Day two: 14 hours from beginning to end.

Today was a very long and filled day at the USITT Conference, beginning at 8am with the Upstate New York Regional Section Meeting. The meeting was short and mostly dealt with new members signing up for the section and making plans for next year’s section meetings. After this meeting there was a break until 11am when the stage expo opened for the day, so we took the opportunity to get breakfast and some of us grabbed a couple more hours of sleep.
The stage floor this morning was spent seeing many of the booths I haven’t seen yet, with the exception of Vari-Lite because I am planning on spending at least an hour there tomorrow and I didn’t have that much dedicated time today. The first session of the day was “AutoCAD and Vectorworks: Working Together” this session was in many way valuable, however in the end it was less than I expected. I learned many great tips and tricks of how to integrate the two programs and will utilize these tricks in my future drafting. However, I was expecting to learn new ways in which the programs cooperate with one another and function as one; this was not the case because of the fierce competition between the programs I had never realized before.
The next session I went to later in the day was “Basic Electricity 201”, this session was very nicely laid out, but after about ten minutes I realized that everything they were teaching I already knew very well. I decided to leave and go across the hall to a session called “Evolution of the Production Electrician” here I heard from a panel of people from various positions in the lighting and electrician world. The gave a lot of great advice on how to be an effective electrician and where they believe the field will be in the future. They spoke a lot about how with LED’s, intelligent lighting, show control, and increasingly complex lighting boards have changed the position of electrician from a true electrician, to more of an electrician, computer scientist, and administrator hybrid.
The last event of the day was the “New and Old Products Showcase”, this was a fun take on the traditional new products showcase which give vendors an opportunity to display their new technologies. This year being the 50th anniversary however added the twist of vendors presenting their new technologies through a history lesson of how they got to where they are today. There enough free SWAG, new products, and excited technicians to make any conference goer ready for a good nights sleep.