Sunday at OOPSLA '07

We're getting close to the end of the real day here at OOPSLA '07. I've worked today as a flotter from 7h to 10h and then again from the 12h to 16h (I did 1 extra work hour than I was scheduled for to help people). Now, you must be wondering what a flotter does, right? Very simple: flotters float! Meaning we just stay in the Student Volunteers (S.V.) Room (a nice room with great wifi, power and free food) and wait for some work to show up. This could be anything: from replacing a missing SV to carrying stuff around and helping in registration. But most of the time, you just sit in the SV Room and chat, organize extra activities (such as Ice skating on Monday or Tuesday!) and have fun. This is how I managed to write the whole last post, read my feeds, check emails, etc...

I'm now off duties but I've already lost around 65% of any tutorials and around 80% of any workshop for today so I decided to stay here and write a bit about the conference itself. We got a lot of people here from all over the world. I've met Canadians, Polish, Americans, Mexican, German, Romenian and even Brazilian students. :) I'm not sure what we're doing tonight but Mariana promissed she would report on the tutorial she attended: "Pick up your pen!" from Steve Metsker. I will try to upload, classify and comment every picture we got from yesterday and today.

Tomorrow afternoon I will be hosting the tutorial: "Why users say 'Start with the Screen!': Effective Test-Driven Development, Presentation Layer-First" from Bobby Norton and Chris Stevenson and I will report about it. I'm not sure yet about which tutorial or workshop I will attend during the morning but I'm seriously thinking about Steven Fraser, Dennis Mancl and Bill Opdyke's "No silver bullet - a Retrospective on the Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering" although I might attend to the beginning of the Mini-PLoP which would not be as good since I would have leave in the middle. I don't know. I will probably talk to Linda Rising about it (since she's responsible for the PLoP) and find about it tomorrow morning during breakfast.

So, activities here finish around 17h (which is in a couple mins) and then we will probably try to agenda something with other SVs and go out in the city and later on go to some pub maybe. Tomorrow's duties start later on (8:30h instead of 7h today) so we might have a couple more sleep hours (or writing). And, finally if anyone is wondering where will be next OOPSLA: Nashville, Tennessee. So get ready to subscribe as student volunteers because there are around 10 or 12 guys from Monterey University which means, there are not limits for a single university. You just need to show interest and be ready to work a little to get a lot of fun.

That's it for now guys, I'll get ready to go somewhere with Mariana before we meet with the rest of the SVs. Bye bye and see you guys later.