SF Trip

The awaited photos. ^_^

Agonized for quite a while whether it was safe to include the ones with my mug shots and my friends'... but well, heck. =P I was probably too paranoid. Fussing over placements took me enough time as it was. Wondered if using services like flickr would actually be quicker than html-ing this thing as I did, as they probably automatically create the thumbnails for you and such. But I was too lazy to invest time on learning about them, and I imagine copying the photos to the school server would be much more hassle-free, if I refer to my experience with Yahoo! Briefcase.

Ramblings are included with the photo pages. In general, it was fun. Half-fun and half-anxious before my presentation, and pure fun afterwards. =D Learnt to "sell our stuff" to people. Pretty exciting and very heartening to really experience that, hey, there are people interested in what we're doing.

Also did the demo for the Chronos tool, one hour per day over four days. Was a bit shaky with the implementation details since I'm not the one who developed it -- but of course tried not to show it. =D The first "customer" happened to be a little familiar with the technical details and asked something I'd missed up on reading (uh-oh). Quickly went online and read the actual paper in the afternoon, but behold Murphy's Law, of course nobody asked me about that again afterwards. XD Just realized not having namecards was a loss in these kinds of events. Plan to talk to the office after this so I can "fish" better next time.

The fishing went on in other aspects too -- next to my demo spot was a group from Seoul University, and we had pretty nice chats when "business" was slow. Somehow I often bumped into one of the Korean guys, and he happened to be quite cute, mwuhuhuh, but then on the last day I found out he was married. Fuah. =D

Thought we were quite lucky too -- Kathy met two fellow Vietnamese in the workshop she attended, and these guys have been staying in U.S. for quite a long time, though in another state. They cordially took up the role of good hosts and drove us around, showing us places. I haven't expected much sightseeing because of our relatively short time outside the conference schedule, but amazingly we managed to squeeze in a lot of things. Well, actually we skipped some technical sessions to play in the exhibitions too. =D There were many booths holding lucky draws for xBox-es and iPod Nano-s, but we weren't so lucky. =( We still got freebies all around though.

My level of shamelessness was particularly tested in a booth that let people play darts. They gave out prizes (choosing between magnetic dart games or micrometers) if you could get 35 points or more within three tries. I played four times, so that's 12 tries, and 11 out of 12 I got zero (one throw went so far off the sides that the two guys manning the booth quickly backed away a few steps, and two throws broke the darts in two) but in the last one I accidentally hit a triple 15 and got me a micrometer. =DDD Because of that incident Kathy thought I had violence tendencies. Maybe all that badminton playing helps, huhuhuh. My aim has always been terrible anyways.

Strangely enough I sort of missed Singapore at some points there. Not Indonesia. Hueuhue. What I missed were the humid air, drinkable tap water, and take-it-for-granted safe neighbourhoods.

Air: San Francisco was cold even in the summer. The phrase of the week was "Here comes the wind". (Or maybe "What's happening?" but that's sort of an inside joke, so.) The cold of the aircon my jacket could handle, but once we stepped outside, the wind froze my fingers and my face, even while the sun was blaring. The dry air sort of hurt when breathed in, and I kept getting dried blood in my nostrils. So yeah, I still prefer to sweat under Singapore's hot weather.

Water: The hotel didn't give us free water supply, so we kiasu-ly snagged bottles of mineral water from the conference. When we went to a minimart some days later we found that the brand they'd given to us was actually an expensive one. (All mineral water brands were expensive there but this one was among the more expensive ones.) I thought, "Oh, lucky." My roommate thought, "Should have taken more." =D We're from Singapore all right. At the hotel we also tried both hot and cold approaches -- asked room service for (free) pots of hot water and cooled it off, and took (free) ice cubes from the dispenser and melted those off. Mwahahah.

Food: While there we ate at a Thai place, a Korean restaurant in Japantown, a Chinese restaurant in Chinatown, an Indian restaurant, and a Chinese express gourmet place. Their Chinese restaurants always gave us fortune cookies, something Asian Chinese restaurants never did, so it made me Wiki that thing, and now I know why. But -- how come still Asian food you ask? Hoehoehoe. Just for convenience, actually. We still ate at Western food places the most, like Subway, Denny's, Carl Jr, and one Italian restaurant. The meal portions were generally huge and I had to waste a lot of food. =P Funny thing was I felt very well-fed on the flights there, but on the return flights I kept getting hungry. Maybe the food portion was rubbing off on me? =PP

As I stepped back on Changi I actually felt quite happy despite the "holiday" being over. I think it's the familiarity and the level of confidence from knowing my ways around here. And after the long flight I just wanted to quickly get home. Back to work now, with some slacking as usual. ^^0

And finally, a little wishful thinking. Another of our submissions got accepted recently, a work I shared with a former colleague. This time the conference will be in Seoul, and wuh, I kind of want to be there. ^^ (And not because of the married cute guy earlier. The place I kinda wish to visit is actually Japan, so that induced this wish as Korea might be a close enough experience.) But I don't think I'll get to go there as I'm not confident with the field we're taking on in this submission, so most probably my supervisor will be the speaker. Of course I can still go on my own to attend it, but currently financial and time considerations are pointing to negative. =P Well, let's be positive and think that there'll be next time. =D