I've done my presentation at the ASIS&T meeting in Vancouver, gone to a social, and got back to my room after some conveyor-belt sashimi. My feet hurt, I have blisters on my toes from the walking, and my head is still buzzing a little from the enormous volumes of information I've been processing all day.
Today was really cool. It went by in a blink. I'm amazed just how
much overlap there is in everyone's work, despite that we didn't know each other beforehand. But, building off the same articles, I'm getting what it means to work in an academic community- it's a community that forms by people interested in the same topics, reading the same papers, and building new research from there. I met the authors of the book ("Personal Information Management") that brought me into this field- that actually helped me reground my dissertation- .I was a bit nervous leading up to the talk- it's not at all like lecturing to freshmen students. But somehow I did the unexpected- not only did I fail to completely mess up the whole presentation, but people seemed quite interested. I actually had something interesting to say to a room of top researchers in the field.
I talked about transportation just a little too much- now I'm "the bus guy" even though my paper never mentioned it. Note to self: limit what you say about "motivation of research" if it's pretty tangential. Geez, didn't they just have another presentation about associative memory? :) But my simplistic little triangle framework of time, place, and task,
It's nice to be in a city again. I didn't realize how much I missed urban life until this weekend. Now it's time to get ready and meet the guy who helped invent XML.
