I’m currently sitting on a plane heading from Portland to Denver. The person in front of me has reclined their seat leaving me no room to use my laptop. Being a good tech guy, I pulled out the iPad I won at HRevolution and am typing this out using the iPad WordPress App. Okay, Okay, I might have finished up this blog post back on the ground but rest assured that the majority of the blog post was indeed written on the plane using my iPad. Now would probably be a good time to thank all the good people at Monster.com (especially my new best friend Eric Winegardner) for sponsoring the opening night party and for the iPad raffle that somehow I miraculously won.
A couple of weeks ago was the HRevolution 2010 conference in Chicago. I was not able to attend HRevolution last year as it was darn near impossible to get from Portland Oregon to Louisville Kentucky in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike many people who attended this year, I did not go to specifically pickup nuggets of HR knowledge. In some of my previous posts I lamented HR department’s lack of interest in technology so I didn’t go to HRevolution with the hope of a tech breakthrough. It’s a good thing since for the most part I witnessed the status quo. But more on that in a future blog post. I did not go to HRevolution to pick up HR technology information; I went for the opportunity to spend time with my HR thought leaders outside of the sessions.
I arrived on Friday afternoon and with casual meetups over snacks, the parties, the sessions and impromptu hallway discussions I managed to have great conversations. I also managed to squeeze in a couple of sessions. Of course one session I didn’t miss was the HR Technology Q&A session since I was co-facilitating with Bryon Abramowitz and Bill Kutik. Again, stay tuned for a future blog post on my observations on HR Technology conversations at the conference.
I could write about what worked and did not work for HRevolution but as it turns out many of my fellow conference attendees have already blogged about it better than I could. One of the HRevolution planners, Ben Eubanks, has already rounded up the HRevolution blog posts into the wonderful Carnival of HR-HRevolution Style. Go ahead, click that link to open up the HRevolution Carnival in a new window and read all the wonderful blog posts. I’ll wait right here until to you return. As incentive for returning, there is still a matter of the blog title to resolve.
I would be remiss if I didn’t give a shout out to my partner in crime and an amazing blogger Paul Smith who kept me highly entertained from morning until late at night and to the HRevolution organizing committee. Finally as I end this blog post, some of you are thinking, what’s the deal with the Dirty Martinis in the Blog Title? Well…I ended the conference on Saturday night at the rooftop bar at theWit Hotel by sipping a Blue Cheese Olive Dirty Martini along with Shennee Rutt and many many others. Good times were had by all.
Stay tuned for my next blog post when I beat you all silly for not having a proper backup strategy for your personal computers. 
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I can still remember the first time I used RSS. It was amazing. It was soon after I really started getting into reading and following blogs online. Every morning I opened up 10 tabs in Firefox and checked my favorite sites one by one to see if there were any updates. After a week or two of doing that, I realized I could sign up for email updates. That cut down on my visits to the sites, but then it cluttered up my inbox, taking time from things that needed to be replied to.