My Second Academic Conference

I had another paper published that year, and once again I felt extremely fortunate.

I am not trying to humblebrag here. I really was fortunate. Publishing papers was quite difficult in our theoretical computer science group. The theory itself was hard enough, but just as importantly, our papers often had a single student author and one advisor; long author lists were uncommon. Meanwhile, the AI group next door and the hardware group one door farther over seemed to produce ten papers per person every year, each with ten authors. Were they grinding publication stats over there or what?

That is an exaggeration, but it captures the general idea. At least from where I stood at the time, they really did publish far more papers than we did.

I had also assumed that the little niche I had chosen might happen to be exactly the sort of thing this conference liked, which was why I had managed to publish there. For a while, I thought perhaps I could keep doing this in the years ahead. As it turned out, I was getting ahead of myself.

The university covered the trip again, and this time I stayed at the conference hotel throughout. It was in the Disney resort area, and the surroundings were excellent.

Soon after I arrived, something vaguely vulture-like flew onto my balcony, apparently intent on competing with me for food.

The conference schedule was relentless. After one talk after another, I spent much of the time trying to work out what I had just heard.

In theory, I could have eaten every meal at the hotel. In practice, the food did very little for me, so I had to venture out in search of something better. It was a resort area, though, and the surroundings truly were hard to fault.

That year, I once again took the stage to present my paper.

And once again, I came away with one precious photograph of the occasion.

After the conference, we made a special trip to Universal’s Volcano Bay, which had opened only a few days earlier. We had not known about it before arriving in Orlando; it simply popped up when we searched online. I would not say the advertising was inescapable, but we certainly saw plenty of it.

And then there were the ratings. If I remember correctly, it had only a 2.8 on Google Maps at the time, which was spectacularly bad. By the time I wrote this entry, the rating had climbed all the way to 4.5. In later visitor reviews, I could even find quite a few positive comments about its wristband-based virtual queue system—the very feature that had been savaged when the park first opened. The complaints said that it frequently lost its connection or otherwise failed, that a virtual wait for a single attraction could last for hours, and that while waiting for that attraction, guests could not join another virtual queue. Even when their time finally arrived, they might still face a physical line, only for the attraction to shut down temporarily, and so on.

Those bad reviews seemed to be aimed more at the operational problems of a brand-new park than at whether the park itself was actually fun. We ultimately decided to ignore them and give it a try. The result was a very pleasant surprise: none of those problems affected us. Everything went smoothly that day, the crowds were light, and we could enjoy almost every attraction with very little trouble. It was an excellent experience.