Day 1 Miami 2006

For those of you that could not visit this year's International Brotherhood of Magicians convention in Miami, FL, I will try to send a daily dispatch with a short summary of the proceedings. On the first day I was reminded how lucky we are in Orlando with traffic. I am not staying at the convention htel, so have a 15 -45 minute drive to or from the convention site. Note the large range of time, depending on time of day. On the first day the convetion opening ceremonies started at 5 p.m. Just around rush hour, so of course I sat in traffic. I expected to be going against the flow, as most traffic was leaving Miami, but it seems that rushhour goes both ways in Miami.
I did finally make it to the convention, and went to pick up my registration materials. Unfortunately, it seems that there had been some computer problems so I ended up waiting half an hour while the convention staff re-entered information for a number of attendees in the same situation. Once the paperwork was in place I hurried across to the opening ceremonies. This was not much more that a large mixer. Roger Miller, the outgoing International President, gave a welcoming speech, and then much business was done at the bar.
I was glad to run into a number of fellow Ring 170 members, Jacki Manna, Charlie Pfrogner, Roger Reid, Steve Hart and Zanifa, as well as a couple of people from my previous ring, Ring 9 Atlanta. Other Ring 170 members present are Bev Bergeron, who is one of the headline lecturers, Dan Stapelton, Don Arthur and Luciano.
Following the mixer I participated in a session for convention first-timers, ably led by Steve Hart. Nice thing about this session were the door prizes awarded to almost all attendees. The best prizes were some provided by Yigal Mesika, including the famous Spider Pen. I was lucky to win a set of Genii magazines, very useful as I was not a subscriber. I liked them so much that I went to the Genii booth and signed up for a year's subscription. At the same time I was able to meet the editor, Richard Kaufman and Michael Close.
This convention does of course also have a dealer room, and another Orlando connected magician dealer has a very successful booth here, Mark Mason. Dayton Magic has also set up shop, and Wild Magic from Tampa is here too. In addition to these Florida based dealers, there are dealeres from all over the world, including Japan, Germany and Isreal.
Finally, the late night session focussed on the new web capabilities that the IBM has made available to its members. Firstly we were shown how to set up personal pages at the magician.org site. Highly recommended for all professionals, as it seems the IBM site is held in high regard at Google, so your new site (which can link to your current site) shows up very quickly in a Google search. Creating the pages is easy, even for computer greenhorns, providing very professional looking pagesd with very litttle effort. Those who know a little about HTML, etc, can really makes their pages sing and dance.
For everyone else with a computer, you will probably want to sign up for the Linking Ring Online, no more waiting for the magazine to be delieverd by mail. And of course, you can now search quickly through an issue to find that nugget of information that you know is there. As far as I know, at present there is not a cross-issue search feature, like on the CD-ROM set that was available a while back, but that may come in the future. Actually activating your access does take a few steps, to prevent piracy of TLR, but is well worth it. Also, it may not be as useful if you are just using a dial-up connection, the files are quite large. However, for those without a broadband connection, the web-site has made the issues available in parts, e.g. articles, Ring Parade, etc.
Look out for Wednesday's report in an email

Stefan