San Diego (Part I)

Ok so I attended the CAM conference over the past week.

Ah that I had access to a computer to write about my trip to San Diego. It would be so much easier but now i must write after the fact as information slowly leeks out of my brain. I will make this a 2 parter to spare you the huge post it could be.

San Diego has a climet very much like Vancouver, not nearly as hot as you would think, what makes it more of a desert is the lack of all the rain Vancouver is blessed with. A Vancouver with no rain, a paradise in anyones eyes.

I stayed downtown at the local hosteling International youth hostel. Nice place, only cost me $144 American for 6 nights. I shared a room with 10 people, and the window faced a very noisy street but i had ear plugs and after the first night was too tried from the day to have a problem sleeping.

The Conference was grate. the first day we had a bunch of student talks in the morning and then some talks on the state of education in Canada, US and Mexico. Here is a summary. Profs suck at teaching, The US is dumb and wants to be smart, Canada is small and wants to be big and Mexico is still trying to figure out this whole university thing.

The second day we had a talk from the president of the university of California. Apparently he could not come Friday because the Governator was visiting his lab. He gave a pretty good talk about his life and such, I liked it. Then we had student talks, they ran over as usual so that our 3h poster session became a 2h poster session and i needed to fit lunch in there some where. I caught lunch at place that makes wood fired pizzas, they where expensive but they make the best pizza i have ever hand in my life there. i ended up eating there 3 times over the 6 days. After an hour i went back to stand buy my poster, I talked to some people in my field about what i was doing and what they where doing and everything was good. Then more student talks, including two particularly good ones about modeling radiation dosages in patients with prostate cancer. Remember when irradiating the prostate you have to be careful with the rectum.

That night we went on a dinner cruse around the harbor. I had steak and it was tasty alghtough it didn't taste like Canadian stake. The guy i was sitting beside said they where probably corn instead of grain fed. He was form Saskatchewan so I will defer to his knowledge on that. I got some good pictures and had some good drinks. We all went out to a bar afterwards, cant remember it's name but i believe there was music and more drinking. You would be surprised how crazy Physicists can get when they drink. we wern't to crazy this particular night but we can be.

Day 3 more student talks. people really need to understand how to time a talk, when they say 10 min with questions you can't go on for 15 min. We had 9 talks to get through and i'm not sitting there if each one is 15 min then questions, it's just painfully. In the afternoon we heard carrier advice from lots of people about lots of carriers, or that is what I was hoping for. In actuality it was a bunch of American telling us not to study abroad cause it will destroy your carrier prospects and publish as many papers as possible so you can get a nice job as a researcher. After a final good buy we parted ways and my vacation began, but more on that next time.