then, on the other hand, there’s moe…

moe has added the “famous author” rôle to her ever expanding list of hats, since her (groundbreaking) book on animal behaviour came out. she’s been travelling, on average, once a month, to various different conventions and conferences, plugging her book and her “new” way of treating animals… which is, basically, “do unto others as you would have them do to you”, with modern branding.

but this whole COVID19 pandemic has put a wrench into the works, and all of the conferences at which she was scheduled to speak for the next 6 months cancelled, which left her with a significant gap in her income. never one to be put down for long, she and a few friends (all of whom had never done this before) decided that they were going to put on a virtual veterinary conference.

seems logical, right?

and, literally, EVERYBODY she talked to about this idea was in favour of it, to the point where she has major corporations paying for top-level speakers so that they can get a plug in the program. and when i say “top-level”, i mean, for example, monique got a call, out of the blue, from Temple Grandin, who had heard about her idea and wanted to help.

all this happened around the middle of march.

the virtual veterinary conference started today. moe is giving 4 hours of talks, as well as handling IT problems — they had an app built for the conference. the developers said they could easily handle 10,000 end users. the conference currently has just over 700 users and systems are blowing up EVERYWHERE. they estimate that 25% of registered users can’t login to see the conference live (they’ll have access to recorded content, so it’s not an entire loss, but…). fortunately, moe says all the presenters can log in, so the stuff will get recorded, but she also says that the developers’ solution to this was to “reschedule for next week”, which IS NOT going to happen with a conference that is already in progress

so, it’s almost as though moe has gone away for the weekend, even though she’s right across the hall from me, at this very moment.

UPDATE: it’s now 2:30 pm, all the speakers have spoken for today (because they’re on eastern standard time), and they got off to a rocky start, but it got better, and they were able to do the second half of the show without a hitch.

tomorrow moe gets to be temple grandin’s “wing man”… 👍👍👍‼‼