I was in the "city" yesterday, it was raining softly, sky was overcast and a modest temperature. I see this group of 20 people, some of them looking at a map, the rest of them standing around outside MacDonalds waiting for their leader to lead them somewhere. When I saw that, I felt sorry for them. I mean clearly research isn't something they are very good at, otherwise they would never come here, but given that they did and they're spending lots of money paying our ridiculous prices (and especially those geared at tourists), it does make me a bit sad to see them out in the rain.

And with the map, that's pretty funny. It's actually very difficult to get lost in this town without a map because it's so small. Just keep walking east, oh there's the river, let's turn left, keep walking, oh there's the bay, turn left, keep walking, oh there's the river again, turn left, keep walking, hey we've been here before. And by then you've seen all of Trondheim. Time to complete at a casual pace: 1.5 hours.

But then I remember going to Barcelona last year in February and it was bloody raining the whole time. If I get my vacation ruined, why should I feel sorry for these guys? Even if I chose my destination a bit more carefully.. so long, suckaz.

My college class plays soccer on Thursday afternoons. They started about 6 months ago and admirably they keep it up, even now in the summer when school's out. I went to the first couple of practices just over Christmas and it was fun but I injured myself both times. It was the ankle. So I was healing for a long time, I didn't go since then. Towards the end of April I was back on the pitch but I didn't go to the school practice because it was sorta awkward starting at 4pm while I was still at work. Now they've moved it to 6pm and today was the first time I played again.

Oh what contrast to the previous practice, 24 degrees and sunny. On top of that I had had a heavy dinner and I felt heavy like a truck, could barely move. But it got better. My form didn't. I've been playing on astroturf and I love it, it's beautiful. But the school practice is on a gravel pitch and gravel f. sucks. Ball bounces like a maniac and the ball mechanics are all f. up. That means I suddenly have no clue. And no form to chase the ball either, good combination. You may have thought I would be out of place but the other guys are just the same. Ball skills are generally unknown to us. At least on a gravel pitch in my case. So we end up playing these guys who were already there when we showed up, Spanish speaking crew. They're definitely not Spaniards, they look more American. I can spot a Spaniard because they're very comsopolitan and dressy, they look totally European. These guys didn't, they were also very short each and every one. But fun to play with cause they comment every play. Also extremely skilled on the gravel, never a bad touch, fantastic ball reception so you know it wasn't their first time.

Among our crew we had the leader, the one who always sends out the "meet for practice" emails and keeps the whole thing going, a couple of lanky guys, a real trooper power forward, a determined wingman and young guy in an Ajax shirt who's whiter than snow. This guy kept pissing me off cause every touch of the ball was a lob, no matter his position on the pitch. All of them very badly taken. So we get underway and we're clearly inferior. I get a lucky break and score the first goal on a good and lucky finish. Then I try to dribble my man in defence and end up conceding a goal on the next play. My touches are terrible, the ball is all over the place and my reaction time is long cause I don't move well today. Another lucky finish and I score a second, although I have to give the goalkeeper most of the credit, he totally fumbled it. In all I got 5 shots on goal, at least I forced a save out of the keeper on all but one. It shows I've been working on my finishing cause 4 out of those 5 were well taken. And that's pretty much where my contribution ends. I don't think anyone outscored me on my team, the wingman also got 2. But that just shows how terrible we were. About 40 minutes into it, I get a good touch for once, the ball is up there, I wanna take it down and turn my man. As I go for it, I get his arm in my face. Nose bleeding. I'm telling you I'm not meant to play with these guys, everytime I show up something happens to me. But I take a breather and I'm good to go again. I get a little better as we go along ball control-wise, but every pass I make is too slow, I can't make it work at all. I also completely embarass myself on some counters as I fumble the ball most of the times. It's so disheartening to go from playing well week in and week out the past couple of months on the weekends (astroturf, people) to an absolute stinker today.

But I'm showing up next week.

Oh and one of the guys we played against scored with a bicycle kick, that's right on gravel.

You won't believe this but throughout the day, no hickups of any kind with the projector. All speakers today brought their own laptops, (Windows, Mac, Linux) all of them worked seamlessly. :eek: :eek: :eek: No jaw dropping presentations today but the 3 lectures on grid computing in Norway, Scandinavia and Europe respectively were very interesting.

There was a poster session and it was way too long, 2.5 hours with lunch in the middle. Not exactly crowd control at my poster but I was just happy to be there. Of course I didn't win the prize either. :D But the conference committee was very eager to collect those feedback forms, so much so that they had a lottery with a bunch of prizes for those who did turn them in. I won a kewl IBM bag with a tux picture on it. A Swedish guy from KTH was one of several people who won a bunch of SGI cups but since he had traveled by air he wanted to dump them so I took one off his hands :)

Of course I brought my poster home and I'm gonna put it up in my house. :D

EDIT: a picture from the conference (atrocious quality).

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.. ;)

The previous entry taken into account, it is slightly astounding that I've been hired as an audio-visual assistent for the NOTUR 2005 grid computing conference in Trondheim Monday/Tuesday next week. What does a AV-assistent do, you ask? Basically I make sure people get to run their presentations, I'm responsible for the technical side of things. All the more puzzling, the person who recommended me for the job is my boss who spent an hour helping me get my presentation underway last week. :D

Last but not least, I decided to enter the poster competition (didn't even know it was a competition at first) for best student poster. So I spent the better part of my weekend working on my poster and I'm quite satisfied with the outcome (if you find spelling errors I'll flame you :devil: ). Here it is in png format and pdf format if you wanna check it out (it's huge btw, A0 dimensions).

Ps. Luca Dirisio kicks major butt!!! See my audioscrobbler profile to verify I'm hooked on that album at the moment.