I go to conferences. I keep going. I have booked flights for them, expensed hotels for them, and I will do it again this autumn, so nothing that follows is an argument for staying home. What I've stopped doing is pretending the sessions are why I went. The keynote is theatre. Not a bad keynote, not an unusually promotional one, but the format itself. A person walks on stage and, over forty-five minutes, delivers information you could have absorbed in four minutes of reading.