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JimBullockTripReport

JimBullockTripReport for SEM2002

Arrived Saturday after not enough sleep. Pre, pre conference highlights included:

• Arrival in San Francisco included low loop over the bay. Wonderful view.
• Amazing visibility departing San Francisco. View and geology out window was fascinating.
• Saturday dinner included meeting a bunch of rowdies which never stopped.

Sunday warmup session was quite an experience.

• Quite impressive to present those four models, thoroughly and accessably, in one day. Also a useful setting of state. By afternoon I was well over my intake capacity, which persisted all week.
• EstherDerby is fun to watch - she's got an amazing vocabulary of facial expressions, and her face is always animated.
• JohannaRothman isn't as scary to me now that I've met her.

Starting Monday, it all blends together. I can't really tell one day from the next in my memory. And my specific notes by each session are gone (see below.) Events that stand out are:

• Too many people in a car, and going to get ice cream anyway after too much food.
• How incredibly smart the folks currently actively coding are. Such acute minds.
• Why would a steak house close at 22:00? What's up with that?
• Around Tuesday I noticed that people gathered into groups, or not, decided what they wanted to do, picked places to sit, mingled, and argued, all without icky kinds of drama. Consistently. All week. (If there was icky-drama, don't tell me. I'm liking this illusion.) Can't we all just get along? It seems that we can.
  
  
  

General impressions:

• Consistent with my other experiences meeting folks who's words I've known, in person they look nothing like I expected and exactly like they should.
• Incredible amount of energy, brains, confort, experince, talent, and fun all in one place. Quite refreshing. I need some of that in my regular life.
• Lots and lots of pithy one liners, aphorisms, and really clear observations. Of course, the ones I noted are now in the missing notebook (see below).
  
  
  

ShapeDay

• What an intersting bunch of people.
• The talk about what, and how drifted toward what we might want to do on Shape next. More book reviews, and / or anti-reviews is one example.
• They're even smarter in person.
• I just realized that I might have said something dumb. I was thanking people for being there when they had to leave, and when I had to leave. This could be taken as my thinking I have some kind of ownership of SHAPE. Like I'm in charge or something. I'm just sincerely grateful for the people who showed up. On SHAPE, I'm just a relative loudmouth. That's about it.

Bummers and Drags:

• I lost my notebook. So anything I wrote down, or anything I promised to do, any reference to look for or side note is gone. I think the foolish thing is in the house somewhere, but it's hiding real successfully so far.
• Charlie Seashore made only a brief appearance for personal reasons.
• It ended.
  
  
  

-- JimBullock, 2002.11.21 (Updated, 2002.11.24)