After being out of the office for 10 days, I am slowly getting caught up — getting my chaotic office back to a state of normality, and cutting down my action list to size. I really enjoyed being in Wellington for the BrightStar 6th Annual Information Management Summit earlier this week. The highlights for me were:

• Getting into an elevator on the morning of day 1 (I was racing to get to another meeting), and finding that I was sharing the elevator with Nik from Microsoft in Auckland. I have spoken to Nik on the phone before, but never met him … so we had a brief chat then, and talked a number of other times during the conference.
• Sarah introducing herself and saying “I read your blog and find it useful”. That always makes a bloggers/writers day!
• Hearing from Linda about the patient records management system in Auckland, and in particular the idea that the system grants access to records to specific people based on specific windows of time. That is so cool!
• Seeing David Archibald in action as the conference chair. I have only ever known him as a conference attendee or speaker, never as a conference chair. He did a great job. And I’m delighted to hear that he’s going to start blogging again!
• Getting to have breakfast on day two with local Wellington blogger Gavin Knight. He’s been a friend for a long time … it was good to meet to talk again.

Many thanks to BrightStar for hosting the event, and to all of the speakers that contributed good and useful ideas.