Almost on the road...

After more than five years "doing software" full-time, and longer than that since the last time I did anything remotely academic, I decided this year to submit a poster abstract to the OOPSLA conference. Truth be told, I did it just so I could whine about how unjust the world is when my boss wouldn't send me to the conference. After scheming for a couple of months, I realized I'd forgotten the submision deadline... Luckly, I had a couple of days to prepare and, with the help of a friendly Mac user in the office (thanks Tim!) I was able to crank out an abstract in almost the right format (last time I did this kind of thing, camera-ready meant pasting scraps of paper on a form covered with light blue lines...). Ok, whew, done. Sit back and wait for the rejection. Huh? You want some corrections? Reviewer comments? Accepted!? Wow. Did I mention that between the submision and acceptance I changed jobs? How do you ask your boss of just a couple of weeks about going to a conference? Thankfully one of my co-authors asked and got approval for both of us to go! (thanks Levi, Scott, Dave, ...).

Damn! Now I need to actually make a poster... (at least I get to do a little whining).
Levi and I split up the the pieces. He's the text and I'm the title and big diagram. Well, today I got the final pieces of together. I hope Levi's ready, we fly out Saturday morning (that is, assuming I can get flight - don't ask...).

With any luck Canadian technology will interact decently with my laptop and I'll be able to continue posting my impressions of the conference. Did I mention I'm a fan of the writing style of Hunter S. Thompson? Might be interesting...

Cheers,

Geoff S.