Saturday: Flying home, being sick.

Ugh.  We'll see how tomorrow feels.

Breakfast burrito.

 With no cheese? WTF?

Airport pretzel.

It wasn't as good as usual, because it wasn't greasy.

Friday: The end.

Which is good, because I've been feeling worse as the day went on.  I'm starting to cough and be snuffly, so I think "con-death" is very likely.  I'll be glad to be home tomorrow.

Where I'll hopefully not wake up at 5:30am.

I did get my rebase to finish and build, after a lot of help and a lot of C++ deciphering.  It probably works, so I can finish the rest of the packages Monday, and get this bit out for review.  And then get the next project going.  And get documentation out for both of those and a third one I mostly just want to have an opinion on.  And maybe do outreach/education science stuff.

Or just hide in bed until I feel better.

• Monster Factory.
• This looks like a good comic.
• Authoritanism.
• Unions are good.

Thursday: So tired.

It's been a long week, and I still have one more day to get through.

The fact that this game went on for like four hours didn't help.

• These people are bad at their jobs.

Tuesday: "it’s not a special forces attack paras."

Second day of the conference, but the first with real sessions.  Plenaries, a session about the educational outreach (which I should probably sent suggestions and code pointers for), one on how we're going to handle calibration products (sanely), and one about calibration (which had no chairs).

Then there was the "banquet", which I ditched out of early because it was hot, loud, and full of people.

I saw a lizard as I was leaving.

I then took a quick nap, and then looked into how hard it would be to code up some simple cuts and cleaning for PS1DR2 data.

Turns out, pretty easy.

I didn't implement a background source removal, but that's not super-too-hard to do (generate likely contamination probabilities by comparing source counts per sky area per plot area, and then selectively show sources depending on that probability).  Also, white dwarfs are more orders of magnitude fainter than I remembered.

• What.
• Oh, also this paper has some useful target lists.
• Everyone should have a union.
• Pokemon.

Monday: First conference day.

I think I had a witty title, but I forgot what it was.

Not much science today.  I did learn about some of the other parts of the project, and the current status.  Tomorrow I need to help work through the CPP stuff, which hopefully will be similar to what I would like it to be.

There's a gym here.

 But the gym sometimes refuses to cooperate.  So sometimes you waste your raid pass trying to get into the raid, but everyone else got into the other raid, and so you can't beat the stupid air snake.

I helped kill that air snake.

 But then there were board games, with semi-illegal outside food, because there are rules this year (????).

But they did not put cilantro on everything like some kind of monster, and were cool with my "no beans, plz" note.

 I also discovered that none of the payment things are easy to set up or use.  Why can't I just transfer money into a generic google account that I can use to buy things from google in the future?

And we played "Chaos in the Old World," which I did not win, despite everyone claiming I was totally winning the whole time.

I also did not win the Alice in Wonderland parade game, but I spent the first game organizing dinner orders.

• Tumblr was sold again.
• For less than three million dollars?  They could have just done a kickstarter if that was the sale price.  I would have kicked in money to buy a small part of the site.
• I only know her from her short time at Rooster Teeth, but this doesn't seem right.  All jobs should pay reasonable wages.
• A 14th century nun.
• I'll need to read this more fully in the future, but a) what an asshole; and b) the system is supposed to prevent things like this from happening.

Sunday: Travel. Blech.

Especially travel that starts so early it's yesterday.  The surprising thing was that I was not the only person to book this terrible itinerary, which was reasonably nice.  There were also a half dozen other people who were arriving at the hotel at 10am.  I did get the upgrade for the DEN-TUC leg, which included a better seat and a muffin.

I would have preferred a more mountain-y view, but given that I'm unlikely to be in my room much other than today, I guess it doesn't matter.

And there's a gym, so I could do the "do a raid, any raid, even the raids against ice trash."

I probably could have worked better to get more contrast to show the nice sunset, but there were bugs, and it was hot.

• What?

Friday: The end of the conference.

It was a good conference.  I learned a lot, and I have a pile of questions for next week when everyone is back in the office.  Now all I need to do is get home tomorrow.  That should be easy.

