Rise at 6.45, get up and get to the printer at 7.52. Get my poster printed (looks gorgeous btw, no screwups of any kind), cost me a hefty 600 bucks but I'll try and get the university to pay for it ;)

Get to the conference before 9, put up my poster as the only one there (apparently there was no rush, the poster session is tomorrow) and I start work, taking presentations from speakers, putting them on the laptop and making sure it works for when they gotta do their talk. Mostly a smooth run, but I had an angry chemistry professor on my back when his Mac wouldn't work with the projector (booo). Turned out all it took was to kick it into standby mode and wake it up (the laptop that is) to make the projector aware of it. After day one no screwups, minor hickups with a couple presentations as I wasn't prepared for embedded movie clips but I made it work

Then the jaw-dropping presentation: Prof. Kenji Satake from Japan. You know the animations of the tsunami wave we all saw on tv? He did the simulations. Not only that, he explained that it's actually very easy (and he really made it look easy as well). Quite a long talk, it was 45 minutes and I won't bother re-hashing but definitely the peak of today's program.

Other than that, people seem to treat me with respect and I don't sense much elitism, which I expected to be the case. :)

Now I'm off to a fancy conference dinner, all expenses paid of course.. ;)