We have had a pretty busy few days here in Monkey Valley. On Friday night we went in to Cape Town for dinner and drinks. (One of us had more dinner and one of us had more drinks). It was fun to the see variety of people here and the similarities and differences between a city in South Africa and a city in the US. On Saturday we drove down the coast toward Cape Point. We stopped at several places along the way and had dinner right by the water where we got to see a whale.
The conference began on Sunday and quiet Monkey Valley is now filled with the clicking of geeks typing and deep discussions about modules and reports. I have attended several of the sessions, a couple intentionally and a couple unintentionally. I’ve seen Ben present four times and it’s very fun to watch him work.
I think Ben had high hopes that his programming knowledge had been leaking into me and that I would really wow people this week with my computer skills. I have to say that I can talk the talk. I know all of the lingo and can follow a conversation, but my lack of nerdiness was confirmed yesterday. I attended a presentation that Ben did on synchronization (which I think I figured out is something about making sure that all of the clinics have the same patient information) and Ben kept talking about this ‘parent’ and ‘child’ and ‘siblings’ and the entire time I thought it was so nice that he was actually talking about people and what OpenMRS does for real, living people. Unfortunately I figured out about ten minutes before the presentation ended that those were also computer terms (although I don’t know what they mean).
The good news is that we now know for sure that Ben is a geek and I never will be and I think we are both happy to be what we are and to not be what we aren’t. I have to say though that after watching some of these people I am very thankful to have ended up with my geek and not one of the others. 🙂