Doesn’t have to end that way. Here’s how to bottle that glow and make it last till next year:

Take good notes: While you’re at the conference, email yourself a daily note with links, ideas, names of people to follow on Twitter, books to read and skills to learn.

Set goals: Compile your notes into a learning agenda. List three to five items to pursue between now and the next year’s conference. Examples might include launching your own web site, learning a programming skill, or lifting your writing skills.

Make a reading list: Use your favorite feed reader to follow blogs and sites related to the skills you’re learning.

Revisit the agenda: Six months after the conference ends, go back and look over the agenda. Catch up on what the presenters of your favorite sessions have been up to.

Make vital connections: Go beyond following people on Twitter and seek out people to network with. Share your ideas, struggles, wins. Look for meetups in your area or opportunities to coach others to share your skills.

Those are my ideas. Yours?

So, that’s why a video I found last week reached deep into my core. It’s from a Poughkeepsie Journal package marking the newspaper’s 225th birthday, a milestone in its distinction as the oldest newspaper in New York state and the third-oldest in the nation. The speaker is Harry Scrivani, a man I saw just about every day for 11 years.

Harry ran the composing room — a windowless enclave on the building’s second floor filled with the aromas of ink, hot wax and photo chemicals. It was the place where text, headlines, photos and graphics dropped from the newsroom one floor up were cut-and-pasted onto page flats before being photographed and burned into printing plates. This was, obviously, in the days before Photoshop, QuarkXpress and Dreamweaver.

For a geeky, green journalist like me, to enter it was to enter a place of mystery and danger. It was a union shop filled with characters, some whose personalities teetered on a razor’s edge as sharp as the X-Acto knives they wielded. A request to excise a typo from a headline — not uncommon — could be greeted either with a chuckle, stony silence or a string of epithets. Most of the guys down there had been in the business for years, back to the days of the Linotype, and they were fiercely protective of their realm. To touch one of their pages, even if your byline was on it, was to risk having one of their metal pica rulers slammed on your knuckles. Do not touch! And yet, they also were the ones to save your hide by pointing out the fact you’d just misspelled “Ohio” in 48-point type.

In this world, Harry was the Good Cop, and I think he often took pity on me as I scrambled downstairs to make sure my pages were on time and all together. His many acts of kindness in overlooking the dumb mistakes and incessant requests of a perfectionistic young journalist all came back as I watched him reminisce about his days at the newspaper.

Watch it: It’s one man’s remembrances of his work, and at the end he says something I think we’ll all say, eventually: “I miss it.”

No office email, no office phones. Just a week to enjoy my family, feed my soul, fix up things around the house, and keep learning new skills.

So, I:

Hiked to a waterfall: Took a five-mile hike with my family through the Shenandoah National Park to the 86-foot White Oak Canyon falls. The trail, which ascends 1,000 feet over about 2 miles, had us breathing hard. The falls was spectacular, and we ended the day spent but inspired by the beauty.

Planted a garden: Our fourth year as amateur farmers, and each year we understand soil and seeds a little more. Given the time I spend in front of a computer screen, digging in dirt is necessary for emotional health. Watching seeds grow into food connects me to bigger things.

Studied Python: Inspired by hacker-journalists at the annual IRE computer-assisted reporting conference, I’ve jumped head-first into the Linux world with the goal of building apps using Django. After getting Ubuntu set up and finishing the Django tutorial, I decided to step back and study Python, the language Django’s built upon. Aaron Bycoffe responded to a Twitter query and recommended the free How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. Made it through 11 chapters this week and now understand Django a lot better.

Upgraded to Lucid Lynx: Speaking of Linux, my week off coincided with the latest update to Ubuntu. Demand was high and getting the download tough, but I eventually got it rolling. You can’t beat free.

Spent time with friends and family: Really the best part. Lots of laughs, intense conversations, great fun.

So now I’m feeling fresh — fresh enough to handle the 252 emails that rolled in when I booted up my work PC this afternoon.

Now add me to the list. Michelle interviewed me right after one of this winter’s east coast blizzards, and my cabin fever shows in the sheer verbosity of my responses. But it was fun reliving my early days — when I discovered the power of merging data and reporting. Here’s one quote:

A reporter in the newsroom came to me and said, “Hey, it would be really good if we could figure out what the most valuable properties are in the city of Poughkeepsie. And I thought to myself, “You know, this might be a good opportunity for me to go and make friends with the IT guy over in City Hall.” I went over and visited him, he was down in the basement of City Hall, in the computer room. Back in those days, they all had big mainframe computers in an air-conditioned room.

Actually, what I first did was I went to the tax assessor’s office, and I said, “I want a list of all the properties in the city of Poughkeepsie and how much they’ve been assessed for.” And they pointed me over to the corner where there were these big books filled with computer printouts, and they said, “Well, all the numbers are there, and you can just start copying them down.” And I thought to myself, “If they were printed on this piece of paper that looks like computer paper, then certainly they are in a computer somewhere in this building. And I can get that data on a disk that I can bring over and put into my computer.” And that’s how I really started figuring out that we can do computer-assisted reporting by going to the government and getting data.

That’s what I did. I went to visit that guy in City Hall, and I said, “Look, I know you’ve got a file on your computer. I’d love to have you put it on this floppy disk for me.” And he had to check with the local attorneys, and get their permission, and I called up a sunshine advocate in New York state and got him to weigh in, and they agreed that, “Yeah, the law says we can do this.” The next thing I know, I had that data on the computer and was going through it in Paradox. We wound up writing a couple of stories about different properties.

A hat tip to Michelle for a smart way to gain insight into our slice of journalism.

