The conference I went to was nice, and I think useful. Since this is not a work journal, I won’t go into the actual content of the conference, but it was well run and the accommodations were nice. Meals were included during the conference; we ate in a dining hall, and the food was pretty good. The milk dispensers had labels saying that the milk was produced and processed on campus. :-) I stayed in a dorm room for cheap. (This has to be just about the best deal on a conference my employer ever gets, barring the conferences that are completely underwritten by vendors.) The room was fine, but bathrooms were in the hall, and it was peculiar to have to put clothes on to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

I took a couple of DVDs with me in case I wanted to watch something in the evenings, and I ended up watching Cube, a low-budget Canadian sf/horror film which I really enjoyed. I liked it so much I ordered a copy. I’m looking forward to the sequels.

(I had borrowed Cube through GreenCine, a small Netflix-like service based out of San Francisco. cathijosephine’s experience with Netflix inspired me to join a fixed-fee video rental service, and I figured if I joined a different one, she could show me stuff GreenCine didn’t have, and I could show her stuff Netflix didn’t have.)

I got to meet Dave Farley, who is the author of Dr. Fun, the first regular comic written for the Internet, and a friend of my co-worker Colin. Alas, I didn’t get a copy of his book.

By far the highlight of the Ithaca trip was a hike along the Taughannock Gorge to see Taughannock Falls after a picnic Saturday night. As you might imagine, I got lots of photos. Some will hopefully be up on the web soon.

The drive back to Boston was as pleasant as the drive out to Ithaca, and quicker, because I took a wrong turn and therefore didn’t come back the way Yahoo! Maps told me to.

More soon...