Alright, everybody! Let's get this show on the road. I've been working on
a fine little wrap-up of my latest overseas holiday for you guys, and who knows?
Maybe you'll learn something. If not, you'll at least get a heaping helping
of my personal brand of entertaining experiences, which many of you seemed
to get some enjoyment out of last time, if I am not mistaken.
Note also, by the way, that my Japan Finale has been updated with the final Day 17.
Like all of my recent trips, this one starts with me largely ignoring my travel
plans and getting Ashnil to do that part for me, and thanks to his obsessive
nature and a particularly helpful member of the uni administrative staff, we
can skip right over any preliminaries with the simple assertion that I knew
this trip was coming for a long time, but nevertheless never really had a chance
to mentally prepare for it in any particular way. In fact, you could say I
was kept so busy until the very moment I left, that even when I got on the
plane, I barely
realised what was going on.
Nevertheless, I managed to have a heck of a time anyways, and everything worked
out perfectly well. There's a lesson there for you organised types: sometimes
it's more fun just to wing it.
Day 1 - In which Liv grows steadily more delirious
Speaking of winging it, did I mention I wasn't particularly prepared for
my trip when I left? All I remember about that evening is saying goodbye
to my parents, then getting Ashnil and his manila folder full of printed
documents to wave me past every checkpoint. I hadn't even really slept
that night, having had a lot of last minute stuff to finish. It was kinda
surreal. Did he have my files in that folder, as well? I don't know. Maybe
just the sight of that folder made people trust him.
I can, however, offer a brief review of in-flight entertainment. Before
I do, however, I should note that I was hardly approaching the situation
objectively. This is to say, I was in "quite a tizzy", as your
grandmother might put it. You see, there was a backlog of work choking
my personal organisation system (zomg what? I have one?) so deep that I
could hardly see the bottom of it - and most of it had deadlines within
the conference period. Being rather a sharp fellow, I
soon realised that a stupidly long plane flight would be the perfect time
to do all of that, especially since I really can't sleep in an aeroplane
seat.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, I spent easily two thirds of the flight
time just working flat out. We're not talking the show-up-to-uni hey-it's-lunch-time
sort of working, we're talking the not-coming-out-of-my-room-until-this-shit-is-done
type of working. As such, simply giving myself a break to watch a movie
or something - particularly given the frustrating nature of some of that
work, and my own increasing sleep deprivation - made me so giddy, I probably
could've watched something from Ashnil's playlist ("Inkheart", "Race
to Witch Mountain", "Street Fighter"...) and still somehow
thought it was good.
So, then, here's what I did end up watching:
Canadian Independent Short Films - Obviously, I didn't
have a great deal of time on my hands, so it was great to have a whole
lot of bite-size movie magic available in the 5-16 minute range. I almost
didn't even notice this option at first, so amazed was I that in Canadian
terms, the "Movies" category includes a sub-category
of "Hollywood". Amidst all the world cinema, avant garde, french,
classic B&W, etc. selections, I almost missed the short-film option.
It all reinforced what would prove to be a rather accurate impression:
Canada is a lot like the US, but with that little bit of extra cultural
sophistication on top, which makes all the difference.
The short films I watched were "Big Girl", "Skinheads", "The
Magic Projector", "Virtual Virtuoso" and "Yellow Sticky
Notes". All of these were very clever little films, and all of them - the
sticky-notes one especially - were unique and entertaining expressions
of clever ideas, which I really enjoyed watching. It's hard to discuss
any movie this short without spoiling the plot and thus earning RJorb's
ire once more, so suffice it to say that next time Lily invites me to a
short film festival, I'll go.
Ip Man - No, this isn't a drama about delivering data
packets, but rather the story of Grandmaster Ip Man, the first martial
arts master to teach the Chinese martial art of Wing Chun. This film is
entirely in Chinese, and I really don't even know if you could find it
in Australia; but if you can, you should go watch it!
I cannot recommend it enough: the martial arts scenes are just outstanding,
and the plot and pacing of the movie were spot on. It was definitely the
best thing I saw all trip. All that Wing Chun action made me
want to go ninja some stuff again. I wonder whether I could find a way
to integrate some of these moves...
Quiéreme - Having been on a roll with these World films,
I tried this ... Belgian? Swiss? Spanish? I dunno, European... film next.
Essentially, it's the story of a chef named Pancho whose young-at-heart
lifestyle
falls apart when he discovers in short order that he is a grandfather,
and that his daughter has gone missing. He has to decide what's important
to him, juggle a lot of difficult choices, and somehow piece together the
life and motives of his vanished daughter while in turn taking care of her daughter.