If you’ve never attended and are wondering whether to go, here are five things I’ve found valuable:

– You’ll be challenged to up your game. Every year, I am reminded that if I stand still in developing my skills, I am actually losing ground. The Web has forced journalism to become nimble, and the people and talks here will challenge you to be the same.
– There’s lots of opportunity to learn. Training is a huge component of the conference. People are genuinely open and willing to share data, code and skills.
– You won’t leave empty-handed. Every year, I go home with plenty of tips on new software or programming techniques, sources of data and story ideas.
– Beginners are encouraged. There’s a really good mix of super-technical subjects and sessions for those just starting in data analysis, programming and visualization.
– You’ll meet some smart cookies. The speakers’ list includes Pulitzer winners, folks working in the emerging area of non-profit journalism, expert coders and statisticians, and a load of really, really good journalists all around. Their stories and ideas will inspire you.

Here was my advice:

Focus on a few: Instead of holding building-wide Excel classes or database journalism seminars, start with just one or two reporters who show a combination of interest and decent technical smarts. That lets you go deep on a couple of beats rather than spread yourself thin. Also, success breeds success. Watching a few reporters land great stories will possibly spur interest from others.

Have the right goals: Goals like “publish one CAR story a week” miss the point. Better objectives are to have data-thinking ever present in the reporter’s mind, have the reporter well-versed in her beat’s data sources, and have the reporter develop basic data skills. From that, stories will flow.

Inventory data: Speaking of data sources, have each reporter you work with find out the sets of data local governments keep. File FOIA requests for table layouts and database schemas. Get the data, then study it. That will spur story ideas.

Crawl first, run later: All the hot talk in data journalism these days is on Web frameworks and visualizations, but there’s plenty of work for the beginner in the land of Excel and Access. Build those skills as a starting point.

Your thoughts? Add a comment below …

Back in the mid-’90s, I taught creative writing at Vassar College for the Summer Institute for the Gifted. The students were precocious middle schoolers whose parents had dropped a bundle for a couple weeks of learning. My job was to impart my love of metaphor, description and iambic pentameter — all of which, as an English major, I truly adore.

One afternoon, I launched into a soliloquy about plot, explaining that every protagonist has an obstacle to overcome. The obstacle creates tension and drives the story to its end.

Needing an illustration, I began to explain the plot of the film Apollo 13, which had just played in theaters. On the blackboard, I drew an Earth and Moon and small spaceship with flames, and I explained how the crew’s dwindling oxygen and distance from home was a major obstacle. The kids connected immediately, interjecting their ideas and answering my questions.

Later, after the class filed out, a camp assistant who’d been in the class came by to chat.

“That was great,” she said. “Did you see Bryce giggling while you were talking about Apollo 13?”

Bryce was a red-haired girl with piercing eyes, sort of a female Opie if you remember The Andy Griffith Show. That should have been a clue.

“No,” I said. “Why would she find it funny?”

“Well,” the RA said, “her dad directed that movie — you know, Ron Howard.”

Ah, yes. I connected her name in my head: Bryce Howard. If you’re a film fan, you know her today by her stage name, Bryce Dallas Howard.

One way to give yourself some flexibility with formatting is to combine text and the results of a formula in a single cell. Just use the “&” operator to concatenate the text and the formula.

Consider this formula:

="Quantity: "&SUM(A1:A20)

Enter it into a cell, press enter and (assuming you have numeric values in cells A1 through A20) it will present this result in a single cell:

Quantity: 23

That kind of output’s pretty handy when you want to create a worksheet in your spreadsheet that aggregates data from other sheets while keeping the formatting simple.

“I think it’s the motherboard,” one of our IT guys told me. “I might be able to get it back to you tomorrow.”

After he carted away my PC — as if he were towing away a dead car — I realized I needed to make do with the only resource I had left: my laptop. If this had happened a year ago, I’d have had to spend most of the day reconstructing files and my working environment. But I was up and running in about 10 minutes, working on my project with minimal pain. Here’s why:

First, I’ve been thinking a lot about disaster scenarios. Maybe it’s living near the nation’s capital and watching the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks unfold. Or Katrina. Or the sniper. No matter what, I’ve thought a lot about not getting too tethered to the resources I take for granted in my office, where I spend most of my work time. If I need to work at Starbucks or some other location for a couple of days, I want to be able to do everything that I can do in our building.

So, when the company issued me a laptop to go with my desktop, I made some changes to my workspace. I store almost nothing of value on my local hard drive — either the PC or the laptop. I keep my databases, spreadsheets, Word files, scripts and other resources on a network drive that’s backed up daily. Second, because we’re a .NET shop, we use Visual Source Safe for version control. All my .NET apps are tucked into a network repository where I — or any developer on our team — can get at them as long as we have the client software installed and the network connection live.

I also set up my laptop to mirror as closely as I can my desktop environment. My desktop hardware is pretty speedy, and the laptop can’t match it. But what I can match is the configuration. I’ll take “slower” as long as I don’t have to re-learn where everything is.

So, today, I got to put my scenario to the test. As soon as I fired up the app I needed to code, I quickly discovered that I was missing the DLL for the Ajax Control Toolkit and a few other components. But they’re easy to download and reference in Visual Studio, so after about 10 minutes I was on my way.

Not all was perfect. If my desktop comes back to me, I have a couple more things I need to prep. The main one: Even though I’ve been using Delicious to store bookmarks, the bookmarks on my laptop copy of Firefox are out of sync with those on my desktop. Easy to handle with export and import.

Still, I was pretty happy with how the day ended. Prep really helps.