00:00.00 archpodnet Welcome to the show. Everyone Paul how's it going. 00:04.20 Paul It's going pretty good. Um I may be slowing down off that creativity kick that I was telling you about the last few episodes but not not for any bad reason I've been busy this last week and a half or so digging stps on a hill overlooking the Hudson River 00:18.69 archpodnet Um. 00:19.94 Paul Around a historic mansion. It's part of the same project I worked on a little over a year ago where they're looking at putting in a trail system down by the River and this historic mansion is going to be the headquarters for the for the interpretive center and. 00:23.53 archpodnet Yeah. 00:35.20 Paul Everything with this trail system. So their plan doing some work there and they needed stps to know if there's any archaeology in the area so you know it's fun. The weather's been despite the middle of being the middle of winter in New York the weather hasn't been too bad. 00:48.14 archpodnet I. 00:49.92 Paul The ground hasn't been frozen So I've been doing that and then for a little value ad. We've been flying the drone drink and making and making maps and so I was out there this morning for a little bit to finish up an orthomosaic and as I was doing it and I'm watching my drone overhead a Bald Eagle came and. 00:55.18 archpodnet Nice. 01:09.33 archpodnet Wow. 01:09.38 Paul Circled around a bunch of times real low, very close to me I don't think I got it in any of the drone imagery which is a bit of a shame and I couldn't stop my flight plan in order to try to take pictures of it from overhead which would have been super cool but but still there They are amazing animals. 01:22.81 archpodnet Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's always cool to see one of those. Well there's no bald eagles down where I'm at right now not that I've seen so I am in Organ Pipe Cactus National monument and it may be a park. You've never heard of before. 01:28.75 Paul Where are you now. 01:40.94 archpodnet And that's because it's far south of phoenix and far west of Tucson and in fact, if I look out my front window of my ah rv I can see mexico because we're only a couple of miles from the mexican border so we are staging here this week we got here yesterday. It's ah today's Thursday we got here wednesday. 01:48.71 Paul Name. 01:59.30 archpodnet There's a whole bunch of other people filtering into the park and we're going down with a bunch of our veers to rocky point. Um, the mexican name is porto pinasco for the month of February so well starting Saturday so just kind of into January end of January there. So yeah, we're going to be out on a beach in you know Mexico for. 02:18.94 archpodnet Four weeks and this is the ah this is the jumping off point for it. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, it will because you can use starlink. It's it's a little confusing on the website in the forums because they're they're not very clear about what you need to do but starlink says that you can use. 02:24.30 Paul That sounds way nice does your ah starlink going to work down there. 02:33.47 Paul Loop. 02:37.39 archpodnet Your dish in another country on the same continent. Ah for up to two months now it doesn't say whether or not that's two months in a calendar year two consecutives months or two months in since you got there like is your two months start like we were in Canada over the summer for a month so if we decided to stay in Mexico for. Longer than a month would starling stop working right? Um, what they do say is after those two months you have to move your residential address to that country. It'll force you to do that. But you can't actually change your address before that like I mean sure you could call starlink and say or or get online and say hey I want to do this but there's no easy way to do it in your account like. We change our address our residential address because we don't have the Rv version we we actually still have the residential version so we change the address and get into the cell that we're going to be in everywhere we go if we possibly can because you just get better service. That's not deprioritzed but they basically convert you to a a depriorz service when you leave the country. 03:20.68 Paul E. Um, right. 03:36.20 archpodnet And you go somewhere else. So if there's too many dishes there. You'll have degraded service but um, yeah, otherwise ah it should work and people are saying like well if you just stay a little longer. It doesn't seem like anybody really cares about it unless it really becomes a problem. So. Just kind of like literature they put on their website for probably legal reasons but doesn't seem like they're really enforcing it too much. So But yeah, the short story is it will work just fine down there. So. 04:02.93 Paul Um, let's hope it enables you to continue with the podcasting while you're doing that because ah, that could be a challenge. 