Valencia, Pt. I

Sidebar: I'm going to write these catch-up entries partly in the present tense – not to be revisionist, but because it's easier, as I transcribe snatches of chats and handwritten journal paragraphs. Anything to make posting more likely...

So stop one is... Valencia!*

Unfortunately, very little interesting happened in Valencia.

It's entirely my own fault. I had a paper deadline (the big push for my ISER paper, which is more babbling about robot navigation**) and at this point I'd actually been sleeping about every other day for almost two weeks as I got ready to move to Europe, finished off papers, was jetlagged, etc. So for the first half of the week I alternated between writing all night and sleeping from the moment talks ended. Some of it was adapting to the schedule on which my advisor is now able to, well, advise – which is, starting late my afternoon and going into my wee and not-so-wee hours.

But hey! I wrote that paper sitting at a wooden writing desk in one of the hotel's many tiny lobbies, with the curtains wide open and cool air on my face as I looked out over the sleeping city. It felt so... European! (T: "Perhaps tomorrow you can have some sort of teeny coffee." Me: "Maybe if it's followed by a much larger coffee." T: "I imagine you surrounded by teeny little empty coffee cups.")

The conference was hosted by the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, which looks like quite a new campus, and is very pretty.

Some interesting building on campus that told me when it was time to get off the bus!  I really liked it.

These were all over campus. Based on my experience off-campus, they are to keep drivers from totally mowing
pedestrians down every few feet?  But hey, they're iconic and attractive. Also, Accidental Shadow Self-Portrait!

AAMAS isn't really my cup of tea. There were a few relevant tracks, but apparently most of the robotics people have kind of moved off into their own conferences (excepting (at least) MTaylor, with whom I got several lovely meals). I did see one paper by an acquaintance/colleague who's working on stuff very similar to mine and a few papers I should have been more interested in.

So I really only spent one day touristing in Valencia. Pix from that... *drumroll* Next Post.

Also, anyone who has traveled with me knows my annoying fascination with stitched panoramic images. I can't help it! The world is big! And interesting! And WIDE.

The original is huge, and you should click!  but it probably still doesn't capture the
awesomeness of a lovely campus, with art, in Spain, in summer? Honest. It was nice.

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* Actually, if that's true, then Stop Zero is Darmstadt, where I slept on Marc's couch for a couple of days while we got me caught up on Europe time, bought me a burner phone, and so on. However, I have enough random stops in Darmstadt that I'm planning to skip over them unless something of interest happened.

** I've been thinking about adding blurbs to my papers so I can post a link saying, basically, "Look here's what my ISER paper is actually about yada yada!" Would anyone actually follow such a link?