Tomorrow I’m taking the plane to Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, to take part in the “Genetic Programming Theory and Practice” workshop. I’m pretty excited about the opportunity – there will be some of the bigger names in GP theory participating, and the structure of the workshop (few participants, lots of time for presentation and discussion) means that I may actually get the chance to pick their brains for a bit, instead of the normal “big conference” environment where when someone moderately famous makes a talk, everyone rushes to try and talk to them and you are lucky to get a question through.

With some luck, I might even manage to bring up the subject of Post-Doc positions *g* — BTW, I finally got my first serious proposals these days, but it is top secret, don’t bother asking :-).

Logistically, the trip is all set up. I’ll leave tomorrow and return on the 24th — not that it will make a big difference for the pacing of this blog. Recently I have been mostly posting personal stuff to Facebook, and news/research stuff to twitter. I’ll be staying at two couchsurfer’s place — hope the karma pays off :-), and I have printed a small list of Geocaches I want to find during the trip, time permitting. The only part which is a bit uncertain is how I will get from the airport to Ann Arbour — it seems that A2 does not have an international airport (or even a big local one), so I have to get off in Detroit and, this being the US, I can’t take a bus/train from the airport to the city – I need to book a shuttle in advance (which I couldn’t do, since most shuttles only take reservation by phone, none answered my e-mails), or pay 50 dollars for a cab – five times what I would pay for an express train Narita-Tokyo, which is about double the distance. So who said Japan is expensive again?

And don’t get me started on the medieval flight security in US airports… :-(

As an aside, I have finally finished all the experiments and most of the analysis required for the “final” revision of my thesis. I kinda hesitate to use final (hence the “”), since there is a lot of stuff which I’m not satisfied with and would like more time to work on, but it should be enough data to satisfy the defense committee (based on their review of my first defense). So in the next 23 days until the deadline, all I gotta do is edit this data into new sections and improve some of the old ones.