More than anything, this film reminded me that real people are often more
interesting, and their stories more powerful, than Hollywood bullshit.
I'm a big fan of Hollywood bullshit, overall, but a simple, slow-paced,
powerful story like this occasionally makes me wonder why.
The Pink Panther 2 - Speaking of bullshit, this was bullshit. Go
hire the Peter Sellers films instead.
(There ought to be a music player in this space right here, but it looks
like either you've turned off JavaScript or don't have Flash
Player 9 or better installed. Your loss, buddy. You can either read on,
or go get Flash and come back.) That's all I watched? Well, as I said, there was a lot of work to do.
If you're looking for a recommendation, go see The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
Anyways, its' time to get into the meat of things. Canada!
In order to really set the tone nicely, I recommend starting up the music
player I've put together for you guys above. I must've listened to this
album four or five times straight on the plane while I was doing my work,
and I liked it enough to go buy it after. I think it makes an excellent
accompaniment
to the post.
After some Airport action, promising to meet up later with the various
co-workers who accompanied us (whom I never saw again...), and standing
in a long queue, Ash and I got in a big ol' taxi, and headed on down into
Toronto.
The cab driver proved quite chatty, telling us about the CN Tower which
stands at the heart of the city (which, after Centerpoint, Tokyo Tower,
etc., we were starting to see as a pretty standard big-city feature), and
about other fine landmarks such as the Skydome (purchased by the Rogers
phone company and renamed to the "Rogers Center"  ). Most of
what I got out of his chatter was that there really wasn't much to see
in Toronto, which was fine by me because I could barely see anyway after
an 18 hour flight on 4 hours' sleep.
What I did see, however, reminded me a lot of Melbourne. That is to say,
it was a rather modern city (although for whatever reason, it struck me
as somewhat... dirtier... than Melbourne), full of trams, full of dudes
who think they're pretty fashionable, full of gentrification, corporate
glamour and multicultural dining opportunities. That sort of thing. Melbourne
on the Great
Lakes.
 In
fact, speaking strictly in terms of décor, the only significant
difference I saw to our dear Melbourne was the fact that these people seemed
to love the colour bright yellow. Say what you will about Australians,
but we'll think twice before painting anything a glaring Pacman-yellow.
Not so Canadians: street lamps, fire hydrants, stop lights at intersections,
billboards, road markings, street signs, and a million billion bigass school
buses, all a garish shade of yellow, all over the place. Perhaps, like
bright yellow safety scissors, these simply represent a society that
doesn't quite trust itself with the adult versions of, say, stop lights
yet.
Regardless, the school buses are a culture unto themselves around here.
They are literally everywhere. It seems as though they simply have so many
bright yellow school buses, they simply don't have enough space to park
them all. It would not be exaggerating to say that any Canadian road beyond
a certain length is guaranteed to have a yellow school bus parked somewhere
along it, often looking as though it hasn't actually moved in at least
a solid century or two. Some of these buses seem to have been press-ganged
into other work, presumably 'cause there could not possibly be enough schoolkids
in the country to fill them. Not only are there a ton of different companies
that seem to respray and convert these school buses for a variety of purposed,
but I even saw one building which, aside from being surrounded by parked
school buses, even used one for decoration by making a
bad school-pun in the store's name and sticking the entire bloody bus up
on the roof.
We soon arrived at our hotel, which is to say at the dingy-ass hotel Ashnil
picked out for us. Given the luxury our co-workers were staying in, this
place didn't exactly thrill anybody: the problem with getting Ash to book
anything - even at someone else's expense - is that his low sense
of self-worth tends to make him pick the crappiest stuff he can find. Just
so our hotel: where the others had marble benchtops, we didn't even have
a minibar. Where they had bus-boys and fluffy robes, we had school buses
parked out front and couldn't work out how to start the shower.
Regardless, we weren't about to go to sleep anyway. The moment we got
there, we met up with our good buddy Ben (a freakishly tall German of ill
repute), and decided to have a night (well, day) on the town. Sure, I
still hadn't had any sleep, and it had been some 20 hours by this point,
but we were in Toronto, dammit: it was time to explore!
 The
first order of the day was to find a nice place to eat at, since aeroplane
food is pretty universally known to be no better than chewing on the insides
of your cheeks. In this respect, we found Toronto to be quite accomodating:
just by picking a random street and going, we were spoilt for choice in
nice places to eat.
