Saw this cool PowerBook/MacBook Pro during the poster session at InfoVis ’06, check it:

Location: Conference Internet Access Room, Hyatt Hotel, Baltimore
Local Time: 10:11 am

The first conference item that I attended this morning was a tutorial on Illustrative Visualization presented by Mario Costa Sousa from the University of Calgary. I was torn between the Geographic Visualization paper session and this tutorial, so I missed the majority of the first speaker in the tutorial but caught all of Mario’s overview and framework talk. It was a very nice talk and it makes me want to take the non-photorealistic rendering class that will be offered next semester.

After the break here, I’m off to see the Network Visualization session which includes Danny Holten‘s paper, Hierarchical Edge Bundles: Visualization of Adjacency Relations in Hierarchical Data, winner of the InfoVis 2006 Best Paper award. Judging from the paper preview, Holten’s talk is going to be excellent.

Location: Floh’s Laptop in the Atrium, Hyatt Hotel, Baltimore
Local Time: 3:37 pm

Woke up on the hotel floor today. Good thing I brought a Therm-a-Rest with me. Today is the first day of InfoVis ’06 and it was kicked off by Peter Eades’ keynote address. It was a interesting forty five minute talk titled “Algorithmics for Network Visualization”, so great if you where looking for a graph drawing talk, but awfully dull for a keynote address. What was the conference committee thinking when that talk was selected? You don’t start a conference with a lecture on specific subject matter, make it general, so that it appeals to everyone attending the conference. That’s pretty basic stuff.

I can hear Annie’s laugh. Time to go.

Just finished last minute packing for my four day trip to Baltimore for InfoVis 2006. This will be my second academic conference and I’m really really looking forward to it cause this one is dedicated to Info Vis research and it’s going to be great.

What I’m not too pumped for are the carry on restrictions currently in place for air travel. I bought my DS and iPod for times like these, but with TERRORISM and all these devices are just not allowed. [Update: I packed a DS, iPod, and DSLR in my carry on and was admitted through airport security without challenge. It's things like liquids that you can't bring on the flight, so get that coffee from Timmies after you go through security.] But I have plenty of reading material and my good friend Megan gave me this wicked cool graphic novel, Rising Star: Born in Fire, so I’ll be reading that all the way to Baltimore. Thanks Megan!

It’s time for bed now, but one last thing. PantherModem has been off-line since June when I moved from Ottawa to Calgary but it’s back and here to stay.