Thoughts on conferences

>What is the problem with buttons?

Their backside needles make holes in the shirt. Even if you are careful enough and have enough patience to actually stretch and pierce through the preexisting gaps in the shirt fabric (provided it's coarse enough in the first place), the button's needle often has a larger radius than the interfabric gap. If you don't know what I mean: just try to get a pen through one of the many holes of a fly swatter.

Magnetic badges were never offered so far, so can't tell. But the idea sounds promising. tinyurls: yeah I could have used html comment writing mode and do <a href="...">[1]</a>, though for some reason I did not consider that at that time. :-)

At the end of the day you'll probably put your badge in your pocket, and at that point you'll suddenly discover that the magnets have helpfully wiped the hotel keycard that you left in there as well. Not that this has happened to me repeatedly, or anything.

I like magnet badges the most. Whereas lanyards put your badge somewhere on the lower part of your belly and get in the way when bending over, magnet badges (or pins) allow you to put your name close to your face, so people can peek at your name without making it too obvious that they had to peek :-)

For someone who has trouble remembering names, but not faces, this would help a lot. Also make sure the names are printed in a font as big as possible. I prefer if the font stretches to fill the complete width. (Sure, some people will have a bigger font than others, but making all badges unreadable because of a few long names is silly at best.)