My Trip to Tacoma for the
Raincoast 2005 User Group Conference
by Rolande Kimmons
s a newbie I couldn’t compare this experience to previous Raincoast Conferences. We arrived in our Tacoma hotel without getting lost—we had three back seat drivers each of whom had a map and each knew how to guide me in the right direction.
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Our hotel was very pleasant as you see in some of the following photos. At the conference registration, they presented us with a Raincoast vest, information regarding schedules, a Smart Computing magazine, pens, mouse-pad and a Linspire Live CD which is advertised as the world’s easiest Desktop Linux.
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The next day during breakfast, Corel presented a demo of Corel Paint. What impressed me the most was the tool to correct pet red-eye—apparently they are the only software with this feature.
Various other software demos went on all day even during lunch and dinner. Demos that I attended included Photovista Panorama Version 3.5, which creates panoramas from a series of photographs. Great for digital cameras! You can print, share, email and publish to any website. Creating 360ş Panoramas appeared to be fast easy and fun! For professionals and photography enthusiasts alike!
Another demo, Software for 3D Album PicturePro 3.14 can create photo presentations, organize photos, collect photos, do page design, layout, printing, and photo editing. Another software program called mµvee autoProducer (Instant Personal Video) transforms your video and pictures into great-looking “mµvees” in hundreds of styles…completely automatically (I liked the “automatically” bit).
They also had tutorials on how to work with Blender Open source 3D graphics with Derek Simkowiak. The history of Blender was described to us and can be viewed on their web site, quite interesting. Blender is a free download. The presentation was excellent. I intend to practice it before I forget everything.
We also had a demonstration on how to assemble a computer. It gave me confidence that one day I might just try it.
On our return home, we stopped at a few places to shop.
Now I know and understand what a computer conference is all about.
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Images by Margit Norton, Rolande Kimmons, Debbie Price and Les Benson