04:09.23 archpodnet Well podcasting work like literally everything I do is based around having good video calls and yeah, like totally everything so I'll be spending some time in a mexican coffee shop or at a Mexican Mcdonald's if ah, you know starling doesn't work so we'll figure that out. But. 04:12.49 Paul Um, ah, that's right, Everything you do is remote. Yeah. 04:23.69 Paul We. 04:25.74 archpodnet Yeah, the other cool thing is that's the farthest south will have ever been in the ah rv right now is probably the farthest south except for like the everglades but that was our old Rv not this one? Um, so we've got just under twelve hundred watts of solar on the roof of this new rig and we were getting. 04:38.70 Paul Women. 04:42.80 archpodnet Peak today we crested over 800 and we're between like eight fifty and nine hundred watts total coming in which is just like super good efficiency and we're going to be an hour further south. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how close we can get to that maximum efficiency now of course that's during peak solar of the day and only for like. You. You know an hour. It gets worse on either side. But I mean we gained we gained ah and we're still coming up because it's still sunny out but we gained I think 30% Twenty five thirty percent just with solar power wet turn the generator on it all today and ah. It's been pretty great. We may not have to turn the generator on at all. We probably will tomorrow because the the charge curve is coming down a little bit but um, but only for a little while just to give us a little bit of a boost. So but otherwise yeah, it's working really great. Yeah, so. 05:22.29 Paul Me. 05:31.21 Paul Um, awesome. So I was wondering what what topic do you have queued up for us today. Yes, we are. 05:36.52 archpodnet So we're getting into conference season right? and for some for some people were already were already knee deepep in conferences conference season because as we're recording this the SHAids the society for historical archeology took place in lisbon portugal a couple of weeks ago and 05:51.47 Paul E. 05:54.23 archpodnet Over on the cm archeology podcast. We talked about that with bill white who was there and for the first segment of episode two fifty six I think it was and which I kept thinking is some sort of memory binary thing anytime I saw 2 56 I was like oh there's got to be a clever name I can come up with here but there wasn't but. 05:56.71 Paul Moving. 06:10.80 Paul Ah, yeah, of course. 06:14.00 archpodnet Anyway, so so yeah we talked about that for the first part but over on the sierra mark podcast we have talked about doing conferences differently. What conferences themselves can do differently to you know, really enhance the conference experience and just make it more functional and and I don't think we've ever talked about it over here because. You know while I've mentioned offhand over there in the seamark podcast the just completely different ways of doing podcasts. Never really gotten into it. It's always centered around. Oh I'd like to have more of these types of events at the conference right? So not not necessarily changing how the conferences run fundamentally. But. 06:44.73 Paul Music. 06:51.17 archpodnet Just adding different things and doing stuff like that. But I want to talk about on this show first how we can how we can improve physical conferences with technology and then how we can really go off the rails and do some fun stuff later on in the show. So yeah, that's where I want to go with this one. What are your. When I say that like what first comes to your mind. 07:10.89 Paul Ah, 2 different things. The first is that we learned a lot about doing things remotely over covid and I know we're not really over covid and we'll probably never be over over covid but we can take the lessons that we learned and apply them. 07:15.77 archpodnet Yeah. Yeah. 07:26.51 Paul To now and to the future and hopefully make ah better more accessible areas places conferences, things for people to interact people places that people can disseminate knowledge. Um, so you know that's the ah positive. 07:35.45 archpodnet And. 07:46.68 Paul We also learned to some extent what doesn't work and then the other thing that that strikes me is that I'm going to be talking about conferences and I haven't been to a conference since 2010 I did a lot of remote learning stuff working in in Ed Tech over covered over the worst of it. Ah. But you know and I've been involved in different lectures and running lectures and online conferences and such ever since then but I haven't been to a conference in so long that I don't know that I've got a whole lot of of firsthand experience that that I can bring to bear. 08:19.44 archpodnet Well let me tell you. 08:24.10 Paul In terms of conferences not just in terms of you know, remote learning or something like that That's adjacent. 