Medsip
I spent the last few days in sunny Santa Margherita Ligure, in Italy, at the Medsip conference. Actually, to be strictly accurate, I spent the days in the Auditorium Santa Margherita, and only saw the sun for a couple of hours in the morning, lunchtime and evening.
The conference was pretty good. There wasn't much that was directly relevant to my research (the closest one had such a dire presentation that I didn't get anything out of it anyway), but it's still useful to make contacts and find out what other people are doing in the same general area. I also made copious notes on what things seemed to be common between the good and bad presentations, so that I can use them to do a good presentation in Vancouver.
I learned a number of things about Italy. Firstly, the food is excellent. I had at least 4 ice-creams in three days, plus quite sizable meals, and everything was absolutely delicious. The other aspect was less good - they appear to be unable to configure working wi-fi (tried and failed to connect in two different hotels), and the trains, while cheap, are not reliable and have little to no announcements to tell you where you are. The buses are OK though (also astonishingly cheap).
Oh, and Air France decided to put my cabin baggage in the hold on the way back. Bastards. It did come out fast enough for me to get the last sensible transport home, but I'm going to have to replace all my inhalers, as they will almost certainly have got too cold, and there's no safe way of telling if it's affected the active ingredient.
The conference was pretty good. There wasn't much that was directly relevant to my research (the closest one had such a dire presentation that I didn't get anything out of it anyway), but it's still useful to make contacts and find out what other people are doing in the same general area. I also made copious notes on what things seemed to be common between the good and bad presentations, so that I can use them to do a good presentation in Vancouver.
I learned a number of things about Italy. Firstly, the food is excellent. I had at least 4 ice-creams in three days, plus quite sizable meals, and everything was absolutely delicious. The other aspect was less good - they appear to be unable to configure working wi-fi (tried and failed to connect in two different hotels), and the trains, while cheap, are not reliable and have little to no announcements to tell you where you are. The buses are OK though (also astonishingly cheap).
Oh, and Air France decided to put my cabin baggage in the hold on the way back. Bastards. It did come out fast enough for me to get the last sensible transport home, but I'm going to have to replace all my inhalers, as they will almost certainly have got too cold, and there's no safe way of telling if it's affected the active ingredient.