Home again, home again, jiggety-jog
The house is on fire, and so is the cat.
Yes, I am returned from Nova Scotia, after an only moderately ghastly trip. I flew out of Halifax at about 2130 local time, arrived in Heathrow at about 0830 local (or 0430 body time...), having seen the surprisingly enjoyable film Failure to Launch and not got any sleep; spent an hour lying on a bench in Heathrow with newspaper over my eyes while two flights to Glasgow took off without me; finally got on the (delayed) flight that I was booked into; slept for most of that; then was met at the airport by wormwood_pearl and went into Glasgow, where I was seized by a sudden urge to buy trousers. Now, normally I have to be physically dragged into clothes shops by teams of horses: this may give you some idea of the abnormality of my mental state by this point. Eight try-ons later, I came back to my senses, went home, and had a long lie-down.
[By the way: yes, I did bring wormwood_pearl back a Mountie (a sergeant, no less): watch my moblog for photos. But no, I didn't bring back any maple syrup, on the grounds that it can easily be obtained in Britain and I don't actually like the stuff. I'm still intrigued by the concept of vegan pancakes, though, stronglight: could you post the recipe or something? It strikes me that we have a bit of a black swan problem here, in that most people's definitions of pancake would preclude veganosity]
Anyway, here's a brief commentary on my Lessons Learned re packing:
Things I forgot to bring that I wished I'd had
Sunscreen
Mosquito repellant
Swimming trunks (though I had a pair of shorts, which were OK)
Decent-size bottle for water
Toothpaste (though I was able to acquire some more)
Things I thought about, decided not to take, and then wished I'd had
Anti-itching cream (for the record, Canada is home to some truly vicious biting insects. In fact, most of my left tricep acquired a nasty rash from one of them, and I was drawing lines around it for a couple of days to track its progress)
More T-shirts
Booze (the bar at White Point was far from cheap, and many categorists are into malt whisky)
Another book for when I finished Quicksilver. Though I acquired plenty of maths to read during the conference.
Sunhat
Fan (aaargh! What was I thinking?)
Things I brought and didn't need
Compass. I maintain that this could have been useful, but as it turned out, wasn't. And now I seem to have lost the dratted thing. Gah. [EDIT: Found it! Yay!]
Blackwell, Kelly and Power's paper on 2-monads. The literary equivalent of dwarf bread.
Stuff that was seriously useful
Notebook & pen
Novel
Camera (also charger and plug adaptor) - not least for the torch feature. There was one stage where we were trying to light a fire, and light was provided by my phone, held at the correct angle by being put in a pint glass and balanced on the sides of the firepit. I was quite glad when the fire started providing enough light for me to take the phone away :-)
Phone (though the bill's going to be scary - Barclays kindly cut off my card half-way through the second week, forcing me to spend half-an-hour on the phone to get the ban lifted)
Swiss Army Knife (only moderately useful, but see below)
Sunglasses
Shaving oil. This stuff is the bomb. The size of a bottle of eyedrops, with a screw-on cap so it's unlikely to make a mess, and it gives a really good shave.
Part of the point of the trip was to find a lower bound on how much preparation you need to do before a trip: as it turns out, not much. I didn't have a guidebook, but the few pages of info I'd printed from the web turned out to be useful, and there were times when a guidebook would have been handy. I was also very lucky in that Jeff Egger from the conference offered to put me up free of charge for a week (thanks, Jeff!). My plan of deliberately checking in a bag so I could take knife, razor blades, nail clippers etc turned out to be a good one - the hassle of baggage checking is more than outweighed by the benefits of being able to take sharp things, and frankly every time I've tried to remove sharp things from my luggage I've forgotten something and had to check a bag anyway.
More news on the other-people-doing-my-work front: there are actually two groups who've been working on this. One group is definitely doing something different - it's like the difference between the algebraic and non-algebraic definitions of n-category. This was the elegant, moral definition I was talking about earlier. The other definition looks suspiciously like something I tried and rejected because it didn't work in an important case: I'll have to look at this one more carefully.
