Remote Office

I’m in remote office mode again. I’ve to give two colloquia while visiting two physics departments in Vancouver area over the next two days. (Subject matter will be essentially the same as the one I gave a month ago.) So tonight, I’m eating dinner at the splendid restaurant Banana Leaf not far from my hotel while reviewing the slides of my presentations on my pda (my iTouch – I dump lots of files I want to read on it using an application called filemagnet. Very useful. See here. In this case I’m looking at the pdf output from the keynote presentation software I use. ) I’m making a few notes on changes I’ll make when I get back to my hotel. I’m also reviewing a few other documents that were sent to me for response, and tying off various loose ends here and there before the evening ends.

I sometimes worry that it might be considered rude that I’m apparently doing a bit of work and so not fully paying attention to the food, but I’m not too worried, really. Once the actual food arrives I’ve been quite appreciative of it, giving it my full attention while actually trying the food itself and turning away to peer at slides only now and again – mostly between arrival of courses or while resting from sampling, even talking to the wait staff about it the food when they come over to ask the usual “how’s everything?” question the usual too many times. I think I’ve got the balance right today, and it wasn’t hard to do since this place is very good.

I’d mentioned a while back that I’ve not been doing a lot of travel (especially international) in recent times, having turned into a much more selective traveller, happier with a sort of “less is more” approach, welcoming invitations to visit and so forth, but sometimes taking a while before I can take up the invitation. I’ll be making up for the lack of travel a bit this month, with this Vancouver trip to start out and then some more grueling travel later on in the month. I did not fully realize just how infrequent international travel had been until last night, while getting ready for the trip. I could not figure out where my passport was for a long while! As an important (but small and easy to misplace) document, I tend to keep it in a special place, out of the way and out of sight, but easily accessible when I need it. The problem is that after so long a time, I could not find it in the usual place, and so then tried some of the previous “usual places”, to no avail. I was a bit worried for about 45 minutes (during which I’d taken to searching even the unlikely places in case something odd had happened to it) until I figured out what happened – the place I keep it had itself been moved during one or other rearrangement of things, and I’d forgotten to make note of that. A bit embarrassing, overall.

-cvj