Those who see only my blog output and do not follow me on Twitter may be forgiven for thinking that I have taken a few weeks off. The truth, sadly for me, is otherwise.
Instead, I have spent 18 of the last 30 days either at events or travelling to or from them. One of those days, it is true, was a day out in Chicago, and my wife and I had a couple of days in Rome. If I cared very much about the difference between a weekday and a weekend day, then these “days off” just about balance the weekend days spent at airports or on aeroplanes.
That is all to the good, of course, at least now it most of it is over. It will not be exactly relaxing over the next little while – I recorded more than forty video interviews at the first two events and they must each be written up, in addition to more routine things. The travel is an investment in future content. It has its own pleasures, of course, at least once I reach the event.
At the Nuix User Exchange in California (I wrote about that here) I moderated a panel on the GDPR and related subjects. At Relativity Fest, I moderated a session on international discovery and data privacy. At the IBA 2018 in Rome, I took part in a panel on how technology, including technology-assisted review and social media, is as significant for family law practitioners as for others. I am off to London on Thursday to talk about the new England and Wales disclosure rule, so the travelling is not quite over yet.
It is quite fun covering all these differing subjects. One defect of diversity is that each has to be prepped for (if you are wondering what fills the days between closely-packed events). Organisers like panel descriptions in advance, even if my panel members are willing to wait until the curtain goes up to find out what their questions are (this is strategy, by the way, not idleness – I can’t stand all those panels whose every utterance has been planned and rehearsed to death, preferring the high wire of trusting the panel to cope with whatever is thrown at them). Looking ahead slightly, I see I have one thing coming up which actually wants slides – I can’t remember when I last had to produce bloody slides.
The mechanics of travel are easily overlooked – bookings, timings, ironed shirts and clean shoes, currency and the rest all take time, even if my poor wife does much of it. For Relativity Fest we (my sons Will, Charlie and I) took vast amounts of video kit and brought back a terabyte or so of media data to be processed. I am no good at writing on the hoof, so the blog has to wait.
In the middle of all that, my old friend Nigel Murray died. My Farewell to Nigel Murray was the only post I wrote between getting back from Relativity Fest and leaving for Rome. Nigel, the great promoter, would have appreciated the fact that my blog got more than 3,000 page views at a time when my post about him was the only new one, with more than 5,600 views of my post about him on LinkedIn.
I will write in due course about Relativity Fest and about the IBA. It will take a little while to catch up.
Note: in English, going “from pillar to post” means merely rushing from one place to another; in American it seems to have a harsher meaning “from one predicament…to another, usually under harassment”. My title is, of course, in English.
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