Update from Zurich

Here's a quick update:

I am exhausted. I slept one or two hours between my two plane flights but have otherwise been awake since 10am on Friday. I am in horrible shape.

The conference organization is ass backwards on so many levels. They got one thing right --- giving each attendee a voucher for free train and tram rides for the entire week --- but have basically failed on everything else. The website is unreadable and is missing convenient ways to find out who is attending and what talks are being given (and when they're being given). There are glitches in the registration system (I need to go back on Tuesday to get my last document). The registration is in a room that is way too small to handle the volume of people. There are different stations to get things so one has to wait in line multiple times. When there are issues, one station doesn't know which precise other one to send you to. The directions to where the registration was in the first place were broken (both in telling us the name of the building in advance and including on-site directions), causing many people to wander around the buildings in searing heat (90 degrees + reasonably major humidity) for 20 minutes until they found it. Oh yeah, and one of the stations where we had to wait in line was at the airport (why make us wait in line for over 30 minutes just to get our generic train voucher --- they could have given us our entire package since they had to look up our name anyway!) They didn't inform me that the hostel where I'm staying doesn't let you check into your room until 3pm. (That one is more of a minor complaint but is the reason I haven't gotten any rest of taken a shower even though that was what I first wanted to do when I got here.) It's just been a big fail so far. Given how I feel right now, I already wish I hadn't bothered to come here. Maybe I'll feel better after I get some sleep. With this experience, I've gained much more appreciation for how good a job SIAM, APS, and AMS/MAA do with organizing their conferences. This has just been a major fail.

Good thing: Unsurprisingly, there were lots of people attending the conference on my flight from Philly to Zurich. I talked to a couple of them, plus other people I know who I saw after landing, in the Zurich airport. (That was one benefit of having to wait in line there for my train voucher.)

Even better thing: The Dodgers won today and the Padres lost. We're now in first place by ourselves!

Hmmm... I need to find a plug so I can read box scores before I go to bed. Though I must say I am tempted to just go right back to the hostel and crash and read the box scores tomorrow.