Last Day of the Conference

12 August 2008; 2330hrs Amherst, Massachusetts

Another day of boring conference presentations. This conference is seriously lacking in organisation. I basically slept through the morning presentations after a visit to the Post Office. It cost me a whopping US$85 to send my book and notes back to the Dot and that was my cheapest option! What the… I guess my books were really really heavy…

The best part of the day was the dinner. It was the best I had so far at this conference. Still not too good but best so far.

I also met my competition/rival from Seoul University. Lee’s student. Dang... He already has a paper out on something similar to what I’m doing… I believe my analyses methods are different and better, so there’s hope yet. But a rival! I need to work harder and faster.

We went around the campus this afternoon. It’s really big and open. I really like the campus, but I cannot imagine staying here. It’s simply too inaccessible! I’d die without a car. My entire life would be experiments and work... Hah... It’s lucky that I didn’t come to the US to study in the first place, especially in a small university town like this.

We went for a lab tour this afternoon. Actually, truthfully, our labs are better equipped. The only drawbacks of our labs are that they are older and a lot messier. The age really shows, making the labs rather dinghy, more unpleasant than they really are. But equipment-wise, we are much better. I only wish we could be like them and in Uppsala, that the equipment are shared regardless if they were bought from research project funds or not. Wishful thinking eh?

Oh well, we are making an early start to Boston tomorrow. The bus leaves at 0900hrs, so that means I can get out of the final session of this conference!