Downtown Toronto was even more modern and shiny than anything I remembered
from Melbourne, resembling parts of Tokyo in its department-store feel,
high-rise buildings and annoying flashing billboards. In particular, the
area around our hotel had the dubious distinction of being the single place
in Toronto most tightly packed with glaring, luminous video billboards (one
of which billed itself as the largest outdoor colour display in the country).
As such, it was pretty tough to get lost, since from any sufficiently tall
vantage point the harsh glare of neon would shine our way home.
Eventually, the lot of us miscreants stopped in at a very British little
joint called the Duke of Somethington (well... it wasn't actually called
"Somethington", but does it really matter the exact name?) and
had us some fine colonial british cuisine. In retrospect, it's odd that
- spoilt for choice as we were - we picked out the food of a country well-known
for bad cooking, but our judgement was pretty well impaired at this point
as the sleep deprivation mounted. I don't really remember what we ate,
save that ketchup and cracked pepper were in abundant supply and ended
up slathered all over everything (RJorb would love it here). In fact, most
of what I remember about this dinner was
that every one of us was talking, but
I'll be damned
if we were actually talking with each other. It was a lot like each of
us was stringing together our own stream of consciousness with everyone
else's in bizarre and loosely-coupled ways, leaving us laughing for no
apparent reason and wondering what exactly any of us were talking about.
I'm surprised that they even served us alcohol in this state, since the
waiter seemed quite bemused by our antics, but I suppose that's just how
things go at the Duke... around noon... At any rate, given that I had to
win the respect of our German cousins, and wasn't really thinking straight
to begin with, I decided to take up Ben's offer of sharing a pitcher of
their "finest local ale". This ended us up with a sour and watery
local brew known as "Steam Whistle", which aside from having the dubious
honour of being the first pitcher of beer I'd ever bought for my own consumption,
did indeed taste of having been used to grease locomotives, and perhaps
being
collected from the whistle runoff.
Luckily, Ben seemed to like it, and after dutifully consuming about a
third of the pitcher myself, I left him to it. All the while, of course,
Ashnil was looking at both of us in his doe-eyed way, that twinkle in his
eye as he sipped at his cola mute testament to the fact that he knew very
well this vile swill was turning my stomach, and was enjoying every minute
of
it.
Not too long afterward, red-eyed, beered-up and still gibbering incomprehensibly,
we emerged from the Duke to once again stalk the local streets, eagerly
taking
photographs of oddly-shaped roofs (which, upon reviewing the pictures...
weren't
actually unusual in any way, save for being somewhat dirty or having steam
vents on them). It was at
this point that we came upon a street festival in full swing.
My first thought, of course, was: "Does everybody have these bloody
events except us?"
I'll be damned if I've ever just wandered outdoors in Australia, and ended
up in the middle of a huge local celebration of some kind (or even just
a small group of people dancing and playing accordeons). Whenever I am
overseas, though, this kind of thing seems to happen all of the time. It
doesn't matter where I'm at, or even what I'm doing: people around me seem
to find excuses to have a good time, and do it in large groups. Back in
Australia, as Ran knows very well, you can personally host and cater an
excellent party in an attractive venue, doing all the work yourself, and
you'd still have trouble getting more than five or six people to show up.
Bloody Australians.
C'est la vie. Canada, at least, knows how to have a good time: as it
happened, it turned out that there would be big ol' concerts and free performances
(including several by Cirque de Soleil) happening during every day of our
conference - and that we'd just barely missed a free circus performance
an hour ago by walking away at the wrong time to go see the Duke.
Chagrined, tired and delirious, we left the street festival alone for
the time being and decided to stake our claim
on some seats the next day, to see some of those creepy clowns for ourselves.
We never did.
Day 2 - In which Liv blows off the conference to go see Niagara Falls
I woke up early today, despite the previous day's severe jetlag, largely
because I had a great deal of work to be doing. With Ben alternating successively
raunchier poses next to me while stirring in his sleep, I focused firmly
on my laptop display, and got to work. As luck would have it, my supervisor
was online at the time - leading to my having even more work to do in short
order, but also having the positive effect of him telling me the first
day of the conference is bullshit, and need not be worried about too much.
This was precisely what I wanted to hear, particularly since I had come
to much the same conclusion from looking at the programme (which seemed
to show mostly training events for medical doctors and nuclear technologists
- neither category of which I fit). Given this temporary reprieve, I got
back to my work with renewed enthusiasm, and made some significant progress
very quickly. All of a sudden, I had plans for today, and I didn't want
to be stuck in my room revising my presentation slides.
