First day of the conference went well. I managed to stay awake despite only four hours of sleep last night. Usually I find conferences stimulating: as the speakers tell their story, many new ideas occur to me and I fill up a couple of pages of notes with things I’m going to try when the conference is over. I have several such pads from previous conferences, but — except in a few cases — nothing comes of it. Somehow the ideas just don’t seem so brilliant when I get back home. I think that what really inspires me is not wonderful new ideas but learning that other people have been working hard on their research, and that I can do it too. By now this effect is wearing off a little and I must work harder to get inspired. Also, I’m not really “at” the conference, in the sense that I come home every night. The venue is only 15 minutes away by car.

Also, this is not really a conference. It is an IFIP summer school and a warmup workshop for ICSE (a big software engineering conference) that is being held next year in South Africa. (I wonder why?) Still, the last IFIP summer school I attended was in 1993 in Pretoria and I think that it affected the course of my life. It was the first ever such gathering I attended and the speakers were brilliant. I still remember the lectures. Were it not for that summer school, I might easily have gone out to industry in 1994.

That was also the trip where we changed the universities policy regarding anti-theft devices in their official vehicles. A whole lot of us traveled up to Pretoria in two of the universities minibuses. The Monday night the first bus was stolen. The Tuesday night the second bus was stolen. The secretary thought that our phone call to report the second theft was an April’s fool joke. Ah, good times.

Even though I am not staying at the conference venue (it wouldn’t make any sense), the whole affair still feels a little like a holiday. It comes at just the right time: after last week I’m burned out, and I know from past experience that I’m pretty useless for a couple of days after a major deadline. Luckily I had time to improve the paper a little and I’m quite satisfied with it. I’m not sure what my co-authors think. In the past, I have almost always felt that the paper I had just written (or co-written, to be exact) was my best work so far. Sadly I don’t feel the same way about this last paper. But still, I think it is good work, even if we could have done it slightly better. No doubt the reviewers will tell us if it should be improved dramatically.

Yawn, yawn, off to bed.