Since the conference ended around lunch time, I spent the afternoon catching up on news and internet stuff I've been missing.  I also discovered that my tumblr queue was empty, so after some git dancing, and some refactoring and testing for an updated system, I now have a functional RSS-to-tumblr queue snek script.  I have to do a bit more work on it for it to be completely finished.  I'm abusing a few things because I was lazy, so those should get fixed up.  As it is, though, it correctly goes through the RSS archive (by increasing date), determines if the link is to tumblr, and if it is, likes and reblogs.  Finally, the RSS entry is unflagged, removing it from the archive for the future.  Running the script now takes about a minute, compared to much longer to manually spawn the link in a tab and click through to queue it.  Yay increasing my internet reading efficiency.

It was a fairly nice day.

 I didn't like lunch, so I planned to get a big dinner.

I think this was cilantro butter.  I could never live here.  The soap flavor would kill me.

A big steak.  I would have preferred better veggies, less cilantro sauce, and a "prickly pear steak sauce" that emphasized tart over sweet.  Still, it was a good steak, cooked to a great level.

I've realized that I'm going to need to go out and get groceries tomorrow night when I get home.  Ugh.

• F the P.
• "We’re not in the crossover this year". UGH.
• I should read this article more fully.  It seems interesting.

Thursday: I don't think I've won a single board game game yet.

But I won a raid.

Dumped a Mareep into a gym.

 Learned a bunch about a major system at work, even if I'm not 100% on board with the new changes, because I'm not sure they go far enough for me.

I then watched an excellent talk. Oh, then more board games.

Today's dinosaur was more abstract.

Tomorrow is the last conference day.  Then another travel day.  Ugh.

Wednesday: I...I'm lost on conference land.

It didn't help that I spent like five hours playing board games this evening.

Put my rainbow sludge in the gym.

This is always what's here, in the board game room.

Board game quesadilla.  I should make chorizo quesadillas at home.

I tried very hard, but didn't come in last.  Taking all the "unique" blue bones for my dinosaur, and then converting them into a petrified halo was a saving grace.  My strategy of "one creepy long arm" wasn't as successful.

WTF, Arizona?

Oh yeah, also I learned a good amount about ML methods for deblending, and some interesting optics discussion about PSFs.  And I didn't break the git repo, so that's always good news.

• What the absolute fuck is wrong with these people?
• I finally switched my webserver over to https.  Yay, super secure crap password!
• There's a board game PAX now?

Tuesday: Ugh so sleepy

Breakfast had bacon.  The sessions had science stuff.  Lunch had pasta.  More science.  Dinner had tasty ribs.  Then board games.  SO sleepy now.

This is a good place to put people in the gym.

Desert sky.

With lightning, as it's been doing that since I got back to my room after board games.

Gifts.

Shiny muk is pretty awesome.

 I should have used an egg/

Fire chicken.

Questionable Character Design.

That Looks Painful.

Death Hug McSpines.

• I was able to help my team win Codewars by remembering Churchill's speech.

Sunday: But at least it all went well.

I was, in order:

1. Not murdered by the stranger I paid to drive me to the train station.
2. Able to buy the correct train ticket without trouble.
3. Step onto the platform at exactly the right time to greet the train going my way.
4. Slip through security with only minor "how do people with this little sense of how to do things get pre-check" problems.
5. Ate a egg/ham/cheese croissant that wasn't sulfurous and bad.
6. Fly to Houston.
7. Eat a salmon BLT with avocado, even if I had to convince the incredulous waitress that I in fact, wanted zero mayo, no matter what variety they had.
8. Fly to Tucson, and due to the wonders of "packing light," didn't have to gate check my bag.

Part of that last one is the fact that flying to SFO for so long that I eventually just bought an alternate wardrobe made me hate flying with bags.  The fact that the Honolulu gate agents were super strict with the carryon policy didn't hurt either.

Aforementioned BLT.  A nice herby focaccia as well. 

I have never been to Tucson until now.

 It's the desert.

Except it's monsoon season, I guess.

Which means cool sunsets.

 And then dinner, which I didn't take pictures of because I didn't want to look crazy.

But then to my room, which looked like spies had tried to find where I'd hidden the diamonds.

Except I hadn't been to the room yet, I don't have any diamonds, and it's probably just that the cleaning staff forgot to finish cleaning it.  A quick phone call, and I'm in a different room that's all clean.

• Based on the SFO tag, I was there for 148 posts/days.  Between the first date and now, there are 1357 days, meaning I've spent almost 11% of the last four years visiting California.
• I am grumpy how this book made the series I've been reading since I left Hawaii.   I think I have two more books already bought, and the eighth in the series comes out later this year.
• I don't know, a tumblr thing.