Pittsburgh

I'm sitting in the William Penn Omni Hotel lobby this morning. It's a grand old lobby with nice architectural touches - interesting ceilig, high decorative archways.

I decided it would be far more interesting to work down here than in my hotel room, and the internet was likely to be faster as well - it was very laggy last night. Some friends suggested some neighbors might be downloading images for "research purposes."

The conference starts tomorrow, but I'm taking a tutorial this afternoon on what I call "tater tots" due to the acronym OAI-ORE. Not a popular nickname with the inventors.

This is probably the best conference in my field. It's a mix of academic pursuits and applied ones. I'm more on the applied side, especially in my job at Stanford. Most of what I'm doing is only available to Stanford IP addresses, but you can play with one demo I set up with our sysadmin's help: http://lyberdev1.stanford.edu:3000.

My friend Carol just came by, so my people watching placement has already paid off.

I have a ton of work to do, so back to it.