The PDF reader I used was built in to my browser and it enlarged to cover pretty much all the 1920 pixels across my screen. It took about a minute to fully load (was that thing at 300DPI?!) but once it did I had no issues viewing it.
I should download it and see just how large it is!
Seana11, what Tari said. I can also export an 8.5x11 version for my resume website, I suppose, here you go:
http://cims.nyu.edu/~cmitchell/pubs/sosp11_poster_small.pdf
Day 2
Monday was the first full day of talks. We got up early, around 6:30am, although for some reason my internal clock had decided it was morning around 4:30am, which doesn't even make sense in the context of jetlag. After a shower and a quick catch-up on the events of Cemetech and the internet, we headed down to our hotel's breakfast, which was fairly good: eggs, bacon, croissants, coffee, and orange juice for me. Portugal isn't in Daylight Savings Time now, so as we were walking the kilometer from our hotel to the conference hotel, the sun rose over a cloudbank at the horizon over the Atlantic, and I got some great photos. We arrived, went upstairs to the conference's main presentation room, and got some good seats. I was scheduled to help out as a student volunteer for the first session (key-value stores), so I spent some of that session helping with registration and tracking down presenters to get their slides. After the three papers in the K-V session, we had a much-appreciated coffee break, then the three papers of the Storage session. As with the first session, there were some novel and intriguing concepts, as would be expected. Lunch was served one floor up, a delicious buffet of seafood salads and finger sandwiches followed by delicious desserts. I chatted with my classmates and with a researcher from Google who works with my adviser's husband there. I set up my poster for the poster session later in the day, then at 2pm the Security session began. After a short coffee break, the fourth and last paper presentation session of the day was held, covering Reality, the deployment and performance of novel large-scale systems in the real world. As you might expect, researchers from Microsoft and Google were big players in this session. Next were two and a half grueling but very helpful hours of presenting my poster, explaining the basics and relevance of my research, and collecting qustions and suggestions. In particular, I got a number of "how is this different from / better than X" questions, some of which I had good answers to, some of which I did not (and now know I need to research). Two researchers from MSRI were both very enthusiastic about the idea and wanted me to come up with a more concrete "killer app" to amaze people and prove why Oolong is the new hotness. When the session ended at 8pm, we went back upstairs for a fancy dinner of octopus salad followed by a delicious lamb and bok choy dish, finishing with pastries and cherry coulis and petit fours with coffee. Matt and I walked back to our hotel with our graduated classmate Jay, watched the tail end of Die Hard 2, and went to sleep.
Time for Day 3!
Octopus. Salad. Is it not like spaghetti with lettuce?
Anyways, here's that picture!
That's the one; thanks for reposting it.
This was taken with my new Casio Exilim 14MP point-n-shoot camera, which I am quite happy with indeed! Octopus salad was dice octopus with slivered hard-boiled eggs, a spinach puree garnish, sliced cherry tomatoes, and something shredded and pickled that went well.
Very nice camera. I'd find something else to eat for lunch though
Blame the way that Powerpoint constructs PDFs from slides.
It prints all the layers back to front regardless of their final visibility.
8pm coffee? D: how did you even sleep?
err, on topic, sounds like you are having quite the fantastic time. Great to hear you had good answers to the questioning part of the presentation. I wish you good luck for day (4?)
Not all coffee is caffeinated; there is decaf.
Day 3 was today, which makes Day 4 tomorrow, yes
Day 3
My third day in Portugal and second full day of SOSP was very enlightening as well as fun, though the entire day was spent in conference events. We got up, got ready, and went to the hotel's dining room for a buffet breakfast, delicious once again. The start of the conference presentations was a half-hour later than the previous day, so we left our hotel around 8:15am and walked the short distance to the conference hotel under overcast skies. The first session of the day was virtualization, with an interesting demo of a virtual machine running on an Android phone and a few other papers about virtualization tricks. After a mid-morning coffee break, we returned for the morning's second session, on the subject of OS architecture. Lunch was served on the third floor as on the previous day, a delicious buffet of (for me) salad, gourmet pizza, pasta salad, and some excellent desserts including a treat I haven't had for a long time, tapioca pudding. The third session of the day was at 2pm, on the subject of detection and tracing; I was responsible for scribing the questions and answers at the end of each talk during that third session, so I spent the session furiously trying to make notes and then recording audio during the Q&A sessions. The audio quality turned out to be quite insufficient for transcription, which ended up taking many hours afterwards while trying to sleuth out what people were saying, and in fact is still not submitted. After another short afternoon break spent continuing attempted transcription, we returned for the final session of the day, the rather enjoyable Work in Progress session. When it finished late in the afternoon, it was time to head to the nearby Hotel Estoril for a banquet reception and dinner. Two of my friends and I walked along the beach for about a mile from near Cascais to Estoril, chatting about feedback people gave on my project and where we think we should go next as we walked. When we got to the casino, we mingled with snacks and wine for forty-five minutes, then filed into a lavish dining room for a fancy dinner. We had a chicken and pastry appetizer, a fish, spinash, and potato entree, and a POrtuguese dessert called an egg sweet to finish the meal. During coffee, awards were given out recognizing the two best papers of the conference as well as four major contributers to computer science, specifically referencing their most seminal paper each. The banquet finished close to 10pm, when I took a taxi back to Cascais with two of my classmates. After TV and internet catching up, we went to sleep.
