A Late Sage Days 7 report

Oh well, Sage Days 7 has been over for quite a while and I did procrastinate on this blog post for way too long.

The event was hosted at IPAM at UCLA and it was a lot of fun meeting a whole new set of faces only known from IRC and email in person and also meeting a large set of people I met at previous Sage Days again. I was one of the few Europeans there (and probably the only one who came directly from Europe) and the flights sucked. For some reason I was routed via Las Vegas and the airline managed to lose my luggage on the last leg of my flight itinerary, a 40 minute flight from Las Vegas to LAX. The travel from LAX to Westwood was very pleasant, but finding the UCLA guest house took some more time than I had thought. In the end I finally caught some sleep and due to my charger and backup laptop resting safely in my luggage I didn't respond to email too much for the first 48 hours.

After my luggage showed finally up roughly two days later things got better, but I never caught up with my email until I made it home. I mostly worked on the Debianization of Sage with Tim Abbott, merged a bunch of tickets and spend a lot of time on discussions and bug fixing. Overall it was a very productive Sage Days for me.

I ended up winning the "Guess that spkg" and "Guess that ticket" competitions and I guess everybody did expect me to win since it would have been a major upset if somebody else beat me there. Let's see if we are having another contest at Sage Days 8 in Austin at the end of the month.

Flying back to Europe was alright, even though I didn't sleep the night before and dozed on the plane for a couple of hours. On the way back I visited rpw in Darmstadt, but at that point I was pretty useless from lack of sleep. I also ended up with a rather severe cold which also attacked other participants of SD7, so that I spend the two days after I got home mostly sleeping and away from the computer.

Cheers,

Michael