Off to Lansing

So I leave for Lansing, MI, in a few hours so I can attend this conference. It should be a good conference for me, as a number of people I would like to talk to are attending; people who's work I've been quoting for the past few months. I am also unusually nervous about delivering my paper. I've done enough of them that normally it doesn't phase me too much, but this is the first that I've delivered at a game developers conference. It's a new field for me, and unlike an academic conference, I can't defend any old BS that I make up as simply my opinion. They tend to expect tangible results at game dev conferences. It doesn't help that my paper is the first of the conference. Ah well, nothing to do now but sling it out there and cross my fingers.

It will also be the first time Sara and I have been apart for any significant amount of time since we left San Diego. One thing about living in a foreign country: it can feel an awful lot like living on an island most of the time. Granted, we do our shopping, interact with the locals occasionally, watch the news... But it all has a sense of being one step removed, as though we had to arrive by boat from our tiny island of Americanness to do our shopping on the mainland of Danish. It will be strange to be back amongst my fellow Americans 24-7.

It occurs to me that this post is pretty much a more elaborate version of one I posted a couple of days ago. So in the interest of variety, here's a website Sara found about cat deformities.