Traveling

I have a lot of travel scheduled for this semester: Laramie, bay area, and Houston in September, Ohio in October, DC in November, DC again in December. My first trip is this week.

I am going to try an experiment in which I leave my computer at home and take my iPad instead. In part I don't want to lug around my huge laptop because I am flying so much (My Town --> Denver --> Laramie --> Denver --> San Jose --> Denver --> My Town), and driving around a lot too (San Jose --> Yosemite --> San Jose). So carrying it around and worrying about leaving it in cars and hotel rooms is a bit of a pain. In contrast the iPad is light and small and easy to slip into a purse.

I have to give a talk, but it's kind of a short commentary type of talk rather than a formal research talk, so it's not clear to me whether I should have slides or not. But I am creating slides just in case, and thankfully the iPad does allow me to do this as well. I use keynote to create the slides on my computer, place it in dropbox, get it off of dropbox on the iPad, open in keynote, and voila! I have a special dongle that attaches the iPad to a projector. I have also found that it's a lot easier than I would have thought to edit and change (or even create) slides on the iPad itself.

I will have a lot of PDFs and documents to read through at the conference, and will need a way to take notes, but I have a nice notetaking app on the iPad and I have some good pdf readers. I haven't yet shelled out for Pages (like word) or any of the PDF annotating apps, because I haven't needed them yet -- I don't tend to do a lot of annotating directly on PDFs. But if I feel the need to, I'll just get Noterize, which is pretty cheap ($3.99 I think). My current note-taking app is free, and with my wireless keyboard I can take lots of notes quickly. I also have the ability to record verbal notes if necessary.

So, it'll be quite interesting to see how it goes without my computer! I will probably feel a little naked without it, but I think I can pretty much do everything I need to with the iPad, and having constant connectivity with the 3G network is a nice perk, too.

Famous Guy #2 is going to be at the conference (and I have to provide remarks on his talk, which is freaking me out), and we've been communicating a bit over email. I'd always heard that he was kind of a tough character but so far he's been incredibly nice and supportive towards me. I even shared that I've been having some difficulties writing my current paper and he said, "Let's be sure to talk. And perhaps you can share some rough drafts -- you never know what breaks a logjam!" How nice! I hope this conference is as helpful as I'm anticipating for helping me work out some tricky ideas that I'm struggling with right now. I know that once I'm there and in the thick of it, getting some valuable connections and some mentoring from FG#2, I'll totally not want to leave early like I have planned. But then once I arrive in CA and see my friends, I'll be glad I did.