Legs 3, 4, and 5 of the East Coast Tour

Oops. After blabbing how I cannot not write, somehow I have not written anything of my current trip since I was in the Peak Leaf season in Vermont.

C’est la blog.

So rolling back a few weeks, I flew out of maybe the most adorable airport in the world, Burlington Vermont (the ground crew waves goodbye) to San Juan, Puerto Rico. Antonio Vantaggiato was my host at Universidad Sagrada Corazon where I yes, put on my fancy pants to do a TEDx Talk.

Have more pity on my for my 3 extra days on the other side of the island near Rincon. The beach was almost unbearable.

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Hey I was productive! I somehow keynoted an online conference.

Puerto Rico. When was the last time anyone in the US gave any thought to this US territory. It is the United States legally but in many ways not. It seems in between. My experience driving around the island brought a small bit of observation- the speed limits are in miles per hour but the signage, markers are in kilometers.

Does that mean anything? No. The economy there is in big big trouble, can it really be “fixed”? (I hope so, Antonio wants me to return for a month’s visit in February) (yeah throw even more pity my way).

From the tropics I flew to Chicago, expecting the cold fall air, but alas, it was sunny and glorious for walking about.

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I scored a great located Airbnb spot next to Lincoln Park. While in town I got to visit with Steve Dembo, David Jakes, and GNA Garcia. I also went south to Hyde Park and hung out with Boone Gorges:

2015/365/295 Dreaming of WordPress Taxonomies...

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and stayed two nights with my good friend Cole Camplese and his family.

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Cole is fresh on the new job of CIO at University of Chicago, and treated me well to good food, drinks, an even a family viewing of The Big Lebowski.

The Cole Abides. And that alone started a tweet stream for the #DudeMOOC.

On Friday he set me up with an exectuive sweet suite workplace at the University of Chicago

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I uber-ed for the first time in Chicago. Twice.

Next leg, flight to Columbus Ohio. Apparently it is the “San Francisco of the Midwest”.

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I am visiting my Vconnecting/Slack friend Autumm, and yes, I am liking the hip scene of the Short North part of town. The Northstar cafe lifted by taste buds to a new plane. I got to see some beautiful countryside of The Hocking Hills

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We drove to Indianapolis for my one day drop in at EDUCAUSE 2015, a conference I have not been to since 2004 in Denver. Back then, I remember vividly seeing so many people between sitting on the floors with large dell laptops reading email. The big changes in 1 years is that the screens are a lot smaller.

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But it was a great chance to say hi again to people like Michael Berman, Phil Long, Christopher Rice. Tom Woodward, Jon Becker, Teddy Diggs, Catherine Yang, Susan Metros, Christa Copp, Steve Greenlaw.

And then I got to have a lot of fun doing onside buddy for a Virtual Connecting session with Bryan Alexander (this ought to be and should be it’s own post)

What was great is that we had some people just drop in, I only recall the one dude as “Kayak Pete on Twitter”, but we had in the hangout Two Mahas, Two Alans, Two Beards, and Two much fun (if there was such a thing).

I accidentally got to do the one the next day with Amy Collier and Kristen Eshleman, only because my plans to take the train home got de-railed so I could make sure Autumm, who caught a nasty EDUCAUSE cold, got home okay.

This session too was so rich and good conversation on action research, making change, and more, heck we even had a tangent about a World of Warcraft approach to visualizing personal data. And evne better was when Tom Woodward just decided to join the conversation:

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So now the last leg home is Sunday, now flying from here to Phoenix, where luckily a friend is down in the Valley who can get me a ride home to Strawberry. And that makes this trip clock in at 46 days on the road.

I just hope I have not been a nuisance anywhere