 For
breakfast this morning, Ash, Ben and I scouted about near our hotel and
came upon a fabulous little place called "Eggspectations". With
interior décor reminiscent of Captain Nemo and delicious, mostly breakfast-themed
menu items that made full use of Canada's rich reserves of high-quality
foodstuffs. We were to return here often, and rightly so: we worked our
way through the menu with some exuberance, and everything we ate was both
rich and delicious.
Which brings me to today's first point about Canada: their food is great.
Not because they're remarkable chefs, really, but because their country
is one gigantic farm, and the fresh ingredients they produce coupled with
their multicultural population and their decidedly French love of eating make
Canada nothing if not a great place to eat.
Once we had eaten our fill, Ash went back to his hotel room to do some
work, while Ben and I contacted a friend of my family's who lives here
in the Toronto area. This remarkably fine fellow, a Romanian-Canadian named
Gabriel in case you're wondering, agreed to pick us up and take us on a
little trip to Niagara Falls. Quite the stroke of luck, this, since the
falls were a whole lot farther away from Toronto than I was initially led
to believe.
 The
first and most obvious thing that one notices about Niagara Falls is that
it is extremely... commercial. Not to put too fine a point on it, this natural
wonder is contrasted on its opposite side by a veritable theme-park of neon
and tacky attractions. Featuring everything from Dracula's Castle through
the Guiness World Record Museum (and even a giant ferris-wheel), when it
comes to dodgy variety stores this place lacks for nothing. Surrounded on
all sides by big ol' neon signs, we felt more like we were in Vegas than
at a famed site of natural beauty.
This impression would only strengthen while we were there, as the tackiness
did not abate for a second, but it did mean there were some fine pork-ribs
to be had when we were actually done ogling the falls. Moreover, we got to
enjoy a fine exploration of cheesy world records! Here's some to whet your
whistle:
How big was the world's largest cookie?
[Spoiler]100 feet in diameter, weighing 40,000 pounds!
What's the greatest number of body-piercings ever administered in
one sitting?
[Spoiler]1,016!
What's the world's longest diary?
[Spoiler]Robert Shields of Dayton, Washington, chronicled every 5 minute interval
of his life for 20 years. He did this from 1972 until 1996, writing 35
million words before being crippled by stroke.
What's the farthest a man can pop his eyes out of their sockets?
[Spoiler]Claudio Pinto of Brazil can pop both of his eyes 4 centimeters out of their
sockets. He feels blessed, and claims this is a gift from God.
It looks disgusting.
What amazing world record can a man achieve with just one finger?
[Spoiler]Well, there's probably a few - but the one I'll mention is Les Steward of our fair country, who holds the record for typing out every number from one to one million on a typewriter, in words, not numbers. He did this all with one finger, between April 1982 and November 25, 1998. He must be real proud of himself.
How tall was the world's tallest man?
[Spoiler]A hell of a lot taller than me, if that statue was accurate... seems he was
about 8 feet, 11.1 inches tall (that's 2.72 meters).
With all the excitement... and fudge... it's a marvel we ever remembered
to actually go see the falls. And here they are, in all their majesty!
Shown above are the so-called American Falls, since Niagara Falls actually
consists of two separate watery attractions. The American Falls are on the
American side, right enough, which is all well and good for them, but it
means that we Canada-siders get to see trees and falls on the other side,
whereas they get to see casinos, haunted houses and Lego city. It's interesting
that it would be the Canadians, and not the Americans, who trashed this place
first. Also, if I heard correctly, the built-up bullshit on the Canadian
side has changed the wind patterns over the falls, causing the falls to be
more misty and less visible for everyone. Nice work, jerks.
 Capitalising
on just this attraction, however, is the Maid of the Mist tour. In a stunning
example of Microsoft's "It's a feature, not a bug" ideology,
they sell the extra-misty nature of the falls as a tourist attraction in
its own right, slap a bright blue raincoat on each customer, and ferry people
out to get completely wet.
Being me, of course, I genuinely enjoyed this little diversionary tactic.
There's nothing quite like taking a boat under the falls and having a mountain
of water come down on you. Does make it a pain to take decent photoes, though.
More than once, I was a little worried for my camera - but luckily, it is
made of sterner stuff than most.
As to the falls themselves, there's not terribly much to say about them,
now, is there? They're quite impressive up-close, and the big ol' watery
death-drop is a standing monument to why you might not want to try to ride
down them
in a barrel or walk a tightrope over them. Viewing the Horseshoe Falls (the
other part of Niagara Falls) from above made me wonder just how anyone could
walk that tightrope, since the spray is not confined to the lower part of
the falls, but seems to wet the heck out of anything that strays within a
half-mile region.
