Tired. All day at the Protein Soc meeting here in San Diego, but the talks were good overall, a couple made it worth waking up at 5:30am to get there (went to sleep yesterday at 2:30am, finishing my poster presentation), three of them put me right back to sleep (micro-catnaps), even when the topics were interesting.

Poster sessions are interesting, more interaction than a talk, although sometimes very strange people come to talk to you. Usually they are extremely fixated on a problem, and see everything in terms of that problem, even when what you are presenting is in area with null overlap with the problem they are confronting. It is difficult to converse w/ a person like that, he/she runs in circles, or at least in closed curves, no matter were you go, they always end up in the same place.

The "I got a hammer everything looks like nails" case. Makes for strange conversations, in which it seems that you are shinning light into an ever shifting prism, light just gets deflected at odd angles and creates strange patterns. Fortunately, the coffee kept me awake long enough so the couple of tunnel-vision people I talked today, got bored and went away, more time to write PocketC apps on my PalmPilot.

I don't know if I can get blinded by a research problem to the exclusivity of everything else, or perhaps I do and not notice. A human tendency of reducing something new to something we know, something we grasp?.

What was with that other strange shifty looking dude?, he basically kept asking me for a bunch of URLs where to download the Open Source stuff I use for my research, what MySQL was, what Apache was, what PHP was, what program did I use for some of my plots (Xmgr), and then telling me how important my research is to his w/o having asked anything or read about my research, that was strange. Now that I try to remember, I don't think he mentioned what he did, and also seems like he's never heard of Open Source before, or of search engines. Not sure if he was very lazy or just clueless.

Sleep, finally. Tomorrow, another day full of talks from 8:00am-9:30pm. Hopefully no more weird conversations. Fortune cookie at lunch "Your will have a lot of excitement in the near future"...