A conference day

Conference started today dot at 8:20. It started with a very exciting keynote by Christos Papadupoulous (got the spelling messed up definitely) - yeah the same famous computational complexity person. He gave an awesome talk on the applications of theory in networking. he talked on 3 specific issues - multi-hop clock synchronization, routing based on virtual coordinates, and congestion control in routing. The first 2 topics i had worked on myself, and was very impressed by ease and natural way he analyzed the problem. But this congestion stuff was very new to me and was fascinating. Just so elegant. I still remembered the course I had taken in my final semester at IIT and had to go through every line of his book with so much effort. But, that was just dumb me. and Christos looked like a proper theoritician too, big beard and bald head. He also stated a geometric problem very casually, which I found myself working on long after his speech. And realizing why I had (and still do) loved this sort of mathematics so much, and after spending quite a bit of time on it, also remembered why I left it for Computer Science and engineering (aka Common Sense engineering).

Then the talks got underway, quite a few papers were really nice. after a lunch (yeah, seafood again. this time shorebird sandwich) at a hawaiian restaurant, was the turn of the Systems session - in which I was to present my paper. Though it was the most interesting from my perspective, I found myself going over and over my slides and not paying full attention to the slides. was a bit tensed up I guess, as a lot of the top guys in sensor networks was around. just felt a little unnerved. anyways, my turn came and my talk went pretty well. there were questions which could handle well, and not any specific things. Boss said later, he could not really think of much scope for improvement of my talk. ;-) good relief after the not-so-polished proposal presentation last month.

Then came a panel discussion on sensor net applications, which many conferences have nowadays to have a reality check on the mainly academic papers. and then a reception and poster session on a tenth floor bay view hotel room. We went again to the same Library ale House for dinner, this time with a few more people. 2 young faculty from CMU and Harvard, a intel researcher and 2 more grad students. Had much more beer this time around. and had a fascinating time listening to the trials and hiccups and joys the bright young faculty have to go through initially. good thing I chose not to go into academia, it is a very hard life initially. They were also discussing the broken CS conference systems, and frustations of having good papers rejected for no good reason.

Marina Del Ray visit

Had to get up early early today morning - 8 am - to catch my flight to LA. Had a conference presentation at Marina Del Ray at DCOSS. I have started cutting it real short on boarding the place; reaching the airport about 30 minutes prior to departure. Missing the plane from Mexico City last month was no lesson learnt, and did the same today. My advisor also happened to take the same flight to LA; he actually had a 10:35 pm flight, misread the pm part and landed up in the am, and still got a seat thanks to his being a platinum member. Good for me, as I got a ride from the airport to the hotel, after feverishly reworking on my slides on the plane.

I dint get to book into the conference mariott, as I missed the conference
rate deadline, and the normal rate was 250$, double that of the conference rate. so, I had ended up booking te foghorn hotel right opposite the street. did'nt turn out to be bad choice after all, as it had free wifi, as also a huge balcony facing the marina. Went out to take a stroll around marina del ray, venice beach, and had lunch at a Cuban restaurant. I actually had tried going to a sushi place, and ended up mistaking the entrance of the side-by-side restaurant and ending up at this place. realized my mistake after getting the menu, but oh well, decided for having sushi later. The venice beach was nice, but the water looked pretty murky and polluted, pretty much like our Galveston beach, the nearest beach from Houston.

For dinner, went with my boss to a library ale place - a beer place he had found on the net. Finding a parking is a pretty tough thing in LA, like any proper big city. And no wonder, at our sensor systems conference, this parking application of sensor networks repeatedly came up. Anyways, had some fish dish as usual - salmon this time. For lunch at the cuban place, I had halibut. I had taken up the habit of having fish every time I go out to restaurants, when I dont have to pay from my pocket. oh, the joy of attending conferences. anyway, dint drink too much beer though I advisor was a bit disapointed. after all, still wanted to fine tune my slides a bit more that night. Already was starting to feel a bit tired at 9 pm, as it was 11 pm houston time.

Rebel XT with a cause

And today, ladies and gentlemen, presently the wonderful technological wonder. My Canon Digital SLR D350 or rebel XT came today. It is so totally awesome. did not expect it to be so light frankly. And getting used to all its multitude of features will take a lot of time. Had finally got fed up with using my SLR, taking print, and then everybody asking for picture link the same day i came back from some trip, and me taking the costs and pains of getting a picture cd made and uploaded and thumbnailed on the webpage. took much wastage of effort and money. specially with such state of the art digital cameras nowadays. was eyeing this for a long time, since the D300 came out in 2003. glad i wasited and did not get that, as the D35 is a huge improvement in a lot of ways. also, the decision to buy the camera now was definitely hastened by getting the 0% APR credit card. Realized 2 things which i had sort of half expected to find in digital cameras - the picuture being taken would be displayed in the lcd screen (they dont do that in DSLRs i found, as one was supposed to take pictures the proper way with an SLR) and there is no movie taking mode (they optimize it greatly for still pictures and dont want to make a mess of it with
trying to incorporate video capability).