As noted in the previous blog post, last week I attended IPMU 2008. My presentation that featured the work done with the agriculture data went smoothly. There was a guy from Caterpillar who had his talk right before mine who was very aware of what I was doing and definitely knew what I was talking about. I asked him afterwards and it turned out that he grew up on a farm. I still need to study some American accents because I don’t know exactly where to put him. There were a lot of other presentations and (at least at the gala dinner) around 250 participants with (at most) five parallel sessions which is a lot of research work in a very short time.

Personally, I wouldn’t choose Málaga or Torremolinos for a holiday — I dislike summer, sand, sun and salt water. But for a conference, meeting interesting people in an air-conditioned hotel, it is worthwile. The fun part was that there were a lot of German tourists there who showed the habit of turning up at around 7 a.m. at the pool and reserved seats for the whole family by placing towels there. It certainly looked like someone from the family or group who pulled the shortest straw had to get up and do that.