The Colby Symposium - Day 1

Every year, Norwich University hosts the Colby Military Writer's Symposium, a gathering of various figures in the military history and literature world, and holds a number of panels, talks and presentations to the public and student body. Seeing that Norwich is a military institution with a strong Social Sciences department, this is quite a big event here. Today was mostly talks and presentations to various classes around the school.
I'm volunteering for the event - I was assigned to 'Colby Central' basically a quite place for the authors to sit down and relax or prepare for their talks, away from the public. I didn't really do anything, except answer a couple questions for the authors, and basically standing by in case anyone needed anything. Tomorrow, I'll be driving a golf cart around the school, shuttling people from place to place, which should prove to be interesting.
For the first time, I was able to attend a couple of the talks - one on the Goals of the eight major leaders involved with World War II, basically, an analysis and results of their long term goals for their countries, by one of the leading military historians in the country, Gerhard L. Weinberg, who has written one of the definitive books on World War II, A World At Arms: A Global History of World War II, which I have yet to read, but it certainly looks interesting, and he has recently written Visions of Victory: The Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders, which is essentially what his talk was about.
The second talk was entitled Blogging them Back to the Stone Age, by Mark Grimsley, who's co-edited the book from which this year's conference takes it's theme, Civilians in the Path of War, which also looks very interesting. His talk was mainly on the influence of blogging against mainstream media, as well as the appeal of blogging to a major audience. I've come across much of what he talked about, but it was still a facinating subject, as it's still a relatively new thing to hit the internet. In the room of about 20 people, only myself and another person maintained a blog, when he asked.
Tomorrow should be interesting, as it's the main panel event, which the entire Corps of Cadets attends, and where they'll be talking (All the authors) about Civilians in warfare, which should be enlightening.
Now, if only I'll start feeling better. Cough is slowly going away, nose is plugged, sore and/or bleeding. Ugh.