Well I am back from Baltimore now. Louise joined me on Thursday and as there were no relevant talks on the last day of the conference we went to the aquarium for the day on Friday. That was really fun and it is a pretty good aquarium. We saw the dolphin show twice as I really like dolphins and went around the Australia exhibit they are currently showing.
We had a really nice meal that evening at the Capitol Brewing Company and I found one of the nicest beers I have ever tasted! It was called Fuel and was made from coffee and chocolate among other things. It was quite strong but very nice, I couldn't find any to buy to bring home though... Saturday we took the train down to Washington DC for the day.
We paid for a day pass on the tour bus and started off at the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. I was amazed that is was free entry, but the queues were long and slow. Once in I had to put my bag through a security scanner, I asked the security guard if it was film safe and he didn't listen at all but took my bag off me and pushed it through. I will find out when I get them developed I guess.
Continue reading "Back From Baltimore"
I attended the APS March meeting in Baltimore this year. I didn't know anyone there, and was the only member of our research group out there but I got the opportunity to see a lot of interesting talks and posters. I also checked out the job fair, but it didn't have anything of any interest to me there unfortunately.
This was the biggest conference I have ever been to, with about ten or so parallel talk sessions running most of the time. Contributed talks were only 10 minutes long, and invited talks were usually 35 minutes long. There were a very large range of talks, and as it was more general than previous conferences I had attended I was able to attend a few talks totally unrelated to my research but of interest to me.
There were also a massive range of booths at the exhibition from a whole range of companies. It was interesting to see so many manufacturers, publishers and software companies displaying their latest and greatest products all in one place. The whole conference was on a larger scale than anything I have previously seen.
Some of the talks I saw revealed other groups working on some of the aspects I do but in quite different ways. Not all of this work had turned up in my searches of the published literature so I have quite a few papers I would like to look up once I get back to the office. I also talked to an interesting person on one of the booths about
ADS which isn't just for astronomers. I have since used it and found it very useful for finding papers published in physics journals, and when combined with
CAS it covers pretty much everything in my field.
Started off my journey on Friday morning at about 5am. Couldn't find my hair fudge but aside from that I think I managed to remember everything I needed. Got to the train station and caught the 5:20 train to London. Louise got me a seat in first class, but first class wasn't as first class as usual this morning. They did the usual barely drinkable complimentary coffee but no food was served. So went I got into London I was starving. Got the tube and the tube replacement bus to terminal 4 at Heathrow.
This was my longest ever journey travelling alone, before this I had just done a short hop to Grenoble, France! It is pretty lonely travelling alone. Security was the highest I have seen it on both sides of the Atlantic. I used the BA online checkin service, checked in my bag for the hold and then I thought I was done. Just had to go through security so I went to the red barriers and was directed to the back of the line. A few times along there I thought I had lost the line but it really was that long! I think I was waiting for about an hour to get through security, thankfully I had arrived with lots of time to spare.
Continue reading "First Few Days in Baltimore"
Well I am going to set off in a couple of hours to catch the train down to London, Heathrow is such a hassle to get to from Sheffield. Looking forward to it but paranoid I have forgotten something I will need. BA only let you take one piece of hand luggage which is going to have to be my laptop, so unfortunately my SLR camera has to stay at home. I will be taking my small Fuji F10 but I would really like to be able to use my Nikon F80 out there. I don't trust it in checked baggage though.
If there are any Gentoo folk who fancy meeting up for a beer I should be able to check mail at the hotel. The conference looks huge - it will be a real challenge taking it all in and seeing as much as possible whilst I am out there. Best continue running round the house trying to check I haven't forgotten anything now!