Wednesday, January 09, 2008

RENO

[Edited while I was in the Reno Airport]

Hey folks, quick update - I had more adventures. I got rerouted through [I wanted to write 'friendster' here earlier] orange county towards Reno. When I got there they didn't have it in their records that I had flew there. So I was asked by a TSA guy how I got through security. Well, long story short I got a private [also wanted to write 'dance' here] search in the middle of the airport. It was no big deal, but interesting nonetheless. The guy gave me a thorough search, checking everything, but he didn't look at my bag or coat at all? Weird. Anyways, everything went well here - I didn't win though. I am so glad to be done with the presentations. Now it is time to relax.

I'll write more later when I am not using a public computer. -Eric

Reno Redux [Things I added in the airport]

I had a lovely incident happen to me at my second talk, the professional one. The entire time that I was in Germany, I kept a Heidi Klum background on my computere. She is Germany and hot, so it makes sense. As I was leaving Germany and heading to Reno I changed my background to something more professionally appropriate. I have this awesome shot from the deep field imager, or something like that. Now, I've had this background up for a good week. I go to my second presentation and when I plug my computer in for the presentation, Bam - half naked Heidi Klum. They engineers got a good kick out of it. Fortunately it was a rather discreet black and white photo. Either way, a bit embarrassing, but oh well.

The talks went well. Dr. Flandro had a good talk too, but he went long. He just had too much stuff to talk about. Today I slept in late and that felt good. I have been going non-stop for a long time. I think it was two nights ago that I went bowling with the other student winners. It was a good group with good presentations. It is nice to see some other quality students around. So I kicked all there asses in bowling and then had a few drinks. That is the rule for me, I am good at all bar games (pool, darts, shuffleboard, etc.,) I think bowling counts as well. I was dead tired, so I was done pretty early.

The view from my hotel room. Reno is pretty nice. They got 8 feet of snow in Lake Tahoe (the reason I was stuck in Vegas.)

Today I ran into Dr. Vakili and hung out with him at the exhibitors area. It was nice chatting with him. Oh and I was hanging out with a group of Australians from RMIT, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, last night. Their head guy asked me if I would like to do an internship there for 3 months, or whatever time I want. I would love to do that, and the similar language would be a welcomed change. So maybe soon I'll be in Australia for a bit. It would make for a new batch of continued blog posts.

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