After math

Predictably, the last few days are somewhat of a blur. The time difference travelling east is known to be more disorienting than travelling west. This time around the difference in climate adds to the effect: on the outbound trip, I think the temperature at my destination was within a few degrees of that at my starting point, but it is more than 40 degrees warmer here now than it was when I left in Banff.

Friday: finishing off

There are different kinds of scientific events. Regular conferences consist of back-to-back talks of around 30 minutes with a short QA-session at the end of each, interrupted by coffee and lunch breaks during which you typically talk to people you already know or in some cases to the speaker of a presentation that had something particularly interesting. In a four- or five-day event, participation will drop towards the end since the saturation level for new information has been reached.

In a workshop like this on the other hand, the group of participants is smaller which invites more mingling and actually getting to meet new people; and the programme is much more diverse, including sessions where the purpose is to discuss rather than just to listen. If the discussion is constructive and focussed enough, you may actually come to a point where you feel that you have achieved something new. (New means publishable.) The last is what happened this week: with the group that was discussing benchmarks we decided to push for a paper on our ideas, to be submitted to a workshop (of the first kind) on Bidirectional Transformation taking place in April next year. The paper still has to be written, of course: deadline next Friday. I promised to take good part of the writing on me as (given my sabbatical) it is easier for me to make time for this than for most of the others.

(Reading back, I see that the above gives the impression that what I called a "regular" conference is a waste of time and money. That is not true however: it serves another very important function, namely that of dissemination. The prime purpose is not to achieve new results, but to present previously achieved results to colleagues with similar interests.)

The Friday morning was devoted to the wrap-up and planning of a next edition. There have actually been two workshops of this kind (a working workshop) on this theme before, though this is the first one I have been invited to. (That's another distinction: working workshops are typically invitation-only.) I like this topic, I think there are connections with what I have done before that mean I might be able to contribute something here.

Last minutes in Banff: waiting for the bus to arrive

After lunch, for most it was time to leave. Around 10 of us took the same bus to the airport; most were booked on a flight leaving 15 minutes earlier to Frankfurt. The other English participants stayed on a day longer to work on a collective project. Only Frank Hermann, aother German (the research area is dominated by Germans) but currently working at the University of Luxembourg, took the same flight as I did, but he would have to wait 5 hours at Heathrow for his connecting flight.

The plane was again no more than half full, and though I did end up with a neighbour, after takeoff I moved to another seat with more freedom of movement. Takeoff was delayed for almost an hour for various reasons, one of them being the need to defrost the wings. Night occurred somewhere on the way, hard to tell when exactly.

Saturday: Getting home

On eastbound transatlantic flights they simulate night by dimming the cabin lights and closing the shutters for a few hours, then faking dawn by reversing those steps. Fewer food and beverage services during the so-called night. I always try to stay awake, to make sure I am tired enough the next night to sleep well. In this I succeeded reasonably well with the help of some movies that I had missed in the cinema (for the record: World War Z, Monsters University and Planes, in that order of decreasing quality).

Setting the mood at King's Cross

By the time we landed in Heathrow I was worn down to 5- and 10-minute mini-periods of sleep, but the activity involved in collecting luggage and getting to the train woke me up for the most part. Not enough to remember that I had bought a return ticket on the Heathrow Express to Paddington, unfortunately, so I got a new ticket. Waste of money, but not so much as on the next leg, from London King's Cross to York, where I paid an astounding 96 pounds for a 1-way ticket, without even realising this at first as the payment was electronic. When I noticed and compared this with my old ticket for the other direction, bought via the internet, which had cost only 44 pounds, I actually went back to the counter to inquire, but was told that, yes, reserving via the internet was indeed a lot cheaper and this was the right price for a ticket bought on the day of travel. Wow!

It got even a bit more ridiculous a little bit later. I had bought a 1st class ticket for the privilege of a table and electricity (and regretted doing so given the price) but when the conductor checked it on the train it turned out to be 2nd class only. I then remembered the man at the counter saying something which I hadn's quite understood about "upgrading to first class being cheaper", and that's what the conductor explained as well: it is better to buy a second-class ticket and updgrading it on the train, than to buy a first-class ticket straight away. That seems completely backwards to me, but I have indeed also at some point (20 years ago or so) bought a return ticket for some English train trip because it was cheaper than one-way. I was too tired to want to move to 2nd class so I got the upgrade. At least the policy for transactions on the train is not so hostile as in the Netherlands, where you face a fine of 35 Euro whenever you have made any kind of mistake in buying a ticket and have to repair that on the train.

This was the last hitch, fortunately, and without further noteworthy ado I got to York and onto the bus to the University. Since it was now around 15:00 my endocrine system thought it was time to wake up, and doing the necessary shopping required less willpower than I had foreseen. By the time I had to decide whether to spend the evening playing games I felt fit enough to do that. For the rest of the day I remaind totally confused about the hour and even the weekday - the fact that it seems to get dark an hour earlier here than it did in Banff didn't help - but that didn't stop me from enjoying Coup, Die Säulen von Venedig, City Tycoon (a new one) and Marrakech.

So, back in the groove! The Canadian adventure is over, successfully. Over to the next challenge: showing off York to Elise when she comes here on Friday.