I went to a regional expo
9/31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.
I cycled up to the inaugural Canberra CBR Small Business Expo today.1 Here is my report.
I got lucky: crystal show!
Who doesn't love sharing a conference centre with a bunch of pseudo-scientific woo.
And it turns out that the 'Canberra Crystal Show' was just a guy selling a bunch of crystals. So, a shop.
It's a shame that the people who think crystals "...can help one attain 'Lemurian awareness' -- the balancing, nurturing, loving, spiritual and sensuous consciousness..." have ruined what would otherwise be a perfectly lovely rock.
It's all pretty 'regional'
Lucy and I have this term for things that are a bit, well ... regional. You know. Not quite big-city-lights. Like, you're not going to stumble across David Letterman at this thing.
We find 'regional' things tremendously endearing. The whole of Canberra -- the capital of Australia, I will remind you -- is pretty regional. This expo was super regional.
I met the Minister for Something
May I present Mick Gentleman, Minister for something to do with business, they said. It's not really clear what?
Anyway, he was available, so he gave a little welcome speech and I asked him for a selfie. He was very obliging.
That's the Grease Monkey chicken van over my shoulder. When I first started travelling to Canberra (as a weekly FIFO from Melbourne) we'd go to Grease Monkey every week.
Every subsequent week we'd say, shall we try somewhere else tonight? And we'd say, yeah. Then we'd finish work and go to Grease Monkey.
I got sushi today because if I got Grease Monkey for lunch Lucy would have given me the stink-eye when I got home.2
Conflicting advice
I saw a talk given by Emily of Ivy Social. I went in to the session thinking, I'd already cancelled my Facebook account by the time Emily started high school, there's nothing Emily can teach me about social media.
I was wrong. It was a great session and I wrote a bunch of stuff down.
One of her key messages was: be authentic. I really liked Emily.
The next guy's talk was about how small business can use AI tools. He explained how you could just give Meta AI a web page and ask it to write you a month's worth of blog posts and social media.
I wasn't sure how authentic that was. I wanted to shout "nobody will read this turgid dross!" from the back of the room but I was eating a fried chicken burger my sushi.
He was one of these older blokes who can't actually explain anything very well. "Yeah then we just load up AI and tell her what we want", he said, and yes he called the AI "her".
I don't know who invited him. Maybe I'll have a word with Mick.
He said that 'prompt engineers' get paid $300k. I really don't think they do.
Anyway. I really liked Emily.