Canadian Cloud Computing Conference Day 1

I am taking a break at the first Canadian Cloud Council conference in Edmonton that runs March 12-13.  I was a big part of organizing this, along with 4 other members of a somewhat grassroots effort to create a vendor-neutral forum for cloud providers and users from a Canadian perspective for mutual benefit.  cCc web site is www.candiancloudcouncil.ca

I used a lot of cloud-based tools to help me organize this distributed team.

RegOnline – is a Software as a Service program that supports online conference registrations and credit card payments, and badge printing and email followups and surveys.  I would not want to do a conference without this.

Google Docs – we shared some checklists and informtion using Google spreadsheets and some uploads.  We did not use this a lot.

Dropbox – for some big graphics files for the printers, we used DropBox.

Salesforce – we had access to a 10-person version of this, but have not set it up to use it for anything yet.

We are forming a national not-for-profit and will create a cloud-supported virtual organization.

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Broke my Mac got new one

Sorry, was away for a while. I broke the screen on my six-year-old-or-so Mac laptop. I was waiting for an excuse to replace it. I always have at least 2 computers on the go. I use a Dell PC laptop for most of my day-to-day work. I have a pretty reliable Dell, but it is actually about 4 years old now. My retired machine was a 15″ MacBook Pro, but it may even have a PowerPC chip in it. It still works when plugged into an external monitor. I use the Mac laptop in the living room at night and when I travel, which is quite often. So I got a new 13″ MacBook Pro. It’s actually the smallest, lowest end Mac laptop available now. It has a dual core Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD. It’s plenty fast and very light. It was $1250ish. A colleague just bought a used PC this week with a 2 year warranty for $350. What a difference in price.

But the Mac feeeeels soooo gooood!