observations on geeks (pt 2) and other stories
Two speakers dropped out of the conference, forcing the organisers to have to refactor the talks for the day. They managed to completely bust the time I had spent finding swaps to keep the talks in interesting, related streams; even though I feel that they could have kept it so that related talks could have been kept sequential, rather then simultaneously. In general, I think the organisers are awfully stressed, and should in general try to lighten up. I don't recall anyone being anywhere near that serious in Perth.
In other news, I have a purple shirt, it makes me undetectable if I remain still. Hopefully this is more coherent then my last couple of posts, however the lack of sleep makes structured language hard. Topic focus is not a skill I currently have. The organisers should smile more.

Comments
metaphors!
What a wonderfully mixed metaphor. Was it an extremely hot horse? Inquiring minds demand to know!
But there you go.
- the Adrian,
- the Alex,
- the Grahame (I am a Grahame), and
- the Tearles
I had forgotten the Packrat, since I haven't run into any Packrat-esque geeks this week. I'm also not sure how to classify James.
Sorry to distill you down to a stereotype and all ;)
Perhaps you hadn't noticed all of the "no food or drink" signs on the entrances to all of the lecture theatres?
Bernard successfully made it neutrally buoyant the first time, James and myself spent significantly longer the second.
The "No food or drink" warning would have been pertinent had any of the system actually involved food or drink. There was a partially small amount of liquid ballast in the can, however this consisted of pure drinking water.
Your average, sweaty geek secretes much more in the course of an hour, with a lot more nasty smelling aromatics then was contained in that can by the time it was balanced (somewhere in the order of magnitude of about 4mL by my guess).