Like yesterday, I woke up quite early around 5.30 am and having an early start to the proceedings was fun. Much of the morning was spent in attending talks/presentations and many were pretty good. Some, however, were quite dull and put the audience back in Monday Greys (yeah Grey - Blue is a bright color and should not be used, in my personal opinion, to indicate dull atmosphere). Most of us, when designing our presentation, are less than a foot away from the screen and from such close distance, everything looks big - but if only we put in a bit extra effort to make sure that the contents can be seen from about 100 feet, when projected on a bigger screen, it would be really nice. Another thing that pisses me (or most people, for that matter) is the poor (or horrible) color schemes employed in slides. Some schemes can be very irritating to the eyes and literally drive the audience away. For those of you who didn’t know, here it is (thanks to my high school drawing instructor, B K Padmanabhachar):

1. BLUE, RED and YELLOW (yeah, Yellow, not Green) are the primary colors
2. Blue is a cool color while Yellow is a warm color
3. Red can either be cool or warm, depending on the situation
4. Violet (Blue + Red), Orange (Red + Yellow) and Green (Yellow + Blue) are secondary colors
5. Black and White are more of shades than colors, in true sense of the word

Last thing that pisses me off is the following: every speaker gets 10 + 2 minutes (atleast in APS) to present their work and many people spend about 4-6 minutes in repeating Due to shortage of time, I am not going to talk about… blah blah blah and then rush through 80% of the slides in the last minutes. This, coupled with smaller font size, crowded slides and irritating color scheme, can be the worst nightmare. I wish academic institutions had workshops / tutorials / orientation sessions to emphasize these things so that the material gets communicated in a much better and understandable way. Just for those of you who use PowerPoint, please remember that cutting & pasting an image is NOT same (and will NOT produce as decent appearance) as inserting it.

Having said that majority of the talks during the day were informative and well organized, it was nice to see many familiar faces - some from Michigan Tech (Da Gao, Yong Peng, Raghava Panguluri, Vijaya Raghavan, …) and some from previous APS meeting in LA. Due to hectic presentation schedule, I resorted to Thai food in the same Inner Harbor food court but the food wasn’t as tasty as last time. Much of the evening, after all sessions, was spent in post-processing some pictures and snapping some night shots. One of them, long exposed shot of zooming vehicles’ head & tail lights, had been on my mind for a while but had to wait for the right opportunity (Houghton does not have skywalks and vehicles move at relatively low speed). I was quite impressed with the result and you should probably check it out too. As I had an early morning session, starting at 7.30 on the other side of inner harbor, my ended a bit earlier, soon after couple episodes of FRIENDS and Family Guy…

Oh, I almost forgot - I placed an order for Apple PowerBook (12.1 inch cutie) - should have arrived by the time I reach Houghton