08:28.34 archpodnet Well as far as archeology conferences go literally nothing has changed so you know in the way that they're run the way papers are presented the way you know you get to the conference I mean the only thing that may have changed since you were going to conferences last was there's often an app now. 08:44.74 Paul And. 08:45.77 archpodnet Right? There's often some sort of conference app where you can find out stuff another thing that has changed is there's often a Twitter or Whatsapp depending on what you're doing discussion happening in the background with the conference hashtags. You know so. 09:01.50 Paul Ah, you know what? as you said, an app like oh yeah, I've used those before wow so disregard. What I just said about not being to a conference since 2010 because we used to go every summer to ah to a conference for the company that that hosted our ah our learning? Yeah um. 09:07.51 archpodnet Up. 09:18.15 Paul Platform You know the the thing to handle all the scheduling all the grading all that stuff. So ah, big company and um and we'd go there and actually I presented at at said conference last time I went so. 09:19.63 archpodnet Ah, yeah. 09:30.44 archpodnet So it was so memorable. Yeah, right? But that's really good. That's really good actually though right? because until I went to a non-archaeology conference and and. 09:33.19 Paul It just as it wasnt an archeological conference and so that's I guess what my mind was stuck when he said conferences. Um. 09:48.44 archpodnet Probably 95% of the conferences I've ever been to in my life were archaeology conferences because I didn't really start going to conferences until I got into archeology. My first one was the the plains anthropology conference plains anthropological conference in Minneapolis minnesota I think. 09:51.53 Paul E. 10:04.85 Paul And yeah, that's where Minneapolis is. 10:06.41 archpodnet I was in Minneapolis somewhere around there but I was yeah good call. Um, so that's I went to that one when I was in college and that was probably around 2003 or 4 whenever that one was somewhere somewhere around in that time frame. That was my first conference and I I didn't go to a non- archeology conference until. 10:25.88 archpodnet Think about 3 or four years ago when I went to podcast movement down in ah down in Los Angeles somewhere and in fact, it was just outside Disneyland so not quite Los Angeles but anyway it was a podcast-related conference obviously but it was I didn't know what what I planned to expect there. 10:28.36 Paul E. 10:44.79 archpodnet Or what I expected to see but it was unlike anything I had ever experienced in my life conference-wise and I was talking to some other people because one of the really cool things about that conference was the unifying aspect of that conference was podcasting but the industries and the backgrounds and the people that came in. 10:56.71 Paul And then. 11:01.90 archpodnet We're wildly different I mean wildly different like when you go to an anther an archeology conference I mean everybody's got an archeology background I mean sure those are different but it's all like kind of the same so you know you have different similar interests all that stuff. But you know I remember sitting sitting at a bar or something having a drink and I was talking to a couple of guys who. 11:10.40 Paul Right? right? right. 11:21.21 archpodnet You know seemed like they were middle aged lawyers that just walked off the street but they do like a biker kind of ah podcast about like like Harley's and stuff like that and and 1 of the guy does ah ah, another podcast called rock and roll archeology and that's why he was interested in talking to me. And it was really just digging into the history of like music and different songs and things like that. So um, the backgrounds and stuff was just phenomenal and you know opening yourself up to exposing I should say exposing yourself to these different types of conferences. Really what makes you show how far behind the curve. We are. 11:38.41 Paul You. 11:56.00 archpodnet With these academic paper related you know and focus type conferences and and really how bad those things are at presenting information and making you think about it and and remember it. You know. 12:04.69 Paul Well, that's but now that you're mentioning it. That's why I wasn't thinking about the conferences that I was at up until I think 2019 as conferences because they were in some respect they were trade shows and they were organized around one particular company and their suite of products. 12:12.50 archpodnet Um, yeah. 12:21.53 archpodnet Right. 