What am I doing here?

Mark asked if I was presenting a paper. So I will catch you guys up on what I have to do at a typical conference.

Monday-7:45am-5:15pm Work my volunteer duty to earn my scholarship funds that I received. This will be supervising and technical support of Tutorials 1 (morning) and 2 (afternoon). Tutorials give a brief introduction to a particular concept. I killed two birds with one stone because I was already signed up for the first tutorial on Education-Based Multiagent Systems. This relates to my work on training firefighters.

Tuesday-9am-5:15pm Attend Safety and Security Workshop. Workshops are where people can meet in smaller, focused groups and present work in progress that is not as developed as a full conference paper. My research colleague, Janusz, will present a paper during this workshop that I am a co-author on. I am also Technical Chair for this Workshop and as such will be hosting and presenting on a simulation contest (that's what I was debugging yesterday). It is more of a friendly this year and will just serve as a lead up to something more sophisticated next year.

Thursday- I present a paper on my research. It is a poster paper, so I will set up a poster and stand by it and people will come up and ask me questions about my work.

Thursday- 14:00-15:30 and 16:00-17:00 I give a demonstration of the system that I have developed (with lots of help) in order to perform experiments for my research.

Sorry to bore you with the details ;) Had to get them out of the way.

The second tutorial was on P2P systems. Made me nostalgic for the glory days of Terazima!! I can't believe that site is still up.

Proof that I just don't take pics of electrical equipment inside. I also take shots through the window from inside too :) Universiteit Utrecht 

Further insight into the dutch psyche. They refer to projectors as "beamers." 

Found Wireless

Yes! Found wireless at the workshop/tutorial locations even though they said I wouldn't :)

Below you can see a the electrical sockets here, which are all quite recessed. This made it hard for my old plug adapter to work (it would have worked if they were flush with the wall). It is an old, sacred adapter passed down from generation to generation. Well, from grandmother to me. These new ones force you to have the metal grounds (see top and bottom prongs on inner rings). It's very similar to the third prong they are encouraging back in the states. However, it makes the plugs 2-3 times bigger over here. Huh, I thought the US was supposed to do everything bigger.

Got here by the local bus this morning. They gave us all passes for the week (sweet!). I met this guy doing a post-doc in medicine from Spain and he helped me out with the right stop.

I should probably pay attention to this Tutorial, since I am signed up for it :)

Here we have your standard euro electrical outlet. 

Is the glass completely empty or not full? 

It's hip to be "plein"

Well I broke down and asked what "plein" means. It means square. So the Domplein is the Dom Church square is the church and surrounding buildings where people congregate. I got the nerve because the hotel actual is on Jaarbeursplein street, so I couldn't go on much longer in the dark.

Today I spent most of the day debugging some code. I really want to get this system running on my system and have been working hard at it and haven't been that successful yet, but there are some good guys here that I am persuading to help me. It's not bugs in my code per se; I am just trying to get something to compile on my system and everytime some error gets fixed, another pops up. We'll see.

But we walked around Domplein today and I am getting to know the downtown Utrecht area well. Lots of canals and little shops, but most things were closed today because it's Sunday.

Janusz finally made it here, after going to the wrong hotel. He then was quite persistent in getting us all to go out for a beer. So we did. I have drank like 4 beers here already, which is a lot more than average for me. Only about 2 euros a glass though, which is good. It's cheaper than water.

Okay, so let me go on my tirade now: You can't get tap water here. And if you know me, you know how much I love tap water. People look at you as if you are crazy if you ask for it and they understand. Most of the time they just end up bringing you bottled water that is usually carbonated. And they only seem to have bottled water that is the really expensive San Pelligrino crap. O man, it's no good. But once in a while, we are able to convince one of these proprietors to give us tap water. So tonight we go to this Moroccan restaurant with expensive food (20 euros) and we ask for tap water and they give us really tiny cups of water, which we all finish quickly and I ask for more and they give us 2 more (there are 6 of us). We finish those and I ask for more and they say "No, we already gave you too much water. Do you realize that we have to pay for that?" Interesting. Well at least that is only culture clash I have hit so far.

The rain hasn't been that bad. Conference starts tomorrow. I have to do my volunteer duty for my scholarship.

I will leave you with your moment of zen in the pic above^

The Dom Church with the Dom Clock Tower in the background. It's on the Domplein. Don't ask me what Dom means ;)

It's their word for pancake type crepe thing that seems to be the only traditional dutch food I can find.