I dropped in for a day or so and have mixed feelings about the conference too. 
Sorry I missed Py and Ilene.

I do think that there is a tremendous amount of valuable information exchanged 
in some of the conference sessions. On the other hand, some of these 
presenters can really get much too full of themselves. I took particular 
exception to one presenter who ridiculed a contractor to make himself look 
good. The presenter's position was that he should specify means, methods and 
everything else, that he should be paid to train all the workers and check all 
their work, and that nobody else should have anything to say about how 
anything would be done.

The presenter has a project in which an 800,000 sq. ft. building is to be 
repointed. His mortar removal method was hand-sawing with a Sawzall blade. 
This is a public project. The contractor that he ridiculed is a well-
established company that has worked on the most sensitive historic projects of 
this scale for decades. They ended up bidding the job on the basis that they 
would provide the required finished project, but that there would be no hand-
sawing with Sawzall blades, no training from someone who knew less about 
repointing than they did, and no use of the historically-incorrect mortar 
specified. 

It is inherently wrong that presenters use their command of the group's 
attention as a weapon to settle personal scores. And that's where APT has a 
problem. They are too insular, too incestuous. That session would have been 
far more illuminating if they put the contractor on the panel to make his case 
as to why he thinks this presenter is full of crap.

Mike E.

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