Monday, February 25, 2019

Organizing Talks


Organizing talks is an art, and as such, it can be lots of hard work, as well as plenty of fun. But since it happens bit by bit you can only see how hard you've worked with hindsight. I've organized six years of talks at Nuance Sunnyvale Lab, 202 talks, in total, I believe.

Sure, lots of other people helped too, but I think most of the work was actually mine. There were times that I thought it was a waste of time and thought I'd stop doing it. But I really enjoy listening to engaging talks, and I do have plenty of very engaging friends, so I usually went back to organizing it. Most of the talks were academic and about stuff already published. I do not have the abstracts or slides for most of the talks, so I hope none of the presenters will be offended that in the attachment there is simply a spreadsheet with their name and the titles of the talks.

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Google Plus is going away


So Google decided to shut down Google+. A shame as the product always gave me the mistaken impression that I had some sort of internet presence. You see, I do have (and follow) a few famous friends and some of their fame 'splashes' over me. Anyways the reason for this post is to try to remind me to save all the bits of writing and links I have in the service. Because the last two times Google terminated a product I was to busy to save my data and I regret it (bitterly) to this day. I lost an immense number of photos...