Monday
I didn’t get very much sleep on Sunday night. There was a fluorescent light fixture on the wall beside my bed, just a foot or so above it. After B had gone to sleep I wanted to continue reading so I turned off the main light and turned the fluorescent lamp on. Unfortunately the light switch became loose and came off, so that in order to turn it off again I had to jam a ball point pen into the switch socket and wiggle it around. But for some reason this only turned it off temporarily, and so 10 or 15 minutes later the fluorescent lamp fizzed mischievously back into life and I had to get up again and reapply the pen.
This repeated itself over a number of times during the course of that night. Just as I was about to drift off to sleep, the lamp would spark back to life – it was too bright and too close by to be able to ignore – and I’d have to scramble around again, searching for my pen, feeling utterly exasperated, and hoping maybe this time I could get it to stay off. At a certain point, maybe around the fourth or fifth iteration, I heard someone rapping on the other side of the wall just as I was busily jamming the pen in. Great: now I’d woken up the poor bastard next door. Eventually, and I don’t remember how, but I managed to turn it off permanently.
We got up at half 7, but I didn’t have time for breakfast. B started complaining about the fact that we had to share a bathroom with the guy in the adjacent room. I went straight off to the conference to see an invited talk given this time around by Erich Grädel, another logician whose work I admired greatly, but who didn’t cut such an impressive figure in person, with his large pot belly jutting out in his black shirt. The talk was interesting enough and I followed it till about half way through when my grasp of the main ideas became too precarious and it all fell about like a house of cards in my head.
Coffee break. I went to the foyer and had some fresh fruit and a cup of coffee, assiduously avoiding the trays of cakes and pastries that had almost immediately caught my eye because I was still trying to keep to my diet. I went back in for the second morning session and worked from my category theory textbook, paying little mind to the speakers up front.
After that B and I went off to the canteen for lunch together. We sat at a table with two Chinese students; the one sitting next to me was busily slurping up his soup and loudly sucking up his noodles. I’ve noticed that in general the Chinese love to accompany the act of eating with a whole litany of appreciative sucking sounds — even if they’re quiet and reserved in so many other ways. For a main I had chicken and liver with rice; it was a bit bland.
Then having filled our bellies we took a short stroll along the Štefánikova, the street upon which we’d first set foot in Brno; we took in some shops and a few graffittied buildings. Soon it was time to go back to the conference.
Most of the talks that I attended during the afternoon session were related to automata theory, covering among other topics, data automata, reset automata, lossy machines, and randomness. B was working hard in the foyer on a presentation of her own.
