ABLE Bioblog

While some of you were enjoying all that Halifax had to offer today, your Board of Directors were busy at work making exciting decisions about ABLE. I gotta say, I love this organization. I hope you do too (even if it is just to come to a cool place every year and find great friends and eat great food and learn great labs and converse about great biology ideas and…)!

Be sure to come to the General Business Meeting this Friday to hear about what is going on (and maybe even volunteer to get involved). Now…it’s almost reception time (2 drink tickets?! Great!!), then the major workshops start tomorrow. Thanks again Jen and Mindy in advance for a great conference!

Mark

My colleague and I arrived in lovely Halifax, Nova Scotia yesterday afternoon, landing practically in the forest.  One of the conference hosts was afraid we’d think we were somewhere in the great wilds of the north…but I just found it beautiful!  We grabbed a taxi to our rooms, and I was pleased to see bedding and towels ready for me (I think I remember one year I was missing a pillow or something?)–the communal bathrooms take me back to my undergraduate dorm days. (Don’t worry, I won’t revert to any dorm pranks like penny-ing doors, streaking, or creating a bathroom sauna; at least I don’t think I will….)

We joined last year’s hosts (Bob-squared) at the Rogue’s Roost for some dinner eats and local brew (great hefeweizen); then the Bob’s took me for a wandering, driving tour of the waterfront and point pleasant park.

I even got a little preview of the LSC (Life Sciences Center) where the workshops are being held starting Wednesday. Looks like ample room, and despite the last-minute worries of the hosts, everything seems to be in order for a great conference. I’m especially excited for our hike around Fort McNab today, the reduced paper printing in our conference folder, the great majors I get to attend, and breathing some more Halifax air.

All the locals have been friendly, but I can’t wait for the bio-friendly ABLErs to arrive today/tomorrow!! Have a safe trip, and look out for those trees…

Mark Walvoord
ABLE Web Manager

(You have to say it like you’re a British darts commentator…)

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been a little slack in the conference-blogging department; more on that below. But today we reached a milestone that is definitely blogworthy – our 180th registrant! Needless to say we’re very pleased with the interest in the meeting this year, and we’re fortunate and grateful to have the support of the Dalhousie Biology Dept., the Faculty of Science, our vendors, and all those individuals who are helping us pull it all together behind the scenes. We’re looking forward to meeting all 180 of you (maybe more??) very soon!

(It’s a pity that we can’t accommodate 300…I could really have some fun with that…)

I have discovered the conundrum of conference-planning blogging…activities related to organizing a conference fall into three broad categories: (1) Fun Stuff, (2) Challenging Stuff, and (3) Boring Stuff, none of which are particularly conducive to blogging. I could regale you with stories of spreadsheets and deposits, but really, once you’ve seen one “COUNTIF”, you’ve seen them all, haven’t you? The Challenging Stuff certainly gets a lot of lip service from Mindy and me, but probably isn’t professionally appropriate blog fodder. (Future hosts – go ahead and ask us all about it!) And the Fun Stuff, frankly, we’d like to keep to ourselves, so as not to spoil the surprise or set you up for disappointment. So it’s been a bit of a sparse blog. But, now that we’re heading into the home stretch and are into the i-dotting and t-crossing phase, I think I might be able to relax enough to eke out a few more posts.

See you in three weeks!

Jen

Jen and Mindy discuss where to hold the opening reception.

Hi folks,

We were hoping to have the registration form for the conference up and running today, but we had to make some changes to the workshop schedule last week that now must be coded into the registration form before it can go live. The form is now in the hands of our techies, and it shouldn’t be much longer before it’s ready to go. We’ve been playing around with a demo version of the form and it works really well, so we’re confident that you’ll find it a straighforward process to register. Plus, we’re lucky to have a number of labs that can hold more than the usual 25 people, and a number of presenters who have agreed to take more than 25 people in their workshops, so we’re also confident that there’ll be plenty of space to accommodate everyone once registration finally does open. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

In other news, HOLY COW DID YOU SEE THAT HOCKEY GAME LAST NIGHT!!?? Yay Canada! Local boy Sidney Crosby came through with the game-winning goal in sudden-death overtime to give us not only the (arguably) most coveted gold medal of the games (at least as far as we Canadians are concerned), but also our 14th gold, breaking the record for the most gold medals earned by one country in the winter Olympics. Plus he’s won the Stanley Cup. He’s 22. What were you doing when you were 22?

Come to the ABLE conference in June. Sidney Crosby won’t be there, but I can show you where his parents live . Also, we have Starbucks.

Jen

Sidney Crosby; image obtained from Wikimedia Commons

Well, it’s February 2nd and Nova Scotia’s own Shubenacadie Sam is the first groundhog in Canada (and therefore North America – take a number, Punxsutawney Phil!) to make weather predictions from a hibernating rodent’s point of view. And the verdict is…

Six more weeks of winter. Which is hardly a surprise, considering how bitterly cold it is here in Halifax this week. I’m not complaining, however, because I know our colleagues to the west and south have gone through considerably worse recently, if not still at the moment.

In six weeks, however, it will all be over, and we’ll be six weeks closer to the most fun you can have in summer school – the annual ABLE meeting! If you haven’t done so already, please check out the spanky new ABLE conference website, where you can find the anticipated costs, information on travel and accommodations, and descriptions of this year’s major workshops. (I was really hoping for a lot of mundane, ho-hum major workshops this year, since I probably won’t be in a position to attend any of them myself, but NOOOOOO – the members just had to come through with a bunch of fun, interesting, challenging major workshops. Try to tone it down with the posters and minis, ‘K?)

Speaking of the ABLE conference website…this year, stewardship of the conference site has been taken over by the ABLE webmaster Mark and his minion, Chris. (Or maybe Mark is really Chris’ minion…it’s hard to say…) Anyway, it’s a huge burden off the shoulders of the conference hosts, and I think it will work well as a permanent arrangement. It’s so easy – just tell them what you want posted and *poof* – it appears! Just like that! (Clearly these two are underemployed and have way too much time on their hands.) I want to thank Mark and Chris for doing such a great job on the site, and making Jendy’s life just a little bit easier.

That’s all for now…registration opens March 1st, and there’s lots more information to come in the meantime, so stay tuned!

Happy Groundhog Day,
Jen