Enter the club
house of the 'Naked midnight jacuzi user group'. Enter the club
house of the 'Naked midnight jacuzi user group'.
On the perilous journey through the completion of my PhD, I've come across a few truly wonderful people. Conferences are aamazing things....you meet people who seem to be ideal friends...or could it be that you only see them for a week or so before you get really pissed off with them...or maybe that the only time you met them socially, you/they were utterly inebriated. Anyway you feel that at the end of a week of seeing these people that they're the best of possible mates... and then never speak to them again. Until the next conference. It's quite addictive. I seem to have been to rather a lot of them now. I suppose I've got to ask myself: am I such a social inadequate that I need to meet all my friends through conferences? Well I guess it's something to do with the research student lifestyle...no time for real friends (Boo hoo :(.
The first proper conference I attended was the ACM CSCW'94 conference in Raleigh/Durham, North Carolina (USA for all those geographical illiterates), held at the wonderful Sheraton Hotel (I think - small memory lapse). Here I shared a bed with the wonderful Steinar Kristoffersen and the rather more worrying /*/name deleted due to future employment reasons/*/ - who tried to force us to watch pornographic films on the hotel paychannel. He even tried hacking into the circuitboard to get free access - most disturbing. And I shared a bed with this guy? But I gotta tell you, Steinar was great :-) . Rodney Fuller also shared the room with us, but slept (and slept, and slept) on his own bed (pah! No fun! ;-)
We also met up with Aaron Tay, Egon Verharen, Birgitte Krogh, Beki Grinter, and Mike Capps. Eileen Kupstas ran the conference: she was amazing - a one woman taskforce. Magnus Ramage was there, although we didn't really meet then, as well as the rest of the Lancaster CSCW/COMIC group (God knows how many of them....).
What an amazing introduction to the conference scene. To be initiated as a student member of the Naked midnight jacuzi user group was more than one could have hoped for. And no, I am NOT revealing any more (but I suppose you could visit the club house).
I supose the next biggie was the CHI 1995 conference in Denver, Colorado (yep, back in the states again, oh stupid ones). I shared a room with Erik Altman and Tom Gross: separate beds this time - soooo disappointing :-). Here I met up with Birgitte Krogh, Dave Lees, Hans de Graaff, Constance Fleuriot, etc. I suppose I needn't describe this, because Hans has a wonderful description of this on his pages (here)
Here we reconvened the Naked midnight jacuzi user group - but in a sauna - they didn't seem to have a jacuzi. The most amusing bit was sneaking Birgitte into the mens changing rooms to get into the sauna. Anyway, it was a bit of a failiure - they turned the heat off before midnight. I suppose that you wouldn't normally expect people to be in there at 1 o'clock in the morning :-) . Any way I seemed to suprise some poor young (American) man sitting in the now rather cool sauna when I came back to collect some things...he seemed horrified that a man had seen his naked body! Eek! How traumatic! In a mens changing room too! Shocking. Oh, well. I suppose that's what you get from a religous upbringing. Most entertaining.
Well, then I went to the BCS HCI 1995 conference (Where I presented my first paper!!) and met up with Dave Lees again and Dave Cartwright (at the same institution - and it's not a coincidence that I call it an institution...:-). We also were bossed around by Devina Rathmundy (a lot).
Most disappointing feature of Huddersfield Uni - no sauna or jacuzi. Well, you can't expect everything.
Yeah, I suppose '95 was good for conferences - I also went to the ECSCW conference in Stockholm (yes...Sweden) - almost at the home of the sauna (NB. It's pronounced saow-nar, I believe). But again, disapointment - we never got round to it (darn. Must try harder next time). We met up with Magnus Ramage, Steinar Kristoffersen and Birgitte Krogh again. I also met Bazza Brown - wahey - someone interested in my topic area (distributed cognition! Yipee: I'm not the only one in the UK!). And the excellent Chris Schnurr (you've just gotta visit his web page: the 'get a life: fun and serious interests page' - see also the very cool Hug-o-rama) was kept under close orders by Devina Rathmundy.
That's about it this year. 'Hope to meet many more of you jolly CHI/CSCW/Cog Sci folk later this year...