8:48 p.m.


#36

Quote:
My memory is getting like a tape-mount request in JCL

Wow!!! Who else remembers this?! I can hardly say I was a JCL guru, but of necessity, I got pretty good at it in the late 60s and early 70s. At some point (around 1971?), the computer center where I was a grad student suddenly changed the cost of accessing a tape drive.

Each access request cost something (maybe only a few cents), whereas it used to be essentially free. One of the programs which we all ran, which accessed a star position catalog on tape, suddenly went from costing 50 cents a run to $100 per run!!! I rearranged the files on tape so that instead af accessing 50 or 100 stars per read, we accessed an entire declination strip of 3000 stars or so at once, thereby bringing the cost back down to 50-100 cents per run.


#37

Quote:


Wow!!! Who else remembers this?!


I remember it but never had to do much more that short stuff to read 9 track tapes to users storage areas at UIC (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago). I think we had to know a little to run assembly programs on the mainframe for a class but I'm cloudy that far back. That was the 2nd half of the '80s. I just missed punch cards (thankfully) and saw the end of the paper type terminals (I think few today would believe that beast ever existed)
#38

1975: Our little university had a shiny new batch station connected to a 370 system down-state, running HASP. I/O was a card reader and line printer, eventually augmented by Selectric terminals for APL.

In keeping with our "road kill" computer budget, we had IBM 026 keypunches which had been converted from something (Sanskrit?) *to* EBCDIC! No fancy 029 keyboard or printer - if you wanted one of those exotic special characters (like an open parentheses) you had press a "Multipunch" button then manually enter the Hollerith code (e.g. "&58").

And man was it a hassle pushing that through punch uphill, through a mile of snow, to the computer lab each morning at 5 AM :-)

After lugging around a case of punch cards for two years I felt like I owned the pinnacle of storage when I got a single 9 track 6250 bpi tape that was all my own. (Now where did I put that write ring?)

My senior year saw this steam-powered affair replaced with our very own HP mini, with ADM-3 terminals for student use. ("HELLO username"). Got a lot quieter in the lab after that.

Oh, and I had an HP-25! :-)

Bob

#39

Quote:
Speaking of which - any possibility of a different time of the year? The current schedule falls right on top of a couple of other tech get togethers, probably of interest to only me (and the air races!). October? Maybe February? Nice time to go to Reno/Vegas/FL/TN. Chicago, well maybe not so much, I'll grant you :-)

Actually we've been enjoying fantastically nice weather lately here in the Chicago area :-) Late September is best for some people, notably those who observe religious holidays as well as possibly getting better airfares after mid September. Since O'Hare airport is a major hub for some airlines it is possible to get good airfares. We tend to hold conferences not too far away, which will be a priority in our discussions here. Ace Metal's new larger facility in Bensenville could be available, but we'll keep our options open.
#40

Quote:
A quick check seems to indicate that it is expensive to fly into Reno. Is this generally the case, or just the way they happened to look today?

You could run a few permutations of venues using this website
find out the best from a cost of flights perspective.
#41

Reno is better than Las Vegas, but I'm not a fan of the latter at all.

We have CHIP meetings on the first and third Wednesdays of the month. Some will miss the meeting this week, but the second monthly meeting should be well attended. Richard Nelson asked about Chicago for 2013, so I will canvass the group to see what level of interest there may be. If there is interest I can coordinate things here, including finding a location.


#42

Las Vegas is glitzier and more fun to wander around, but Reno would likely be much cheaper.

#43

Quote:
There were 4 or 5 new people at the conference this year and I wonder if that's because the location made it easier for them to drive.

For me, absolutely! I was one of the first-time attendees. The short driving distance was the critical quality. I had other plans made much earlier that I happily postponed for this rare opportunity. I live 93 miles from the HHC 2012 site, but something five times farther would still be attractive.

Gene did a really great job organizing the logistics for the conference. I still don't understand how this event could have been staged for the trivially low conference fee. I was much impressed by the other attendees and the overall HHC 2012 program.


#44

I wish one day the organiser's would have one in Florida.


#45

Quote:
I wish one day the organiser's would have one in Florida.

There was a conference in 1983 in Orlando. I organized the 1985 conference in Atlanta when I lived there. The question is, is there someone willing to make the effort to find a suitable location and coordinate things and be available, as Gene did in Nashville?

#46

Quote:

There was a conference in 1983 in Orlando. I organized the 1985 conference in Atlanta when I lived there. The question is, is there someone willing to make the effort to find a suitable location and coordinate things and be available, as Gene did in Nashville?



Having one in either FL or GA would be pretty nice for me =)


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