I wrote some of this on the go on my Palm, and the rest has been transcribed from illegible notes made by hand as I tried to follow what the speakers were saying. So there is the possibility of some inaccuracy, the more so in the talks that weren't in my area.
Usual disclaimers apply: the opinions or research of anyone mentioned
here may quite possibly bear no reality to my understanding of them.
If you're using this as a reliable data source, you are quite mad.
But it hopefully gives a useful flavour of the conference, which I found
enjoyable and interesting.
Friday 19th July
I'm a worrier. I'm very good at worrying. If it were an Olympic sport, I'd make the team without even trying. My worry gland is so over-developed, it takes up most of my lower abdomen and is the prime reason why my stomach refuses to slim down to a six-pack profile. At least, I hope that's the reason.
Today was one of the best worry workouts I'd had in a long time. It started with a half day in work, which was all well and good, but at midday I had to leave to pick up my car. The first dependence was therefore on Wessex trains, to get me back to Bradford-on-Avon on time. Those of you familiar with this august TOC will realise that "on time" and "Wessex trains" go together like "Englishman" and "happy-go-lucky socialite".
In fact, the train wasn't overly late, and I had my car loaded and ready to go by about 12:30. Now, for those readers unfamiliar with London Stanstead I must inform you that it has all the accessibility features of Inverness; in the middle of nowhere with awful roads forcing you around major gridlocked cities. I ended up with a 3.5 hour drive from B-o-A, along the M4 to the M25 (okay so far), clockwise around the M25 to the M1 junction (slow but steady) and then I hit a brick wall of traffic.
Ruefully I remembered the wise words of Mr. Iain Lees earlier that morning as he had advised me to travel cross-country. "Don't go on the M25!" he had pleaded. "It's a bad, bad thing!" Turning off the M25 I had forty minutes on twisty turning country and town roads before locating the wonderously empty A10. From then on it was quite easy and I drove into Stanstead Mid-stay car park (perspiring from the sunshine and the effort) just after four. Another worry was that there wouldn't be available space; in fact, I'd booked via e-parking.com and my credit card let me in with not a hiccup.
After that it was a bit anti-climatic. The queue for the Go flight to Copenhagen was short, I got an aisle seat by the emergency exit with extra leg room, and the plane was delayed boarding by half an hour so I even had time for a coffee, sandwich and a call to my parents.
Of course, the whole reason that I was flying to Copenhagen was to present a paper, which by itself was an ample source of fear. Nevertheless Fate intervened here too. I ended up sitting by Mike Poppleton who was also going to REFINE'02, and whose PhD thesis on retrenchment my supervisor had been recommending for months. We had an excellent discussion on refinement, retrenchment, conference politics, funding negotiations, and Mike was reassuring about the reception I'd get. He advised me to play up the helpless PhD student thing shamelessly...
Once in Copenhagen we picked up our bags from the baggage carousel. Mike was talking to a lady who turned out to be Susan Stepney (yes, that Susan Stepney.) Between the three of us we got our Klippekort bus tickets and found the 250S bus to take us to the Radhusplads in the city centre. It wasn't a particularly quick journey, but at least it was on time and reasonably comfortable.
Our luck held when we changed buses; the number 10 came along within a minute and we charged on board waving our tickets as instructed in the conference directions. There ensued a long discussion of mutual incomprehension with the driver (in hindsight he was probably trying to find out what zone we wanted to travel to) but eventually he waved us on. Probably he figured that trying to explain the city transport system to three Brits simply wasn't worth the candle...
We got off at the first stop over the bridge and parted company. A five minute trot down the dark yet unscary streets brought me to the Cab-Inn Copenhagen. My final worry was that my reservation might not have been confirmed and that I'd have to sleep on the streets. In fact, as any normal person would have expected, all was fine.
The Cab-Inn rooms are odd. They reminded me of the quarters in the North Sea oil platforms I'd visited, though redesigned by an engineer fanatic in the use of space. Everything has at least one purpose, and some have two or three. The shower/sink taps took some figuring but I managed an OK shower eventually. The arms of Morpheus took me just before midnight -- an early start beckoned.