Unexpected fun

I played frisbee golf for four hours tonight. And the group of us went to eat food post-disc-golfing. And I had an unexpectedly good time. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised...something to do with a frisbee, good people, hanging out on a Friday night after a long week at work, but still, it wasn't quite expected. Maybe I should get out more. :)

A picture is worth a thousand words...

so how many words are multiple pictures worth?

A long week!

It has been a long week, but at least the conference is nearly over. I'm kind of saturated with physics-stuff right now. In combination with being sick, I'm ready to sleep for quite a while.

Tomorrow, I will go to a place where it's hard to take bad pictures: Banff National Park, by all accounts, is a stunning place. Point and shoot, here I come. Hopefully there'll be some hiking as well.

Can you believe it?

Natali went to a heck of a lot of effort to get her passport in time for the conference. Two days later, what happens?
The USA changes the rule temporarily and you can now travel to Canada without a passport for 4 more months! I can't wait to tell Natali this morning. :)

Mixed bag

Today started out in promising fashion:



I attended several talks in the early morning session before Natali and I put our heads together to figure out what needed to be "polished" for her presentation which is scheduled for Friday afternoon. Unfortunately, the answer was that a lot of material needed to be gone over. It wouldn't have been so bad, 'cept we lacked some of the machinery necessary and so I ended up doing a lot of programming today. I wish I had spent _yesterday_ inside and _today_ outside; given the weather each day, that would have made more sense. Alas, it was not to be.

Of course, I was unable to go straight to work given the nicer weather, so I took the long way back to my dorm, my computer, and my work by finding a new bike route between the university and downtown. I still haven't repeated any significant stretches of riding this week, but I'm going to have to detour farther every time I go to keep that record up. I took a few more pictures to add to the collection. Check them out.

Since I'm exhausted I'll leave off by noting that I had a singular experience this morning: a bicycle traffic jam. On my way to downtown, there were several points where 5 or 6 riders were in a row on the trail and couldn't pass the slower rider because of "oncoming" traffic. Davis, California is the only other place I've seen comparable numbers of bikers, but Davis is a much smaller place than Calgary.

Day 2

Today was the day I presented my poster. I finished the poster completely on Monday (because I had to print it before I left), so there wasn't a lot of additional stress involved.

I woke up to pouring rain outside. Nice overall, but not so good for the biking plan... Natali made it to Calgary after all (at 2 am this morning!), but had no idea where to go. We managed to find one another in the morning (our rooms are even in the same wing of the dorms) and we trudged through the rain to the light rail station with poster tube in hand. We found out much later we could have avoided the soaking we got had we known about the tunnels underneath campus. Doh! Hopefully, I won't need to use the tunnels again because the weather will be perfect for the rest of the week. Right...wishful thinking, I know.

Once we arrived at the convention center, I proceeded to change out of my wet clothes into my nicer dressy clothes. Yay for thinking ahead enough to pack that second set. It would have been a less pleasant day sitting in on sessions when damp. I saw a few people I know present their talks and a number of talks on interesting topics by people I didn't know. I'll spare you the gory details. Tomorrow, many more talks are being given by people I know well.

The poster presentation was two hours long, and I didn't even notice the time going by. I was talking with people who came by the poster almost continuously, and it wasn't until my mouth was really dry that I noticed I only had about 20 minutes to go in the session. I got a fair amount of positive feedback and some suggestions on things to look at. I wish I had had more interesting results to discuss. It's not that what we had on the poster wasn't useful, but the discussions I had were much more about what we might be able to do in the future instead of about the material at hand. I guess it never hurts to have a little external motivation.

After sitting through lectures by two Nobel prize winners, I went to dinner with some guys from the Hulet lab at Rice. The lectures were okay, but not spectacular. I think my stomach would have liked me to skip the Nobelists. :) Finally, I made my way back to the university from downtown on the light rail. I didn't get many pictures today: between the pouring rain, not biking, and being in sessions almost all day, it was not an especially visual day. Don't worry, I'm saving up for Banff this weekend (I hope).

Here are the pictures I did take: http://mac.andcheese.org/calgary2007/index2.html. Off to sleep!

Calgary!

I'm in Calgary this week for this conference. It has really been crazy in the run up to the conference. Not only have I had a poster to prepare (I present Wednesday afternoon), but I've been trying to finish some analysis that needs to go in the talk of one of my lab mates. But here's the other exciting part: my lab mate may or may not get to Calgary. First she had passport troubles and then (after several days of panic were resolved by getting said passport), she's still not sure she can get a flight to Calgary. Rumor has it that she caught a flight up here, but I haven't heard anything solid. It'd be nice to know exactly what kind of work I need to do in the next couple of days besides presenting my poster and attending conference sessions.

Anyway, on to the fun stuff. I rented a bike this year. Last year in Knoxville for this same conference, I wanted to do the same thing, but no one in Knoxville rents bikes (boo!). I pedaled around quite a bit this afternoon and found my way to downtown Calgary:



Later, I met up with Ben Luey, my roommate from Carleton my senior year. He's demo-ing his company's wares at this conference. We caught up and then went to the conference's welcome reception at a really posh hotel whereupon we saw many people we know and many more people we only recognize, but don't know, from past years. Good stuff.

Make sure to check out all my pictures from this week at http://mac.andcheese.org/calgary2007/. :)