Nevertheless, apparently some Frenchman did indeed walk a tightrope across
the falls. He was carrying his manager on his back, no less. What kind of
a manager would agree to that, anyway?
After another tour around Niagara, and the aforementioned pork ribs, we
discovered once more why it is a great idea to have a local show you around.
You see, Niagara Falls itself might not live up to the peace and natural
wonder one might expect, but there is actually a Niagara Falls community
not too far from the falls themselves which does live up to the image perfectly.
Nestled on the ocean-like shores of Lake Ontario, this idyllic community
perfectly depicts the white picket fences, colonial architecture and small-town
feel (with horse-drawn carriages, even!) that the average tourist to Canada
might be looking for.
 Here,
at last, we got a peek at the historical Canada. A place that looked like
a natural park studded with lovely little cottages, save that it was a
functioning community. We're a lucky sort of people, in that even the nicest
parts of Canada can be compared favourably with much of coastal Australia,
save only that there's typically a lot more bright green colours and less
of the whole deserty vibe. You don't realise how arid even the lush parts
of your country look until you view some of the majestic landscapes elsewhere,
and figure out that the scraggly trees we're used to outside of our rainforests
aren't really all that amazing.
We didn't linger too long in the Niagara community, but we did stick around
long enough to get a feel for the place, throw around a boomerang some,
take some shots of the water, and drive around really fast in their little
streets (wheee)!
One thing I noticed along the way, actually, was that numerous other Niagara Falls
type waterfalls existed, but that most of them had been turned into Hydroelectric
plants. What Hand of God decides which falls become power plants and which
become 'unique natural history' is anyone's guess, but it does seem a little
odd overall when you see those dams and think 'well... I guess they already
had THREE'.
Incidentally, if you do ever plan to go off the falls in a barrel, you
might want to be well informed as to which tributaries lead to the tourist
falls, or you might end up in a turbine.
Day 3 - In which Liv takes science to new heights
I woke the next morning the way I would wake for a number of mornings
hence: namely extremely early in the morning (around 5-6 am), only to stagger
over to my tiny computer corner over the unsightly, spread-eagled form
of my oversized German roommate (who insisted on sleeping on top of his
covers, wearing only a small pair of tight orange briefs labelled "Aussie
Bum"). Here, in the semi-darkness and morning chill of the Toronto
nighttime, I would crack open an energy drink, speak to my supervisor
over in Geneva, and proceed to work on polishing all of my material for
this conference and for the upcoming EMBC conference, to which I had to
submit a paper
in the middle of my stay overseas.
 After
what felt like a whole 'nother day unto itself: an eternity of typing,
coding, e-mailing, swearing, preparing graphics with my little mobile Wacom
tablet, and fumbling with my iPhone in the finger-numbing morning chill...
True Morning came at last, in the form of the customary visit from Ashnil.
This ritual, familiar since my Japan days, typically consists of a fully-dressed
and moisturised Ashnil pounding on everybody else's respective doors at
a time precisely calculated to wake us up on time while allowing him the
leeway to feel smug about being ready before us. This typically proceeds
to us standing around in our pyjamas, blinking, while he tells us just
how amazingly efficient and well-prepared he is, what we'll be doing that
day, and when we're supposed to be doing it, all in a cloyingly thick
tone of acute self-satisfaction. Finally, we start to wake up a little,
make out a few of the actual words he is speaking, tell him to go fuck himself,
and then kick him out of our room. Given it was his first time, Ben got
into the spirit remarkably well.
For all its inconvenience when I'm not typing away busily in the corner
of my room, this was reasonably handy today: so important
has this
ritual become
to my sense of time overseas, that
I don't think I ever even checked what time it was or when the conference
started. If Ashnil
hadn't banged on our door, it probably would've been lunch time before
it occurred to either of us that we needed to be somewhere.
When we did head out to the conference, however, we found it very different
to what we expected. Or at least I did. Ash probably had the building plans
and speaker profiles tucked away in his manila folder, if not uploaded
to his PDA. For me and Ben, however, it was pretty exciting.
One factor that led to this excitement was that when I set out to go to
this conference, I had really just expected an upmarket version of the
CeBIT exhibition we get in Sydney, except with just medical software and
devices. Instead, the reality of SNM (the 56th Society of Nuclear Medicine
Annual Meeting, 2009) actually had a lot more in common with the Tokyo
Anime Festival which we experienced back on our visit to Japan. If you
can imagine it, the crowd of young students and fifty-something radiologists,
scientists and
technologists crowding around the latest medical visualization systems,
devices, lectures and services looked and acted surprisingly similarly
to the mix of young and old, mostly-conservative Japanese crowding the
colourful anime and manga art exhibits back in Tokyo - save only that there
were no young children, catgirls, french-maids or giant stuffed animals
to be seen, and I found it much harder to fathom what they were all so
excited about. Granted, the differences might've been a lot more marked
had the Tokyo Anime Festival not banned costume-play within the hall, but
it was interesting to note the similarities: it seems like events of this
nature the world over are remarkably similar... particularly when they
are held in these kinds of homogeneous large-scale conference venues.
