Easy Like Sunday Morning

This is the second blog post of a three part series about my experiences as a presenter with fellow MCDM student Katherine Turner during the 2011 American Society of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  See the first post from Saturday, Feb. 26, 2011 “Hurry Up and Wait.”

Episode II, A New Hope

After waiting in line for nearly 40 minutes and salivating for a traditional  bocadillo I had to settle for avena or oatmeal. I was not able to upload the video for the conference to YouTube or Vimeo as the uploading time kept getting longer and longer. The panaderia was a ghost town as the morning rush had come and gone. Things were looking bleak.

Finally, I was able to send the video via a drop box service to the film festival producer — and the crisis was averted!

The day of the film festival we made our way back from Culebra to the mainland via an hour and a half ferry ride at the break of dawn. The whole point of coming to Puerto Rico early was to have plenty of time to fine-tune our ASLO Conference presentations.

Oh, hindsight. Why you are always two days late and a dollar short?

Sunday morning from Fajardo to El Condado was just 35 minutes and the same route in the afternoon is an hour and a half. Since check-in time was not until later in the afternoon we had to take refuge at the only familiar place we knew our kind was always welcomed. A place that inspires and nurture the human spirit – one person, one coffee cup and one neighborhood at a time. That’s right – Starbucks.

The line at the Starbucks in El Condado seemed to be one self-generating infinite loop. The irony of the situation was not lost on us. We come all the way to Puerto Rico and were now seeking settling in comfortably at a Starbucks. (In case you are wondering the only difference on the menu is Café Con Leche is listed under local favorites.) Here the tourists outnumber the locals 3 to 1.

The baristas were somewhat bilingual but not to fear I speke the Spanish.  Thirty minutes later it’s my turn and I blank on how to say quad espresso. We edge our way to a table, plug in our laptops to one of four electrical outlets in the store and boot up to get online. But …

WTF?  No Wi Fi at Starbucks? Are you kidding me?

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream For Ice Cream

Häagen-Dazs comes to our rescue. That’s right – the only free Wi-Fi in El Condado we could connect to came courtesy of the Häagen-Dazs ice scream store. What little connection we had was used to verify our film would be screened, update blog editors that blog posts would be delayed due to lack of reliable broadband connectivity, and to approve landlords entrance to the apartment to fix the water pipes.

After a mad dash to the hotel room we unsuccessfully waited outside the hotel for twenty minutes for a cab. Ten minutes before the film festival was to take place we decided to make our way to another area that might have an abundance of cabs. In the midst of chaos that is Puerto Rican traffic, a minivan honked its horn at us wanting to make friends. As I am in the middle of using colloquial metaphors in Spanish to express my feelings about our current situation a female voice with a thick New Jersey accent screamed at us, “where are you guys going?” It was the hotel caretaker.

“You ain’t going to get a cab on a Sunday afternoon. It’s crazy!” she says as she agreed to drive us over to the convention center. The convention center is about a mile and a half away, we are stuck in traffic 20 minutes.

Screen Gems

We run into the state of the art convention center where the festival had already begun to a packed house. The point of the film festival was to have a chance to get constructive criticism from an entire audience for films made by scientists for a general audience, as well from a professional filmmaker. Dr. Randy Olson, writer-director of the feature films “Flock of Dodos” and “Sizzle: A Global Warming Comedy,” was the moderator for the evening. The festival was more like a film screening.

The interaction between filmmakers (and I use this term loosely) and Dr. Olson was sometimes defensive, inconsistent, and odd. For the most part they all tried to keep their brave face and not let their feelings get hurt.

My colleague Katherine said that she was so nervous to speak in public that the other videos turned into a blur and she just fixated on the right thing to say when it was her turn in front of the microphone. “I was reassured by some of Olson’s comments prior to our presentation, nearly word-for-word advice Carlos and I had given in a presentation at UW a week earlier,” said Katherine. She found herself thinking, “This guy calls himself an expert, and he’s saying the same thing I did a week ago. That’s good.”

All the other videos submitted attempted to convey too much information. Olson kept saying, “simplify, simplify, simplify” to all the other entries. To us he said: “This might be too simple.” Our film was an example of storytelling using only pictures — little text, no narration. It was a talking point. Olson suggested that we add shots of a single person trying to pack for the cruise and cut back and forth from the ship to this person, someone to exemplify what everyone can identify with — the stress of leaving for a trip.

We hadn’t thought about that before. We didn’t expect this suggestion, as we were finished with the film. But then it got us thinking, “What if the ship is the main character, would adding a person have shifted the purpose of the video?”  The one thing I did not agree with Mr. Olson what so ever was his preference to use scripts and actors when ever possible.

Olson talked a lot but the direct advice he gave brought up some interesting questions. It made us think about the video in ways I hadn’t before. Anytime you can ask new questions it is an opportunity to learn and reflect. All in all, it was a good evening.

The Revenge Of  The Cisco

We came back to our hotel to find this Cisco router, ghosts of routers past (circa 2001) which was supposed to help us be our medium with the real world.