h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Off to liverpool for a week at a summer (?????) school on chemical catalysis. Whoopy-do, see y'all soon

That seems to be a new definition of 'summer'.

See you when you get back.

RhoMuNuQ

What?! You get to see him? Is there a whole extra level of webcam h2g2 which I'm missing? I know I can't access the Yahoo chat rooms or the special stream-feeds on other bits of BBCi but I didn't even know I was supposed to be able to see h2g2 people.

Oh dear, it look like I'm going to have to explain the concept of a metaphor. *sigh*

RhoMuNuQ

Hi guys , I'm back now, it's been a very long week, had a nice time though drank far too much. It was basically a week of lectures and the odd workshop but because of it being a 'summer school' and there being people from a variety of disciplines, a lot of the course content seemed to be undergrad revision and so pergaps not as enlightening as a proper conference where there's a greater amount of cutting edge research presented. Had a poster session on the first night and got interrogated about my work by people who had also worked on Cativa chemistry with BP but that wasn't too bad, gave me a couple of ideas. As I suspected, a prize was not forthcoming as one of my industrial supervisors was on the judging panel Met a lot of cool people aswell and a few very odd individuals but also ran into a lot of people I did my undergrad degree with at York which was nice . Anyway, I'll stop wittering on. Hope your both okay and that you got over that nasty bug SEF. Probably be around again on Tuesday having taken advantage of the long weekend Take care

I got fed up with the bug and zapped it with some antibiotics. I've still been a bit floppy of late though. It's probably the weather.

Didn't you know that your undergraduate classmates were going to be there? Sometimes these convention thingys come with a list of attendees. I take it you suspect your supervisor of being biased against you rather than that there was someone more worthy of whatever this prize was. I would have thought the cool people would have largely been the same as the odd ones - but maybe that's just me.

Yeah, a lot of conferences you get sent a books of abstracts for the plenary sessions, talks and posters and sometimes a full attendence list and so have a good idea of who's attending. This one was more imformal so we got the list of participants when we arrived so had no idea who was going to turn up.

As for my poster, it's more of a running joke as every time I have a poster there's a BP judge, last time my groupmate (not sponosered) won a prize so it's more jovial internal rivalry There were some very good posters, the standard gets better everytime as people get more used to using computers to do big posters. The guy who won top prize was a worthy winner with some innovative chemistry . Anyway, 'cool' and 'odd' are adjectives that are probably quite warped within the academic framework as opposed to in real life Anyway, speak soon, I'm off home now, take care