The Guy Who Stalked Me: Part II Strikes
So let’s move on with the chronicling.
I woke up at 6:30am and took a shower. I ate the continental breakfast delivered to my room before rushing out to catch the bus to the university. The bus schedules were idiotic. Buses only operated between 6:45am and 10:00am and then between 4:00pm and 6:30pm. That meant that if you were presenting at 3pm like I was, you had to go before 10am and STAY there until after your session got done. So I was at the university from 8am to 5pm that day.
We got to the university and got on line to register for the conference. It was a nice campus - very green. They gave us a bag, a name tag, a bottle of water, conference schedules, and guess what, a temporary tattoo with the conference logo on it! So exciting! After getting all that swag, me a friend decided to explore the campus. We spent some time in the library computer lab. Sat around and took pictures of the pretty campus. Then we went to lunch. I was surprised that the vegetarian lunch pack was actually pretty good. After lunch, we just sat around going over our conference presentations and making sure we knew what we were talking about.
At around 2:45pm, I went to my assigned room and waited there. I was up first in the 3pm session. My presentation finally started and I thought I went over it fairly well. I still had time left when I finished because I didn’t get any time warnings (2 minutes or less). I got three questions. The first two were good and I think I was able to provide satisfactory answers. The third one, well, I don’t think I quite understood what the question was. I tried my best to explain it but obviously my answer wasn’t what he was looking for. Thankfully, a couple of people in the room that understood him bailed me out. HUGE THANKS!!!!
The guy was a professor from SUNY Brockport and it seemed he was on a mission to harass everyone that day. Three more presenters after me got a question from him. Each question was equally confusing and the students obviously weren’t quite sure how to answer him. I was in good company. The last guy in the session was this professor’s student. And guess what, the professor kept his mouth shut. Quite what was expected. Was he trying to sabotage everyone else’s presentation to make his guy’s look good? I thought so. But, his student got a question that he answered incorrectly!! The professor had to stay shut because he was his adviser. I found that to be some kind of retribution.
My session got out at 4:40pm and I met up with my buddies to get on the bus back to the hotel. We were too tired to want to go into the city again. Hence, we just got a quiet dinner at the hotel restaurant and went to our rooms. I did some homework and reading that was due. I think my friend just passed out. We decided to go to the conference a little later the following day since there was nothing we wanted to see in the morning. We checked out posters in the two afternoon sessions after grabbing lunch and a bunch of stupid pictures. Some of our school-mates were presenting so we were there to encourage them.
I saw a couple of really cool posters: one by an EE student from Columbia showing a voltage generator using alternative solid state devices that can produce steady voltages for use as references and another one on two-photon spectroscopy that produced a blue laser from two near-infrared lasers. They weren’t ready to call it a laser yet because of the nature of it’s production. But it looked like one!! And they were using the same kind of rubidium cell that we use in our lab as well as a laser at 780nm just like us. So that was quite fun!
The Guy Who Stalked Me
So you’re probably wondering why all these posts are (will be) called The Guy Who Stalked Me. Well, because a guy did stalk me. When I was reading the first poster, this dude from Milwaukee comes up and starts asking the poster guy some questions. Now these two are EE majors and I took one EE class. But I found the conversation interesting and hung around until it was done. We thanked the presenter and walked away. While roaming around aimlessly, I bumped into that same guy again. All right, we were in the same area so that wasn’t alarming.
Then, I went up to the second poster and was reading it when this guy shows up and starts asking questions again. This time though, I knew more about what was going on and most of his questions were boring. But I waited for my turn and asked some questions of my own. And then, finally, I left the poster and went to hang out with my friends. After the poster session was done, we walked out of the poster hall and started going to the cafeteria to get food. The guy was walking behind us.
We had the special “Mexican Fiesta” dinner and had plans to go into the city after that. But we got lazy and played table-tennis and ate dinner at the hotel restaurant again. Then we trooped over to a friend’s room to watch a Bond film. I was way too sleepy to hang around even though they were watching Living Daylights. I went to bed.
Part III to follow.
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