ftw!

¶ in singapore Posted 1 week, 2 days ago on January 20, 2004
last full day in singapore. pretty cool so far. hung out with stacy for several days, which was nice. dropped lots of money in a video arcade, saw Paycheck, dinner with the family, met up with andy and went to karaoke and dinner, etc. etc.. nice trip so far.

The actual symposium was nice. I was terribly underdressed (UMichigan t-shirt and fat black pants) and some of the organizers chewed me out for it. Everybody else pretty much had at least a shirt and tie. Oops. Some famous important people gave boring talks to open the symposium. Me and 4 other mit kids skipped out on that cause it was so boring. Came back just in time for lunch. Then a lot more technical talks. Those were pretty cool. More techy stuff, blah blah blah. More food.

I gave a poster presentation this morning, and it was reasonably well received. People even seemed like they were remotely interested in what I was doing, which was a surprise. The way it works is that everyone has this giant 3'x4' poster that they stand next to for a couple hours. During that time, other students and faculty walk around and ask you questions if they're interested. The poster is supposed to be about your research work, but since I haven't been doing any research at MIT so far, the poster was about my undergraduate work with twd.

Halfway through the poster session, three profs. standing next to me got into a heated debate about the merits of matlab and mathematica. Then this ring of grad students formed around them as we watched them duke it out. It was weird. I had this running commentary in my head as they argued... "C pulls out the elegance argument, A counters with pragmatism, B goes off on a tangent about engineers vs. computer scientists, C says it's stupid... ooh, low blow." etc. etc. All this while about 10 of us grad students circled them, watching quietly.

Just hanging out at some internet cafe now. The plan is to kill time for the rest of the day, then it's off to taiwan tomorrow. gonna go see family, travel around the island for a bit, then find and pester smee.

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