 In
particular, the SNM conference occupied one of the largest conference centers
(perhaps the largest) in all of Toronto. In fact, it also sprawled out into
part of another (which, I believe, was part of the same big complex). Here,
in the shadow of CN Tower, Toronto's version of the ubiquitous tourist-and-radio-tower
seemingly found in pretty much every city nowadays, we experienced the height
of conference convenience. Everything here ran like a well-oiled machine:
the computer systems that kept everything running provided each speaker with
the right materials in any speaking room in the building, allowed you to
call attendants in any ol' room whether you needed a video file converted
or just a glass of water, and kept various screens updated with the latest
happenings as well as tracking your movements by means of fancy swipe-cards
you used to swipe into and out of every session you attended.
So luxurious was it here that not only were they handing out bags, gifts,
journals, subscriptions, etc. freely, but they even offered smoothies, free
chow, and complimentary shoe-shines! My shoes were pretty darn shiny, and
I really didn't notice the difference afterward, but I indulged in a free
shoe-shine nevertheless, just to feel like an A-List celebrity. Penny (of
Penny's Loafers) herself attended to my shoe-shining personally, and spent
about 5-8 minutes working on my fancy leather treats with brushes and oils,
cloths and bristles, all the while telling me about her business, the people
she meets, and how well she pays her grateful army of shoe-shine boys. I'm
not sure how we got on that topic, but I also learned several things from
Penny - namely how to tell the difference between a fine leather shoe and
a cheap one, and her patented double-toe
loop method for doing up laces,
which is guaranteed to make laces hold even better than a double-knot, and
maintain their tension throughout the day, without being any harder to undo
than standard shoe-lacing! Wow!
It wasn't Penny I was here to learn from, however. Rightly so, it turns
out, since her patented method completely ruined the already-frayed laces
on Syfro's shoes (which I had stolen and run off to Canada with, along with
his mobile phone and his pants). I was here to learn from medical types,
industry-leaders and
scientists the world over; and there was a place to do just that:
the showroom floor.
Here, a multitude of colourful stands, giant installations of medical
gear, case-study posters, crappy Wii-remote games, TV talking-heads and
clueless sales-staff exhibited the state of the art of nuclear medicine
today. I can't very well quantify just how much information I soaked in
just wandering the floor and taking in the info (and illustrated brochures!)
on offer from all the various groups, but it was certainly a great deal:
being here had the distinct advantage over personal research that rather
than always feeling like your knowledge is incomplete and there may be
a better innovation just around the corner, you could literally look around
and take in the most advanced systems that exist at a glance. Certainly
if anyone had improved on these systems, they would be here hawking them.
Incidentally, however, I can put a precise value on how
much I learned from the actual sales-staff manning the exhibits. This evaluates
to precisely dick. One similarity this conference did have to CeBIT, you
see, is that the super-advanced technology of the future is presented to
you for the most part by ignorant marketing goons who haven't the slightest
clue how any of it works. You have only to try wade past the buzzwords
so many times before you realise that the buzzwords are all these people
have, and just irritably get them to stand aside while you take over their
hardware and find out the answers for yourself. Maybe it's asking too much
to expect every company-booth info-guy to have a PhD, but surely with the
combined might of the medical community descending on Toronto they might
at least have expected that they'd get a few more in-depth questions that
the copious FAQs they memorised did not contain an answer for.
 One
marketing-type dude who did have his hand on the pulse, however, was the
member of our research group's commercialisation team that we met here
in Toronto. More Australian in his manner than most of the rest of us Australians
(down to calling the assembled attendees "Medicos", and using
words like "bandicoot"), he really gave off a very different
vibe to the rest of the people I met at this conference, and I actually
think it was very useful to meet and have the chance to talk to him, because
it opened up my horizons a little regarding research and the process thereof.
It's easy to imagine all this 'researching' business - particularly in
IT - to be a simple matter of doing a whole lot of math in a cubicle somewhere,
writing stuff down and then presenting it at a conference like this one...
what often
gets lost along the wayside is the whole bit about that work being useful
to other people, or able to be turned into a real system or shipping product.
