Having spent quite a bit of time in vain yesterday night, attempting to use the wireless network in Days Inn, I woke up this morning under the impression that the problem might have solved by iteself — wrong, problem was intact and that forced me to be in the Convention Center way before my usual arrival time. BCC also has some problems - strength of the APS signal is not the same everywhere and more importantly, some other signals (which cost $$$) overpower the free one in main lobbies. After attending a few talks in the morning session, hunger struck and took me to Burger King. Later on, I stopped at Ritz Camera to return few filters. Then on, till about 2.15 pm, I worked on fine tuning my presentation — making sure that all animations were just the way I wanted to (not too fast, not too slow), testing compatibility of my laptop with APS projectors, cleaning things up so that nobody was pissed and timing it close to 11 minutes. All these practice paid off as I finished my presentation, quite smoothly to my own surprise, in about 11 minutes and even more surprisingly, answered the lone question from the audience. There seemed to be more people in the room this time or it could have been just an optical illusion - small room with same number of people.

Anyways, one done and one more to go on Friday. I didn’t have too much time to think about my talk as the MARC train to Washington DC was leaving Camden Yards in less than 45 minutes. I ran back to the hotel room, took another bag and camera, and walked swiftly off towards to the station. Brisk walking helped me spend a few minutes in the Orioles Stadium (FYI, it’s a baseball stadium) - I had never been inside one so far & I was in the space between the main gate and main fence taking some nice pictures. Some confusion delayed the start of my journey towards DC and about an hour (and a short nap) later, I was in Union Station around 4.45 pm. Mike arrived shortly and we walked back to his place, just a few blocks away. It was good to see him and I feel sorry that I missed Laine - owing to my slightly hectic schedule. After the usual catching up on usual things (and taking pictures of the neighborhood from his terrace, and talking to Dr. P about the talk), we went out for dinner at yet another desi restaurant, called The White Tiger. My food could have been little less spicier and Mike had had better Tandoori Chicken. Soon before I could realize, it was time again to start the return journey and about another hour (and some fiddling around with camera’s intricate operations), I was back in Baltimore’s Camden Yards….

I am too tired to do anything else and like yesterday, I will do the simplest thing that can be done — should I explicitly mention it? Well, I will - sleep