Sunday, June 24, 2007

Finally, some update

Yes, I am alive. Thank you, thank you all (*waits for the ovation to die down). Now shut up and read. I have been in the US for the past few days for a conference (my annual pilgrimage). It is my bread-and-butter conference, so I had to go all the way to Oregon, to a town called Corvallis. The town's claim to fame is that it has no airport, so the journey here is quite a voyage. But enough about the town. I really have nothing to say today (as if I always do), so here are some ramblings:

a) It took me almost 24 hours to reach here and on reaching, all I wanted was someone to bang me on the head with a hammer and liberate me from this world. Now, after sitting through almost 35 presentations in two and a half days, I feel the same way.

b) I will never ever try to make a lame joke while making a presentation. Yes, you guessed it right, I made a stupid joke and only a few laughed. Rule of thumb is that if want to get people to laugh at your stupid utterances, you better be in MIT or Berkeley.

c) I really need to stop watching South Park. Now whenever I see a Chinese guy facing me, all I think is that he is about to say "Werrcome to Shitty Wok, take your order pree?"

d) Bubble baths are gay, but DAMN! they sure feel good.

e) By Murphy's Law, the most interesting papers are the ones presented by Chinese/Japanese presenters. So I cannot understand a thing beyond "Let x be a data point". And after the talk I get this urge to go eat a Momo/Sushi (see (c))

f) It is difficult to concentrate on the conference when the volunteers and catering staff are gorgeous. Conference organizers should make sure that the support staff is as ugly as the conference participants.

Now I gotta go checkout the news about how the motherland is doing while I am gone. But first, I gotta eat some noodles.

4 comments:

shruti said...

he he ...confeences are always an interesting topic to write about .. I am glad you had som much fun ..wonder how the feeling of wanting to be hit on the head by a huge hammers feels like .. must be one good amazin feeling ..lucky U

Anonymous said...

why blame the organisers..
despos (read 'loosers') like u wld find even the 'shitty' staff to be very distracting..

Tweety said...

Bubble-baths, Gorgoeus volunteers, Noodles..... Some pilgrimage haan ;-)

This conference sounds fun :) And yeah, they even managed to get you to have a bath :p

Cheers,
Tweety

Asterix said...

@shruti: I went through what the zombies usually go through in every
B grade horror flick. Walking around aimlessly without blinking or showing emotion.

@mahima: Yes you are right. The only solution is that the conference gets a bunch of guys as volunteers.

@tweety: Yes, the abovesaid gorgeous volunteers provided enough motivation for bubble baths. Note, I said "motivation", not oppurtunity ;-)