updated bullets

• My talk was fine. I could hear my voice shaking a bit at the beginning, but others claimed not to have been able to tell I was freaking out at looking at such a huge expanse of audience (in terms of number of seats, anyway; I've no idea how many of them were filled since I was trying to avoid looking at actual people). I'm feeling kind of bad for not giving my advisor enough credit, since I was talking about lab stuff and the student the next day who did that was much clearer (I obviously thanked him in the acknowledgments, but still...). I got introduced as Dr Pigpuppet, too, which was weird (all the moderators had to go on were first initials and last name so they assume everyone was a Dr). I only got one question in public (yay for strict timekeeping!), but that was kind of weird and confused. A bunch of people came to talk to me later, though, which was kind of cool, but again I felt like they should be talking to my advisor, not me.
• I actually went out one night with a bunch of the Commonwealthlandians, because Overly Verbose Student was looking for people to go out with and they were the obvious crowd. It was actually pretty fun, but I didn't stay very long and, as usual, felt the next day like I missed out on something because OVS was all friendly with the C'landians (not that I would have talked that much even if I had stayed out). I met someone who was in my lab at home before me, though.
• The ratio of female to male speakers improved after the first day, up to almost a third. It was a bit hard to tell who was an invited speaker, but the ratio there was still only about 1/7.
• Now that the conference is over I can think about where I want to travel. I wanted to get up earlier this morning to start exploring, but I guess I had some sleep deprivation (and blogging) to catch up on.
• Anyone want a postcard, à la Profgrrrrl? Email me an address.