12:23.36 Paul And so there it was a little bit of advertisement. It was a lot of very specific how you get you know one part of their product to work in the way that you need to for your school. Ah which is something That's very unlike you know, almost anything that you see at an archeological conference. You know. 12:33.89 archpodnet I know. 12:40.60 archpodnet Yeah, yeah. 12:42.95 Paul The the how to stuff tends to be relegated to a ah to poster sessions and I don't know that I've ever been to a talk that was at an archeological conference that was a how to it was how we did and what we did and here look at our stuff and what I'm working on and blah blah blah. But. 12:53.36 archpodnet Um, oh yeah, yeah. 13:02.95 Paul Very rarely is it How to so that was our big takeaway. We would go to this conference because we could book time with some of their techies and explain our very specific problems and we could talk to others people from other schools that occupied the same space and had the same problems and we're also. 13:09.73 archpodnet Oh. 13:21.24 Paul Very like minded in a lot of ways including their approach to programming solutions and then we would just sit down with a bunch of beers in some common space and. Code and upload and do a lot of data processing which is yeah well maybe there are a lot of beers at ah, an archeological conference but it tends to be around the social events This was specifically for us to sit down and and brainstorm and do a lot of tedious work. 13:34.72 archpodnet 1 13:44.29 archpodnet Right. 13:53.40 Paul So it it was ah the reason why I was thinking about it as a conference per se is because it's It's so radically different. So that's interesting that you have That's a similar I mean maybe if it's a continuum between a typical archeological conference on one end and this industry conference that I'm talking about at the other end What you're talking about with the podcast conference. 13:58.31 archpodnet Yes. 14:08.21 archpodnet Well. 14:12.70 Paul Sits somewhere in the middle with the added bonus that neither of the extremes I'm talking about which have very likeminded people archeologists or computer techies at schools. You had this wide range of people that are all bound bound together and coming to the same place. 14:22.83 archpodnet Yeah. 14:30.52 Paul For this shared interest in podcasting So that's that's curious to me. 14:33.15 archpodnet Yeah, and you know a couple of things that stand out too like well first off you mentioned how you know none of the presentations. You've been to were more how to it's more results oriented which is fine. You know it's like here's what we did and here's what we got but again the problem is. 14:46.70 Paul Um, oh yeah. 14:50.70 archpodnet You've got 15 maybe 20 minutes the session is already probably running late so you know people are tapping their watches going. You don't have any time left and and people spend way too long doing the setup. 14:55.73 Paul Ah, yeah. 15:01.76 archpodnet And then they're like oh if you want to see the results email me and I'll send you the send you the paper or the presentation and they never actually get to the reason why they came to the conference and I don't know how many times I've been frustrated by that because of poor time management and then not having enough time to begin with to actually do what you want to do so. 15:07.94 Paul Um, yeah. 15:18.84 archpodnet 1 of the things that really sticks out with me with these podcast conferences is the couple that I've been to these sessions were like 45 minutes long and that included the extra 15 minutes to just clear out the room and get other people in there right? and and people are just hanging out and talking and asking questions but it was it was never somebody like. 15:31.70 Paul Me. 15:38.50 archpodnet Somebody was always doing some kind of a presentation whether it was a panel or it was a single person so they had slides they had things they were teaching you something but it was there was a lot more answering capability a lot more question and answer a lot more audience interaction and they had a lot more time to just sit there and. You know, get out what they wanted to say without rushing through it and then being rushed off the stage so somebody else could come in and that was fundamentally one of the more interesting things to me is just just more time and somebody might argue with something like the essay is that well we've got so many more people that need to present I'm like do you like if you actually. Like rejected a third of those or even 2 thirds of those and said listen sessions are 45 minutes long or half an hour long or something like that. You're instantly going to eliminate out the people that just can't handle that much time right? They just you're just going to cut them right out and you're going to have a better quality. Presentation. You might have fewer of them. But I feel like people would get more out of it at the same time. You know what? I mean so anyway, all right? Well, let's take a break real quick and let's come out on the other side and talk about how physical conferences can maybe be made better or enhanced by some tech or some. 16:36.62 Paul Anything. 16:49.32 archpodnet Virtual components back in a minute.