Almost forgot: somewhere in between all the travelling I also ordered the Criterion (they heard my prayers!) DVD edition of "Before the rain".
This movie hasn't lost one bit of its original overwhelming power!
No wonder I put it in my top 10 of all time fave movies :-)
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Summer update :-)
Sooo... big gap in updates but I've been travelling a LOT the past 4 weeks.
Shortly after the deception of our Orange mofos being kicked out of the tournament yet again I flew to the Netherlands for the ICLS 2008 conference.
Since I have the worst bad luck concerning my baggage it indeed got lost once again. Eventually I ended up in Utrecht and my baggage in Madrid. Somehow I wished it was the other way around :-)
After arriving in Utrecht and being without my clothes for the 3rd consecutive day I went shopping with some colleagues. Quick yet very pleasant shopping!
The conference itself was okay, nothing too special but I did a fair amount of networking which shouldn't be underestimated.
During this trip I also went to the Graspop festival with Ed and Stephan and in good tradition more bad luck had to overcome before we finally were able to find a company which would rent us a rental car haha.
Yet despite this early setback we had 3 days of great fun, good metal music (Forbidden and At The Gates were awesome!) and a serious lack of sleep! Being the designated driver made things a bit harder for me but I managed just fine.
Besides, since the car rental clerk wrote down the wrong address he joked about any speeding fines not arriving at my place and I certainly lived up to that :-D
The following week was spent chilling out at my parents' place, watching some movies, hooking up with Bas to catch up on his busy life etc.
Then I came back to Pittsburgh to mentor some students at the PSLC summerschool. Fortunately for me they soon found their way and didn't need much mentoring :-)
Half a week later Paul arrived at Pittsburgh airport and was psyched about going to the Central Illinois Metalfest (CIM). We left on July 17 and returned on July 21. Three days of extreme death metal on the Illinois menu and we had some silly fun with my camcorder. Among others, a "Signs" spoof, a parking lot party prank and so on.
What wasn't fun for me was Paul's snoring. I barely slept during the CIM days.
After dropping Paul off at the Pittsburgh airport on July 22 I had to do some work (geezz!) and ended up wasting all my time on small tasks. I didn't have time to start working on the presentation for the CogSci conference yet!
As some of you might know we won the 'Cognition and Student Learning' award at the CogSci 2008 conference so my talk better be damn good!
Regardless of my lack of preparation colleague Bob and I drove to Washington DC on July 23 and I finally managed to get working on my presentation slides that evening.
On Thursday morning the award was handed out which Bob captured on my camcorder:
I hooked up with colleague Vincent to rework the slides and have a practice run through my talk.
Since my lack of sleep had been building up steadily over the last few weeks I slept in on Friday and I headed to the conference hotel around noon. Our session was scheduled at 1:45pm and as usual I was the last speaker. But as often is the case, I seem to perform quite well under pressure and even with the last minute preparations gave pretty good talk (thanks to Bob again!):
So now it's 2 days after the conference ended and I'm slowly starting to fall back in my old rhythm.
Finally.
Shortly after the deception of our Orange mofos being kicked out of the tournament yet again I flew to the Netherlands for the ICLS 2008 conference.
Since I have the worst bad luck concerning my baggage it indeed got lost once again. Eventually I ended up in Utrecht and my baggage in Madrid. Somehow I wished it was the other way around :-)
After arriving in Utrecht and being without my clothes for the 3rd consecutive day I went shopping with some colleagues. Quick yet very pleasant shopping!
The conference itself was okay, nothing too special but I did a fair amount of networking which shouldn't be underestimated.
During this trip I also went to the Graspop festival with Ed and Stephan and in good tradition more bad luck had to overcome before we finally were able to find a company which would rent us a rental car haha.
Yet despite this early setback we had 3 days of great fun, good metal music (Forbidden and At The Gates were awesome!) and a serious lack of sleep! Being the designated driver made things a bit harder for me but I managed just fine.
Besides, since the car rental clerk wrote down the wrong address he joked about any speeding fines not arriving at my place and I certainly lived up to that :-D
The following week was spent chilling out at my parents' place, watching some movies, hooking up with Bas to catch up on his busy life etc.
Then I came back to Pittsburgh to mentor some students at the PSLC summerschool. Fortunately for me they soon found their way and didn't need much mentoring :-)
Half a week later Paul arrived at Pittsburgh airport and was psyched about going to the Central Illinois Metalfest (CIM). We left on July 17 and returned on July 21. Three days of extreme death metal on the Illinois menu and we had some silly fun with my camcorder. Among others, a "Signs" spoof, a parking lot party prank and so on.
What wasn't fun for me was Paul's snoring. I barely slept during the CIM days.
After dropping Paul off at the Pittsburgh airport on July 22 I had to do some work (geezz!) and ended up wasting all my time on small tasks. I didn't have time to start working on the presentation for the CogSci conference yet!
As some of you might know we won the 'Cognition and Student Learning' award at the CogSci 2008 conference so my talk better be damn good!
Regardless of my lack of preparation colleague Bob and I drove to Washington DC on July 23 and I finally managed to get working on my presentation slides that evening.
On Thursday morning the award was handed out which Bob captured on my camcorder:
I hooked up with colleague Vincent to rework the slides and have a practice run through my talk.
Since my lack of sleep had been building up steadily over the last few weeks I slept in on Friday and I headed to the conference hotel around noon. Our session was scheduled at 1:45pm and as usual I was the last speaker. But as often is the case, I seem to perform quite well under pressure and even with the last minute preparations gave pretty good talk (thanks to Bob again!):
So now it's 2 days after the conference ended and I'm slowly starting to fall back in my old rhythm.
Finally.
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