Back from Science Online 2011 and the east coast

*brushes off a layer of dust* Long time no see! Done travels for the time being, am here to stay in one place for a while. ScienceOnline 2011 was absolutely fantabulous, as was my little trip up the eastern states to Massachusetts (look, I even learned how to spell that!). Never been to eastern or southern US before, which is embarrassing for someone who's lived on this continent for two decades. Well, I guess the North Carolina Research Triangle barely passes for 'south', but it was definitely different already, enough to pique my interest in further exploring the southern US someday. Passed by New York City on my train ride north, and was a very obvious hick, glued to the window in total awe – so big! I really don't get out much these days, and seeing a little bit more of the world, of only briefly, was quite necessary at this point. Hell, it was my first time in Seattle since passing through there c.10 years ago, even that was worth the effort of flying out from there (well, that and the substantially cheaper tickets, of course).

Apparently people don't mind us bloggers revealing random oddments of our personal lives, like travel. At least a couple people found the preceding snow camping post interesting, so I'll do something with my east coast photos too. The ones without people in them, since we don't want any careers terminated prematurely due to the context of those photos and the ethanol-rich atmosphere ;-) (for some idea, look up the hashtags #DSNsuite and #TheGam, at your own risk). You can also read the potentially incriminating records of the #scio11 tweets here, sorted by days of the conference. And yes, that hashtag is still alive and well because we just can't stop, and #scio12 is up and running already too...

So I intend to have two posts, one summarising the conference and my thoughts on things, and another on my rapid 'tour' past 8 states (and Washington DC) in 24h. Behold, I even have blurry photos of the Washington Monument in the distance, at night!

Before embarking on attempting to write something marginally passing for coherent and maybe even intelligent about Scio11, I must point out that the organisers of the conference, Bora Zivkovic and Anton Zuiker, are fucking awesome, and we in the science blogging community are really lucky to have them around!

To be continued.