Last night I learnt two things. That firstly in Vienna I can get amazing tacos and secondly Austrian Netflix has a great selection of movies that I can’t get on UK Netflix. These are the important things to discover when away on a conference.
06:40 – Seeing as I spent a good few minutes yesterday writing about my annoying phone alarm tone you’ve have thought I would have changed it. I didn’t, I’m an idiot. Maybe contorting myself in the shower will cheer me up
07:00 – It didn’t
07:45 – Still managed a healthy breakfast, except I’m not repeating the mistake of yesterday I’ve had coffee and also prepped a takeaway coffee for the journey in. I will not be later nor will be I inattentive, I’ve totally got today sorted.
08:45 – And I was still late. Guess what, if you drink 2 cups of coffee and a glass of water first thing there’s a chance you’ll need to make a little stop to *cough* let it back out. This are the important things that obviously everyone wants to know about attending a conference.
10:00 – This morning I visited a pico session. Pico is type of presentation that has two phases, a series of 2 minute presentations followed by a sort or electronic poster session. Each presenter gets a touch screen around the room and the audience wonder around chatting to them. The presentations are I suppose designed to whet the appetite of the audience and prompt discussions. Missing 10 out of the 12 presentations because I was late wasn’t the best start but was a pretty relaxed start to the day.
11:00 – Had an extended coffee break to replace the coffee I’d ‘lost’ earlier. This time the great and famous Rolf Hut tracked me down and we chatted about all things cartoons (he has a big handful of my badges to hand out) and fiber sensors. Many future projects have been plotted and will be discussed after EGU but this meeting ended when Rolf had to run off and go fish one of his sensors out of the Danube… geoscientist problems.
12:30 – I had a cunning plan today I was going to cartoon in the press area while there was a press conference. My reasoning was that all the real press would be doing their jobs at the press conference. Sadly I hadn’t accounted for the fact that the press are apparently related to birds and had built ‘nests’ of computers and notebooks on every available desk. I resorted to cartooning back out in the public area which considering the cartoon that had been requested meant I got some strange looks.
13:00 – I had planned to go to a fascinating sounding session on Ocean Remote Sensing this afternoon but something more important came up. My friend @Dirt_science found me with exciting news, there’s a booth with cocktails. Ocean Remote Sensing will have to wait until I’ve discovered this amazing location and doubled check the quality, for science.
14:30 – Sadly cocktails appear to be for later. They did offer free coffee but I feared that any more caffeine and I will no longer walk round the conference centre, I’ll float. Instead I have used my afternoon wisely by drifting around the exhibitor stands and eyeing up the free goodies. There are rich pickings of pens, fluffy bugs and enough stickers to cover my bag 5 times over .
17:00 – Beer Poster time again! Today I have been busy on twitter persuading people to come find me to get badges and I’ve been seeding various other people with stocks of badges to hand out. I’m hoping that I start seeing more ErrantScience badges appearing in the wild after this evening. If not then I’ll have to step up my badge campaign and start pinning badges to people when they are not looking.
18:45 – Operation give out all the badges is an unmitigated success. By which I mean I gave out some badges. I also got to go see an excellent poster in comic form and a poster that actually involved some live participation and data collection. My day today doesn’t end here as I’m going to a talk from 19:00 till 20:00 (making today about 12 hours of conference) but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to read about that.
1 Comment
Diary of a conference attendee – day three, taking a break – ErrantScience · 25 February 2019 at 18:41
[…] Yesterday I decided to bail on the 19:00 till 20:00 talk. Turns out trying to do a 12hr stint at a conference is a little bit exhausting. So instead of late night conferencing I sat in the now blissfuly quiet media room, drank coke and wrote up some notes from the day. It took the entire hour but I have a very well formatted page with “Rocks are made of chemicals”. I really feel like I’ve learnt a lot this week. […]