As many of you already know, I am leaving this evening for Portugal for 23rd ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (SOSP 2011). I will be presenting a poster on my current PhD research as well as learning all about the state-of-the-art in OS research and doing a bit of sightseeing. I can only assume that I'll have spotty internet in Portugal at best, so I leave the administration of Cemetech for the next week in the capable hands of my trusty administrators and global moderators. I'll be sure to tell you guys all about the conference when I return, and if you happen to be going or know anyone going to SOSP 2011, feel free to say hello at the conference! If you have any problems or questions that my staff can't answer for whatever reason, you're welcome to drop me an email, but no guarantees on responsiveness. Other than that, I'll try to stop by and catch up on posts; at any rate, see you all next Thursday/Friday!

Good luck with your conference, Kerm!

Thanks very much, Souvik. I'll do my best to both learn a lot and have fun.

If you run into a Dr. Thomas Bressoud from Denison, tell him I say hi.

Shaun, doesn't look like he's presenting anything from reading the proceedings, but I'll keep my eyes open.

Oooh, we're the very first in the Poster proceedings! Feel free to check out my paper and poster (actually, looks like you can only read the abstract for now).
http://sigops.org/sosp/sosp11/posters/

Have FUN!!

Oh I didn't know you were speaking. If I did, I would have tried to go, it's not that far from here. I can't go now, it's too late.

Good luck for your talk and make sure you go to the beach in Cascais, it's awesome.

yay Kerm! Do have a great time, and good luck now that I see you shall be speaking

also, bring us all a present, if possible

That list only has the admins

Have some of your friends take photos of your presentation for us! And share anything you learn, if you are able.

ComicIDIOT, I'll definitely try to do so.
Qazz42: Thanks very much. I'll try to bring you all presents.
Ephan, no worries. I shall definitely try to visit the beach unless it's super-rainy.
Aes_, I will do my best.

Super rainy? My friend, you really do not know Portugal, the weather is great.

Ephan, it looked like the forecast was for rain, but I'm here in Cascais now, and it looks pretty sunny and blue-skyed to me.

Edit: 11:30am, time to find some coffee and some food. See you guys soon.

Have a good time, Kerm! And I'll be waiting for pictures/scanned-in pamphlets

Psh, I want to see how badly he burned in the sun!

When he comes back, he'll no longer have white skin nor red hair

Oh this, definitely this. My grandparents took the whole family on a Caribbean cruise once for their 50th anniversary and I burned red like a lobster.

Day 0
Saturday was entirely spent traveling. I met my friend Matt at 3pm in New York, we had lunch in Koreatown, then took the New Jersey Transit to the AirTrain to Newark. We got to the airport with about two and a half hours to spare before our flight, and baggage check-in and security were uneventful. To my surprise, the TSA neither backscattered nor groped us, and they seemed to be trying to be friendly and polite, perhaps trying to counter bad PR? Anyway, we then had two hours to kill before our flight, so we wandered about the shops in Newark for a bit, then sat and read and worked on our laptops at the gate. Our advisor Jinyang showed up about half an hour before the flight was scheduled to depart, and we boarded. We took off close to the scheduled 8:20pm departure, and had quite a pleasant flight, such as it was for a red-eye. They served us dinner and beverages, then I spent about three hours in fitful, cramped sleep.

Day 1
I awoke about an hour before we landed, and they served us a little breakfasty snack of a warm croissant and fruit as well as coffee and orange juice. We landed in Lisbon at 7:43am Portugal time, or 2:43am New York time, and deplaned. We had to stand in the Passport Control line for about half an hour, but after that getting our luggage and going through Customs was a breeze. We were going to take public transportation to get from Lisbon to Cascais, where SOSP 2011 is, but our adviser convinced us that it made sense to take a taxi, since we could amortize the cost across the three of us. We got a friendly and English-speaking taxi driver (and indeed it seems many people in Portugal speak some English), and had a pleasant half-hour trip to Cascais. Jinyang got out at her hotel, which is where the conference is, and we continued another kilometer to our hotel, on the Atlantic. We tried to check in, but it was still about 9am local time, so our room wasn't ready yet. We walked around the town of Cascais a little bit to get oriented, then returned and caught up on Internet things. We were able to check into our room soon thereafter, and found it to be a nice two-room suite. We took showers and changed, did a bit of work, then went wandering about the town looking for some lunch. We ended up at Jardim Dos Frangos, and had a quite enjoyable and not super-expensive lunch; it came to €7 for me. We returned to the hotel, and with jetlagged tiredness starting to set in, took naps. Around 5:30pm we gathered ourselves and walked back to the conference hotel for our first event of the conference, a welcome buffet and shmooze session. The food was good, the wines were carefully paired and explained in the conference wine guide (!), I saw a few people I knew and was introduced to a few more, and I heard a lot of new perspectives on people from industry and academia alike, very thought provoking. I also had a chance to briefly talk about my own work a few times, and found that I need to come up with a more concise and crisp description. We ended up leaving around 8:30pm, returned to our hotel in a bit of a mild rainstorm, then watched some TV and retired to our rooms.

More soon!

Kerm: Your poster is Huuuuuge. Can you post a smaller version here that doesn't incapacitate Firefox after taking 5 minutes to load?

Sounds like your PDF reader is to blame. Evince handles it fine here.

Mine got utterly destroyed too. There was some complicated background stuff that was taking a while to load, and then it wasn't even visible afterward when other stuff was rendered on top of it.

What I read though was fascinating. I hope I get to be that smart someday and do something like this.