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Well Seymour I Made It, Despite Your Directions
2 Plane flights and one day-long conference workshop later, I can finally relax and bask in the beauty of the internet. Oh how I've missed you these past few days, you bearer of oddball facts and breaking news that the Red Sox are waiving Manny Ramirez.
The workshop and talk went well. I got to hear lots of funny stories at lunch, specifically many "Dijkstra Stories" about how Mr. Shortest Path likes to go to conferences and, seeing that a student is presenting a paper for the first time, ask questions that begin with things like "Well when we solved this problem 10 years ago..." or say something like "Can you explain to me why you've done such worthless work?" and then walk out the door before the stunned M.S. or PhD candidate recovers in time to say something.
Luckily, neither Dijkstra nor Tarjan nor Leslie Lamport nor Wacky Don Knuth were present for my talk, and the questions were much gentler.
California was an odd little place, or at least the tiny little bit of California that I saw: the San Jose airport and Doubletree Hotel 3 tenths of a mile away. For one thing, while we have ads in our airport with Daisy Fuentes on them, in San Jose they have ads with FPGAs and microchips on them. Lots of them.
They also have all their network TV shows on an Eastern Time schedule, but their ESPN stops showing Sportscenter at 10 AM. The morning's not over yet, guys, keep it rerunning!
The water flows in reverse when it goes down the toilet there, also, and while it is becoming winter here in the STL, it's becoming summer in the OC. Or maybe that's Australia.
Speaking of, there were people from all over the world listening to my dynamic and exciting talk, including Australia, the Netherlands, Austria, Delaware, and a guy from Finland who began his talk by saying "I just flew in last night from somewhere with a 10 hour time difference, so if I sound tired up here it's because I'm jet lagged, not on drugs".
But now I've traveled forward in time back to St. Louis, and even though my body thinks it's only 7 PM, for some reason I'm exhausted. Back to work tomorrow.
Comments
Waitaminit - No Don Knuth? I'm sure you could have argued with him for hours about the tip of the lowercase delta. You missed out.
Posted by: Brian at October 30, 2003 11:13 PM
Great, glad the trip went well. Your defense should be a breeze (unless Dijkstra or DN shows up). -- Ron
Posted by: rkc at October 30, 2003 11:17 PM
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