Yes, I am returned from Nova Scotia, after an only moderately ghastly trip. I flew out of Halifax at about 2130 local time, arrived in Heathrow at about 0830 local (or 0430 body time...), having seen the surprisingly enjoyable film Failure to Launch and not got any sleep; spent an hour lying on a bench in Heathrow with newspaper over my eyes while two flights to Glasgow took off without me; finally got on the (delayed) flight that I was booked into; slept for most of that; then was met at the airport by wormwood_pearl and went into Glasgow, where I was seized by a sudden urge to buy trousers. Now, normally I have to be physically dragged into clothes shops by teams of horses: this may give you some idea of the abnormality of my mental state by this point. Eight try-ons later, I came back to my senses, went home, and had a long lie-down.
[By the way: yes, I did bring wormwood_pearl back a Mountie (a sergeant, no less): watch my moblog for photos. But no, I didn't bring back any maple syrup, on the grounds that it can easily be obtained in Britain and I don't actually like the stuff. I'm still intrigued by the concept of vegan pancakes, though, stronglight: could you post the recipe or something? It strikes me that we have a bit of a black swan problem here, in that most people's definitions of pancake would preclude veganosity]
Anyway, here's a brief commentary on my Lessons Learned re packing:
Things I forgot to bring that I wished I'd had
Sunscreen
Mosquito repellant
Swimming trunks (though I had a pair of shorts, which were OK)
Decent-size bottle for water
Toothpaste (though I was able to acquire some more)
Things I thought about, decided not to take, and then wished I'd had
Anti-itching cream (for the record, Canada is home to some truly vicious biting insects. In fact, most of my left tricep acquired a nasty rash from one of them, and I was drawing lines around it for a couple of days to track its progress)
More T-shirts
Booze (the bar at White Point was far from cheap, and many categorists are into malt whisky)
Another book for when I finished Quicksilver. Though I acquired plenty of maths to read during the conference.
Sunhat
Fan (aaargh! What was I thinking?)
Things I brought and didn't need
Compass. I maintain that this could have been useful, but as it turned out, wasn't. And now I seem to have lost the dratted thing. Gah. [EDIT: Found it! Yay!]
Blackwell, Kelly and Power's paper on 2-monads. The literary equivalent of dwarf bread.
Stuff that was seriously useful
Notebook & pen
Novel
Camera (also charger and plug adaptor) - not least for the torch feature. There was one stage where we were trying to light a fire, and light was provided by my phone, held at the correct angle by being put in a pint glass and balanced on the sides of the firepit. I was quite glad when the fire started providing enough light for me to take the phone away :-)
Phone (though the bill's going to be scary - Barclays kindly cut off my card half-way through the second week, forcing me to spend half-an-hour on the phone to get the ban lifted)
Swiss Army Knife (only moderately useful, but see below)
Sunglasses
Shaving oil. This stuff is the bomb. The size of a bottle of eyedrops, with a screw-on cap so it's unlikely to make a mess, and it gives a really good shave.
Part of the point of the trip was to find a lower bound on how much preparation you need to do before a trip: as it turns out, not much. I didn't have a guidebook, but the few pages of info I'd printed from the web turned out to be useful, and there were times when a guidebook would have been handy. I was also very lucky in that Jeff Egger from the conference offered to put me up free of charge for a week (thanks, Jeff!). My plan of deliberately checking in a bag so I could take knife, razor blades, nail clippers etc turned out to be a good one - the hassle of baggage checking is more than outweighed by the benefits of being able to take sharp things, and frankly every time I've tried to remove sharp things from my luggage I've forgotten something and had to check a bag anyway.
More news on the other-people-doing-my-work front: there are actually two groups who've been working on this. One group is definitely doing something different - it's like the difference between the algebraic and non-algebraic definitions of n-category. This was the elegant, moral definition I was talking about earlier. The other definition looks suspiciously like something I tried and rejected because it didn't work in an important case: I'll have to look at this one more carefully.