TITLE: A Weekend in Portland
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: May 09, 2006 9:19 AM
DESC:
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BODY:
I was in Portland this weekend for the spring meeting of
the
OOPSLA 2006
conference committee. This is the meeting where we assemble
the program for the conference, from technical papers to
lightning talks to invited and keynote talks, from Onward!
to the Educators' Symposium to DesignFest, from workshops
to area of responsibility this year,
tutorials.
It looks like we will have 57 tutorials this year, covering
a range of topics in the OOP community and out in the industrial
software development community. It's a tough job to assemble
the elements of such a program, which ranges over five days
and encompasses affiliated events like
GPCE
and, for the first time ever this year,
PLoP.
Trying to schedule events in such a way as to minimize the
number of times conference attendees say, "Rats! There are
two things I want to see right now. In the session before
lunch, there were none!" I suppose that, in some way, we'd
be happy if every session created a conflict for
attendees, but I'm not sure the attendees would like it so
much!
As I've done in the past when chairing the
2004
and
2005
Educators' Symposia, I owe a great debt to my program committee
of seven OOPSLA veterans. They did most of the heavy lifting
in reading and evaluating all of the submissions we received.
I had to make some tough calls at the end, but their input made
that doable.
Some highlights from the weekend:
PDX, the
Portland International Airport,
has free wireless -- with better coverage than promised.
Hurray!
Why is
Onward!
is a must-see? So that you can "cool your pinkies in the
mud of the future". Maybe it's a must-see because the
chairs of Onward!
are the kind of people who say such things. I'm
especially looking forward to Onward! films, which I had to
step out of last year.
I am not sure that my students are ready for a web page about
me that looks like this
pictorial biography
of past OOPSLA chair
Douglas Schmidt.
My favorite is this take on the old cartoon standard about
the evolution of man:
You may recall me commenting on a
particular sign I saw
while running in Portland back at the fall meeting. Doesn't
it always rain in Portland? Maybe not, it rained again both
nights and mornings I was there this time. It was nice enough
when I arrived Friday evening, if cool, and the sun had poked
through the clouds Monday afternoon -- as we left.
At least it didn't rain on me while I ran. Unfortunately, I
was only able to run my first morning in town. It was my
first 12-miler in eight weeks or so, and felt pretty good.
But, just as I did the
second day at SIGCSE
and the
second day at ChiliPLoP
I came down with some sort of respiratory thing that sapped all
of my energy. So I took today off, and probably will tomorrow,
too, just to get back to normal. I have a feeling that I won't
be
bragging about my mileage the year
like I did at the end of 2005... I'm beginning to wonder about
the pattern and what I can do make air travel workable again for
me. I won't have a chance to test any hypothesis I develop until
October, when I go to PLoP and OOPSLA.
Finally, on a less frivolous note, we spent a few minutes on
Monday morning to plan a memorial for
John Vlissides,
whose passing I
memorialized last winter.
We want this memorial to be a celebration of all the ways John
touched the lives of everyone he met. In an e-mail conversation
last week, 2006
Educators' Symposium
chair
Rick Mercer
pointed out a picture of John and me that I didn't know about
from John's wiki, courtesy of
Dragos Manolescu.
I remember that moment clearly. It has an OOPSLA connection,
too, because it was taken at the annual fall meeting of the
Hillside Group,
which traditionally takes place the evening and morning
after OOPSLA. (I've missed the last two, because the night
OOPSLA ends is the traditional celebration dinner for the
conference committee, and I've been eager to get home to see
my family after a week on the round.)
John and I were part of a break-out group at that Hillside
meeting on the topic of how to create a larger world in which
to publish some of the work coming out of the PLoPs. Most
academic conferences are places to publish novel work, and
most pattern work is by definition not all that new -- it
documents patterns we see in many existing code bases. The
pattern as a literary work and teaching tool is itself novel,
but that's just not what academic program conference committees
are looking for.
Anyway, John and I were brainstorming. I don't remember what
we produced in that session, but my clueless expression indicates
that at that particular moment John was the one producing. That
is not too surprising. yet he made me feel like an equal partner
in the work. I guess I didn't hurt his impression of me too
much. When he became general chair of
OOPSLA 2004,
he asked me to get involved with the conference committee for
the first time, as his Educators' Symposium chair. Good
memories. Thanks for the pointer to the photo, Rick. And
thanks, Dragos, for taking the photo and sharing it.
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