In the process of trying to ensure that this work does indeed go toward
benefiting people, the commercialisation arm of research has to think very
differently about the technologies we create than we scientist-researchers
do. They value different things, work in different ways, and relentlessly
think in terms of a team mentality. Rather than thinking "how can
I solve this problem?", they look at things in terms of how they can
build a Team that solves the problem. This Team, with a capital T, typically
consists of a handful of people all over the world who, together, have
the minds, means and motivation to turn ideas into reality. Having
become
used to the isolated, insular and all-too-often incomplete work involved
in traditional PhD-student style research, I was not only exposed to new
ways of
thinking about my own business, but reminded of how I used to approach
things myself (back when I was doing commercial R&D).
As a fringe benefit of all this highbrow business networking stuff, Ash,
Ben and I were taken to dinner at the top of CN Tower. Our mysterious
benefactor even paid for our tickets to the top, where we ate like kings,
viewed the Toronto skyline from above, and took a whole lot of pictures.
 We
also got to stand on the glass floor of CN Tower, from where you can see
the drop all the way down to the bottom. Given that CN Tower held the record
for being tallest free-standing structure on land in the world for 31 years,
that's a long way down, and the view was suitably dizzying. Not the sort
to be put off by heights, however, I was more interested in how quickly
we got up all that way: the CN tower elevator goes amazingly fast. It's
a miracle their busboys don't, like, separate into their component parts
(grease, monkeys, old spice and a fez) from being shaken around like that.
Maybe if it went around in circles like a centrifuge, they would.
After a fine meal, suitably exhausted, and faced with a long walk back
to our accomodations, we decided we had had enough excitement for the day,
and
strolled hotel-ward. From up in the tower, we had spotted the flashing
lights of more than one gigantic dance party... but after waking up at
5 am, it was too much for the one day.
Day 4 - In which Liv lives off company dime, on company time
Today was notable for being the day of my first talk, and hence of yet
another early-morning Jack Bauer Power Hour of peak-performance hard-working
insomnia, minus the terrorists, and plus more than one hard-to-please
overseas boss.
 The
presentation itself went amazingly well, with the incredible caveat that
NO-ONE I KNEW SHOWED UP!
I told you all earlier that I never saw any of my co-workers again save
for Ash and Ben, and I meant it: not the folks who flew in with me, nor
the others I was meant to spend time with ever showed up anywhere in my
vicinity all conference, save for the aforementioned business contact,
who walked into this presentation five minutes after I'd finished delivering
it. To be fair, one speaker's disappearance had thrown the schedule of
my session into confusion, and I didn't wait around to see if anyone else
would walk in after the talk, but I was a little disappointed that my research
group members didn't see the presentation at all for one simple reason:
it went extremely well! Had it sucked, I would've been overjoyed to have
no-one I know see it, but as-is, I was quite miffed (and had no-one reliable
to hold the camera, resulting in the blurry-ass shots you see here, which
I have digitally enhanced as best I could).
From the start of my presentation, having suffered through a series of
uninspiring talks on chemistry and lab results that none of the speakers
made any effort to deliver in a way that a human being would actually find
interesting, the audience as a whole seemed to heave a sigh of relief at
finding my presentation to be lavishly illustrated, more dynamically presented,
and on a topic they hadn't yet heard a great deal about. As an added bonus,
I had video footage! And who doesn't love HD video? If I ever run an international
conference, I'm going to require everyone to present their work in a Discovery Channel
video-documentary style. They're already spending thousands per person
to ship their people to this conference, not to mention accomodation, incidentals,
and all the costs associated with writing the paper. Would it really break
the budget to borrow some uni camera-equipment, hire a decent editor for
a day or two, and get John Laws or someone to do a smooth-voiced 10-minute narration
with good diction over the top. In total, it can't cost more than a couple
thousand (probably more like a couple hundred, on a shoestring) dollars
to do, and they'd easily make most of the money back on DVD and cable television
royalties.
I know you important scientific decision-makers all read NWTJ (can't get
enough of our discussions re: horse porn, right?), so start pitching this
idea to your committees. Together, we can make cutting-edge scientific
research way more interesting than watching paint dry; an experience which,
unfortunately, might still have trumped some of the talks I went to see
at SNM.
 You're
probably thinking, "That's a fantastic idea, Liviu! You're as wildly innovative
as you are devastatingly handsome!", as any rational human being would
after reading the above, but I'm certain that there are still an unwashed
minority amongst you who aren't interested in what I think. Luckily for
the future of science in general, there are some very rich folk who are:
Big research companies!
