Hey all. Back from Florida; I’d posted an entry from the conference (see below), but due to some quirk of Blogger it hasn’t shown up until now.
It was, I think, a good conference. I’ve got three new research projects to puzzle over, with three different collaborators, so that’s pleasant. Good response to my talk by the masses of mathematicians there; between that and getting an acceptance to a (fairly) prestigious journal, I seem to be building a bit of a career here. Nice.
The not-nice part had to do with my return flight… which was through Chicago this past Thursday, a day apparently fraught with weather-related complications in that part of the world. My flight to Chicago was delayed, due to some bizarre system of confliect resolution between airlines when a major airport is experiencing difficulties. I did manage to get into O’Hare barely in time for my connecting flight… or would have, had they not cancelled said flight earlier in the day. (The airport in Florida has free wi-fi, so I discovered this well before boarding my first flight for the day.)
The thing that annoys me most about the whole experience is the airline’s apparent attitude that information is on an immediate need-to-know basis. The folks at FLL refused to give anything more than a vague estimate for a departure time until about twenty minutes before boarding; further, I was told that no help with accommodations in Chicago would be offered (since the delays were not the airline’s fault) and so made my own arrangements over the internet… and then got to Chicago and found that no, actually cut-rate hotel rooms were available after all.