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.

I was supposed to hold a presentation today on the big project I've been working on the past 5 months. This is 2005 so obviously no overhead, it's strictly laptop+projector. I did my presentation in Impress, part of OpenOffice. This morning I came to work an hour and a half ahead of time to prep and check that the technical setup is functional. Well little time to prep as I had to wrestle with the feckin projector for an hour. I tried all kinds of resolutions, settings in the projector's menu and nothing helped. All the while it would display just a part of my screen and refuse to do anything else. After about 15 minutes I had my boss over to look at it and he couldn't figure anything out either. After an hour he went to get his laptop to see if there was any difference while I suddenly had the impulse idea to try Windows. Well what do you know, as I booted up Windows and reset the resolution, bam, there it was, whole screen displayed and no more nonsense. Now won't you explain to me how a VGA signal differs be it from a Linux
os or Windows? It's the same friggin signal!!! :wth::wallbang: Evil
evil stuff! :mad:

I don't have an office suite in Windows because I use it strictly to play Championship Manager ;) But I exported the presentation to flash format and ran the presentation out of Firefox. If you wanna see how lame it turned out, here's the flash movie. If you want to steal my uber cool slide design, here's the powerpoint version. Also, how sad that the figures look so crap, they're originally vector graphics so they should be spotless but idiot Powerpoint/Impress (because they're both just as bad) doesn't handle vector graphics so I had to rasterize them and then they were automatically rescaled to fit the presentation. :wallbang: See for yourself and compare, these are the originals scaled to 600 pixel width.

Right so something is over, you know there's very little chance you will pick it up. You quit or the other person quit and that's how it is, the post-relationship situation. What do you do with "left overs"? When I look in my address book I see some left overs. Sometimes it's almost like I don't want to look because I don't want to see a name that used to mean something. Have you ever been there? What do you do when you encounter such a "break up", do you remove all traces so that you don't remind yourself of it? Or do you think maybe it'll come in handy sometime to have that address, it would be hasty to get rid of it now?

I now have a couple of those entries I'm considering throwing out but I haven't yet. Does that mean something? Probably that I'm slow to deal with these things, that it takes a long time before I can say I'm not thinking about it anymore. Is that a bad thing? Should I be quicker to forget?

To change the subject completely, I was looking at some photography sites the other day and decided it was time the world would see my holiday snapshots, so I registered an account at the mainstream deviantart and the more upscale caedes.