So interested are they in ensuring I think highly of them, that they're
willing to pony up the dough for a night of fine dining at the Toronto
Marina... and pay off my bar tab to boot!
This was a side of conferences that I'd heard about, but never had much
to compare to. It's common enough to hear about social events at conferences
giving away dinner for free, etc., but you never really expect it to happen
to you. At least, not like this.
As experiences go, this smacked of being the kind of experience which
had been repeated so often as to become routine to those who attended. This
is my roundabout way of saying that the people who came to the dinner just
didn't seem (to me) to be properly grateful. One got the impression that
they expected to be treated this way, and felt that this adulation was
their due, in some way. As such, when the time came to actually listen
to the short PowerPoint presentations which the company had expended so
much money and effort to have us present for... most people kept eating
and talking right through the whole thing!
Call me old fashioned, but when someone puts me on a bus, books out a
fancy venue, buys me all the drinks I want and pays for me to enjoy a night
of fine dining, I consider it a mark of good breeding to actually listen
to their short, unintrusive presentations between courses.
 Not
so the majority of medical professionals, apparently, whose roar of conversation
and obvious attitude of indifference to the words of their hosts continued
unimpeded throughout, to the extent that I was quite ashamed after a while
to be one of their number. About the most interest they exhibited was that
a few of them occasionally looked over at the presenter, as if to ask,
"Are you still going?"
Conversely, of course, if I were a large company that had just bought
a fancy-pants dinner for a few hundred people, I would probably do my best
to have them addressed by engaging, motivated speakers. I don't mean to
be unnecessarily insulting, but the few sad clowns they had there talking
to us weren't exactly Martin Luther King. My grandmother doesn't speak
English, but even she would've done a much better job of making that audience
sit up and take notice. Interested or not, it's hard to chatter on calmly
through
the tirade of a shrieking Romanian woman. At the very least, people
would've looked at the slides.
Dissatisfied as I was with both the audience and the hosts, I was more
than happy with the chow. Most of you will know of my fondness for colourful
mixed drinks, and the open bar combined nicely with this to result in the
LivMan bringing down pairs after pairs of cocktails to the open astonishment
of Ben (who waited in line four times as long for just one beer). I rather
enjoyed my little drink-procurement secret, sharing out my drinks rather
than giving away my tricks, but the magic was remarkably easily achieved:
I went to the upstairs bar, instead. The line moved faster, and they had
a lot more delicious entreés.
In the end, I probably ate about three to four times as much as anyone
else there; another thing that should come as no surprise to anyone. Most
especially, I enjoyed the wide selection of desserts. The tables of delectables
on offer were laden down with every food group in the dessert pyramid...
food groups which I piled into my own little pyramid, and proceeded to
devour with gusto.
 This
dining trip, however, was not entirely free in my case. As my second presentation
loomed the next day (a result of having had two papers accepted to the
conference, to my companions' one), I had plenty of last-minute rehearsing,
slide revisions and code-testing to get on with - to say nothing of having
to get up early the next day to go prepare my equipment for the computer-demo. The
time I lost devouring the entire menu of this delicious Torontoan destination
cost me precious time, which I was forced to pretty much stop sleeping
to make up for.
Unlike certain Fijians with a martyr complex, however, I'd rather be
haggard, overworked and hedonistic than dependable, well-rested and completely
no fun.
As such, the end of the night, our eventual return to the hotel, and everyone
else going to sleep became the signal for my day to start in earnest. Having
messed up my body-clock to the point where every part of me thought it
was a different time, and fed my body sufficient calories and caffeine
to keep going, I burned on through the night and got everything done that
was left for me, from final presentation work that had been buried by conference-paper
writing through the last-minute fixing of flickering
issues in my web-based imaging client, I got it all done - and done to
a superior standard. By that point it was almost time for morning, and
I had just about frozen in place in my chair.
I pushed past Ben's
writhing body as he grunted in his sleep in an almost Ash-like fashion,
threw myself under the thick Canadian covers, and then fainted dead away. |
Canada Powers, Activate!
Ranneko: To be fair Grubs, I think when you are home you don't wander the right areas for this stuff. In summer every friday there is a noodle markets in North Sydney and a band. There are markets at that primary school just near Uni each weekend, which I only know due to the inconvenience of the extra foot traffic.
GrubLord: Duly noted. I might well look into some of the local festivities, having gotten a taste for such things.
Ash: The British joint we ate at was called the Duke of Somerset. You had a chicken pot-pie with vegetables while Ben and I had the Big Ben Burger with cheese and fries.
Praeteritio: I wait in anticipation for the next post. Awesome work.
