Today, I had a good hot breakfast at the Embassy Suites, and it was complimentary! They serve all kinds of omlettes made to order, french toasts and pancakes, scrambled eggs, lots of varieties of fruits, juices, cereal milk, coffee, donuts, pastries, etc etc. It is pretty major. And you can eat your fill downstairs and then take a full tray of food to your room if you like.
Next I walked over to the convention center for my 8:30 AM workshop on ArcHydro Groundwater - Managing groundwater data in ArcGIS. the walk to the center was very comfortable as the weather was cool and there was a nice breeze in the air. I met up with an Indian lady from Bangalore, who has been teaching Biology for non-majors at Ball State Univ in Indiana. She's beginning to use GIS software in her curriculum and is here to attend the parallel GIS educators' conference. She has been in the States for 11 years. She is also staying at the same hotel.
For lunch, I walked several blocks to a grocery store - Ralphs - where I had the best turkey salsalito panini, for about $7. I then had a nice walk back to the convention center for the start of the afternoon session.
The session was interesting but not very applicable to what we do at work. But the work that these people are doing is amazing. And there were so many nationalities among the presenters today, including American, Indian, Chinese, Serbian, German, Australian, and probably others I don't know about!
I tried to post my zoo pics (I have about 75-80) on my picasa web album but I cannot because the conference organizers have decided to control some amount of internet traffic so attendees don't create major bottlenecks in the network. And since uploading pictures of a personal nature can do that, I'm not able to access picasa web album from work. I will try later from the hotel. Btw, for others who may/may not read these posts, I also cannot access the vpn server at my workplace from here...turns out the organizers only allow connections to some very basic/mainstream vpn servers and block attempts to open a lot of different ports (I hope I'm making some sense here). Fortunately, I can still use webmail to access work-related email, so all is not lost.
I'm done for now. I just spoke to Eliza, and she is already on the LEX bus back to Urbana. Her plane was over an hour late so she missed the bus she was originally scheduled to be on, and had to catch the later bus for an extra $10 fee :-( doesn't sound fair that airplane delays are passed on to the customer in the form of extra fees. LEX already imposes a $5.50 fuel surcharge on their tickets, which makes them much more expensive than the Amtrak!
Ok, I will try to load my zoo pics and some misc pics from today to picasa web album later tonight and send you the link somehow. Got to go now.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
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