While part of the leadership council was in Evanston running our incredibly successful workshop, Joanne Stewart and I continued the invasion of Canada. We attended the International Conference on Chemical Education (ICCE) in Toronto. I've only been to Toronto once before for a baseball game in 1998. I took a bit of a detour on the way and stopped at Niagara Falls. As far as the city and the weather go, it was outstanding.

The conference was also great. As I expected going in, Joanne does actually know everyone. We had a good crowd when we gave our joint talk on IONiC VIPEr. My part of the talk was more focused on the historical development of the site and a brief introduction about what we do at ACS meetings and our workshops. This included an almost live look at our workshop in Evanston where we showed some pictures and displayed the schedule for the day. Joanne then took over and presented some interesting facts about the community that is VIPEr. She has had a student diligently mining data from the site and from our recent user survey. One thing that they have discovered is that VIPEr very much embodies the quote "An army without leaders is like a foot without a big toe." (First person to post the source of that quote will get a prize if they see me at ACS in Denver. And no cheating and typing it in to Google, I'll know if you did.) What I mean by that is that our community contributes to VIPEr in very diverse ways. Some of you are really good at posting in the forums. Others love creating new LO's. And some seem to be big IONiC Facebook fans. That's what makes this community so great. Everyone can and does contribute. And I feel pretty sure that I can speak for the entire leadership council and say 'Thank you.' Keep up your tremendous work.