conference first part 2

thursday began with my rediscovery that i'd made a bad backup. the data was fine, but i'd formatted the drive incorrectly :/

i made the 7.27 train easily this time, possibly because i knew which platform to wait on. i had a sudden insight on the way to the conference, which i had to share with nystire as soon as it struck me: "i'm being paid not to break anything". that's not really true, but it's the only narrative i can give to my present situation :P

my course buddy from yesterday sat with me for the rest of the conference, which was good because there were a lot of times where we needed to prop each other up :P

lieutenant colonel lullaby opened the day with a long-winded explanation of "responsive space", and was met by exceptionally irrelevant questions from some old guy who'd read something or other in a newspaper that had bothered him.

i suffered a few coughing spasms during the day. the timing is always just right (murphy-wise) to cover something interesting.

someone mentioned "dr evil": it took me a few seconds to realize that that was an italian accent making an attempt at "dr evans". it had a slight effect on the meaning of the sentence :P

spacex's "time is money": christophe bauer really did make all the governmental types look bad. his presentation was interesting, short, sharp, to the point; it included a brief summary of all the cool stuff they've been doing, and made up for the boring, long job-justification shit that had preceded it.

after a quick break, the futron programmer / salesman gave a presentation on their statistics package. i'm not usually a big fan of such things, but with the handful of examples that he threw out to make his pitch he provided an interesting picture of the space industry at a glance. one day, when i'm big, i'll most likely be paying for that.

aside from an amusing verbal typo of his, wherein he listed the swedish space budget as being €100 [instead of 100 million], i found my train of thought wondering the back-country and i was feeling generally inspired by the end of his talk.

the amos satellite excitement: all i could think of was "i'd rather read it all than hear you drone". don't read your damn presentation, you monkey! they could've handed out a flyer, it would've been easier on the mind. i think half the audience was drooling.

the laser communication lecture that followed was a lot more interesting.

thinking that the head of the fisher institute would speak before lunch, we sat through the discussion on defensive solutions. quite easily the most pointless of the lot. if you've got nothing to say... stop. please.

for me, personally, the important note for the day was borne my conversation with my previous TL's brother about 24 hours earlier. it took me that long to register that something that he'd said was indicative of a void in the israeli industry - one that's exactly what i've been meaning to fill since i first got enthusiastic about scaled.

[i just found myself amused by the fact that "scaled" is a south-africanism for "stolen"]

so the bottom line for me:
1. my ideas are still extremely relevant
2. there's a strong demand for them
3. sitting through the boring items gave me plenty of time to ponder the interesting stuff, and i walked away from the conference with my ideas more finely tuned and a lot of inspiration.

we had dodgy chinese for lunch, and i suggested that my course buddy apply to fill the vacancy i'm about to produce in my section before getting on the train. i decided that i didn't need to attend the "youth education" section of the conference.

getting off the train, the doors opened and everyone crowded round them from the outside as usual.
"can i exit freely, please?" i asked - and was amazed that at least one person took half a step back. how hard is it to let people out first?!

my arrival back in tel aviv was greeted with dust. it was time to get indoors and stretch out on the couch while i reformatted the backup drive.