Day 4
Yesterday was the last day of the conference and included a half-day of exploring nearby tourist attractions, a Wednesday of academic, sightseeing, and rain. We awoke at the same time as the previous day, and after morning ablutions went to th edining room for our third and last breakfast at our hotel. It was enjoyable, as expected, and was followed by a drizzly final walk to the conference hotel, though with plenty of time to make it for the first of the two sessions, covering the topic of threads and races. Four papers were followed by a coffee break, then two final papers on georeplication and consistency, the former of which was presented by my advisor. When the last talk ended, concluding remarks were made, then Matt and I waited for our adviser Jinyang while people asked her questions and offered suggestions about the material she presented. We soon moved to the lobby, and around 2pm, the three of us grabbed a taxi to Matt and my hotel to drop off our bags and have lunch. I decided to be a stereotypical American and get a burger; my colleagues both had paninis. Around 3pm, we were ready to go sightseeing; we decided to start in the famous Sintra, an ancient Portuguese town with buildings as old as the 8th and 9th centuries. When our taxi dropped us off, we were disappointed to find that everyone had failed to mention that the main attraction, the Palace of Sintra, was closed on Wednesdays. We made the best of a bad situation, though, and after a stop at the tourism office, more or less equivalent to a chamber of commerce, we went to another huge estate from the 18th century. We explored it for over an hour, including a very nice main house, nifty tunnels, and a 27-meter-deep, very wide well with an ornate spiral stone stair that we descended. When we finally felt we saw everything, we returned to Sintra proper and continued to the commuter rail station. Once we figured out (or thought we figured out) the ticket system, we hopped on a train and rode into Lisbon proper, disembarking at the Restaurdos station after a 45-minute ride. We wandered about in that district for a bit, taking typical touristy pictures. It was my very first experience exploring a very European city, and looked the part to a T. Once we reached the waterfront, admiring states, trams, and trolleys while being buffeted by high winds, we turned back along another street and began hunting for dinner. We eventually chose one of the last (and least pushy) restaurants that we passed, called the Solmar. As the name suggests, it was a seafood restaurant for the most part. We shared prosciutto, ham and melon, octopus salad, and fresh mussels as appetizers, then each had an entree. Matt and I both had "tornados" (steaks) with chips and spinach-garlic puree, while Jinyang had grouper with potatoes. Quite stuffed, we left after 9pm, and went back towards the subway. On my recommendation, we walked south and west to the commuter rail station, through deserted streets that for the most part seemed fairly safe, barring a few exceptions. We managed to catch a 10pm commuter train to Cascais, which dropped us off at the final terminal after a forty-minute ride. Matt and I walked Jinyang part of the way back to her hotel, then returned to our own. We almost immediately retired to our rooms, anticipating our early awakening today to catch our flight.
Day 5
Today has been a very long day for me thus far. We awoke around 6:15am, took our showers, packed, then checked out around 7am and walked through a light drizzle to the train station. We refilled our ticket, then since our adviser was not yet there, sat in a little coffee shop and had tiny, concentrated Portugese coffee for 0.60E each. Jinyang arrived, we got a 7:40am express train to Cais de Sodro, where we had embarked to return home the previous evening, and rode the crowded train into the city. Along the way, I read some of my book and enjoyed the scenery of morning rush hour into Lisbon. We got off the train, on which we had noticed some of our fellow SOSP attendees, then got a taxi to the airport. It was a fairly complicated affair, with check-in, security, passport control, then more security at the gate, but we eventually got in a bus at the gate that drove us through the airport to our plane; it seems Lisbon doesn't yet have enough gates that the planes can directly pull up to. We walked a few feet across the tarmac from the bus to the plane, and as I got on, my feet left Portuguese soil for the near future, as far as I know. We eventually started taxiing, lined up behind a few other planes, and when we got our turn, sped down the runway and took off. I'm now seven hours into the flight, having spent it working on schoolwork, book, and watching the first two Bourne movies. They served coffee and lunch near the beginning of the flight, and they're about to serve a dinnerish sandwich snack. I'll fill the rest of this in when I get home (and here it is). We met some pretty serious turbulence coming into Newark due to bad whether; once we disembarked, went through customs, got our bags, and then went through baggage control, we got the Neward AirTrain, then the New Jersey Transit into Manhattan, and after parting ways, I hopped onto the subway to come home. And an excellent trip came to its conclusion.
I surprisingly didn't be lazy so I read the whole thing
that indeed seems like an awesome trip! Sounds like lots of nice food and scenery. What would you say was the best part?
It certainly sounds like you had a good trip! Plenty of good food, sights, interesting talks and (presumably) bad TV.
Where do you think you'll go next?
The steaks you had are called "tournedos" in English/French.
Ashbad, thanks for the thoroughness! I'd agree entirely with that characterization; my only regret is that circumstances forced the sightseeing to be relatively minimal. An excellent question about the best part: I'd have to say that of the whole trip, it was probably the sightseeing on Wednesday night, and exploring Sintra and Lisbon. Of the academic side of things, I personally found the poster session to be great to push me to develop a concise, compelling explanation of what my project is and why it is cool and worthwhile and novel. There was also one particularly entertaining and amusing presentation from the talks, which ironically was a paper I had presented to my group two weeks previously.
Benryves: Interesting, I don't think I've ever heard of that in American English, unless I just missed it. I would like to go to Bern, Switzerland for Eurosys in April, but since we didn't make the deadline to submit Oolong to that, it might not work.
Ah, Switzerland is a beautiful country.
It seems a shame to go all that way and not be able to tack on a couple of extra days for sightseeing but I understand your schedule is rather hectic these days.
