Highlight 1: I got to meet old and also made many new friends. Highlight 2: Richard Hughes gave a very personal and touching speech on Jade. Highlight 3: Bear Williams held a speech about advanced instruments with a lot of insight and humor. Highlight 4: Thomas Hainschwang on synthetic diamonds (mostly fancy yellow) and the difficulties to sort them out from parcels of melee.
Lowlight 1: JTV Jerry Sisk (?) presenting his company with a commercial. For instance one part showed a mix of gemstones poured into a glass bowl and stirred. Makes any gem conoisseur want to throw up. Hopefully that kind of bad advertisements will disappear when the Gem-A cooperation with JTV is fully running. Lowlight 2: The staff at the conference hotel was not as customer focused as they should have been.
Joined: Fri May 12, 2006 11:24 am Posts: 7523 Location: Rome, Italy
Conny Forsberg wrote:
Highlight 1: I got to meet old and also made many new friends. Highlight 2: Richard Hughes gave a very personal and touching speech on Jade. Highlight 3: Bear Williams held a speech about advanced instruments with a lot of insight and humor. Highlight 4: Thomas Hainschwang on synthetic diamonds (mostly fancy yellow) and the difficulties to sort them out from parcels of melee.
perfectly agree with Conny here.......
Highlight 5: great attendance at the GemmoRaman booth, lot of interested people!!!!
Lowlight 1: the hotel accomodation, really the worst one i have stayed at in a modern country... Lowlight 2: JTV Jerry Sisk presentation
ciao albé
PS: picutres will follow once i will have the time for arrange'em and post..............
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:42 pm Posts: 2846 Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Highlights for me:
Getting to meet a bunch of people who I consider friends for the first time face to face. Most of them from here.
Getting to see old and not so old friends again.
Dick Hughes' presentation. He got the audience so immersed in what he was describing, I could almost feel a malaria attack coming on. A couple of people that I spoke to later admitted to having teary eyes at one point. Glad I wasn't the only one.
Bear Williams' presentation. Informative and he had the chic to insert a blurb for Alberto and Mikko's GemmoRaman-532 unit into it. Apparently, he's a fan of British humour as well and the audience was on board with that.
Seeing the GemmoRaman unit in action. I want one, big time! I had brought a somewhat confusing blue stone from Vn. Lent to me by the owner of my new favorite store, he who has the 93ct Melo pearl and the 42 ct blue spinel that he casually pulled out of the safe. Read as spinel on a refractometer, odd (to me, to him and to his father who's been doing this for 40 years) inclusions for a spinel, ADR that on a portable polariscope was impossible to differentiate from birefringence. And I swore that I could see a slight blue/green dichroism. As you can imagine, I was wondering if it wasn't a Taaffeite. Showed it to a dozen gemmos the first night there, all but two were also of the opinion that it was weird for a spinel.
As it was, we put it in the GemmoRaman 532 at the conference. Spinel it was, with a very high iron content, no cobalt. I was also told by one of the two gemmos who were positive the evening before it was a spinel that he's seen two colours in Mali garnets as well. If anyone knows how that occurs, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
Meeting people like Antoinette Matlins and Lore Keifert.
Unabashedly getting to "Gem Geek" out while surrounded by people who totally get that. LOL
Midlights: In years past, there was no seating plan for the tables. When I asked over the phone if there was one this year, I was told no. As a result, we had intended on snagging a table for the GO members there as we were looking forward to enjoying the evening together. As it turns out, they ended up deciding to do one this year and we were all at different tables. Shame for us, but at the same time, they also distributed the speakers and/or well known people throughout so that they didn't all end up sitting at the head table together. Nice for everyone except for those of us who had intended to spend an evening getting to know each other IRL.
Lowlights:
One of the speakers pretty much dismissed treatments as unimportant on his stone of choice. A bit disappointing to hear "move along, nothing to see here" in regards to treatment when one is adressing a room full of gemmologists.
One of the elderly couple next to me had gas throughout the presentations. That possibly added to the "jungle ambiance" during Dick's presentation, at least from where I was sitting.
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm Posts: 21602 Location: San Francisco
Quote:
One of the elderly couple next to me had gas throughout the presentations. That possibly added to the "jungle ambiance" during Dick's presentation, at least from where I was sitting.
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:22 pm Posts: 21602 Location: San Francisco
I had a customer one day in the shop...a very well groomed middle aged woman who really seemed to have a serious gastric issue. The first couple of times, I looked around at everyone else in the store looking for a more appropriate source......only to discover it was her, because every other customer left. Seriously.
Hehe... Reminds me of a strange advice I heard of. If you are at a dinner and sneaks one off. Just turn to your table neighbour with a: "I don't mind, it's OK to blame me..."
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:42 pm Posts: 2846 Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
I guess that's what you have to do when you can't blame it on the dog...
Said elderly person sitting next to me also kept asking me if I was someone important. Apparently the response "I'm important to my kids" wasn't quite the answer they were looking for.
Joined: Sun Oct 16, 2005 12:42 pm Posts: 2846 Location: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Barbra Voltaire wrote:
I had a customer one day in the shop...a very well groomed middle aged woman who really seemed to have a serious gastric issue. The first couple of times, I looked around at everyone else in the store looking for a more appropriate source......only to discover it was her, because every other customer left. Seriously.
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