To Make Something More Clear
I mentioned it before, but I think I want to reiterate it:

Most of the people here are rather unfriendly. _Especially_ to the American "graduate" student that I am. There's definitely a correlation involving professors. I got along with Mark (from Microsoft), Bob (from DataPower) and the guy on the bus whose name I unfortunately forgot (from the company I also forgot... I think I saw him in the other room, will have stop by there right after I'm done typing this and get his name again).

As for academics, I've talked with a few graduate students and that tends to go well. Gogul is a graduate student, not a professor; and I just met another one a little earlier who started asking me questions about jMonitor and what it's purpose is and how it relates to aspect-oriented programming.

That leaves professors. I managed to get along with the people from Berkely (possibly because I was also from California) and the one guy from Belgium who was interested in American politics. Most people either give me weird looks or just try to ignore me (i.e., avoid looking directly at me and only respond to me when directly asked a question, and then promptly avert their eyes and stance).

This is a _very_ different atmosphere than all previous conferences I've been to. At Conference.NET there was this continual jovial nature to _everything_. You almost weren't allowed to not join in and talk and play games with other people. With GDC everyone tends to be interested in what everyone else is doing as everyone is working on similar issues and have things to talk about so there's never an issue approaching anyone.

Yet even TOOLS, the academic conference I went to back in Santa Barbara because it had a .NET-oriented conference held as part of it that year and I had been invited to talk about my decompiler, involved a number of really friendly people. Everyone was doing stuff I didn't really care anything about, but everyone was approachable and if you didn't approach someone they'd approach you. I met a _number_ of fun professors there.

I don't know... frankly, if anyone was thinking about doing it in the future, I disrecommend they attend this conference. The main reason to bother actually going to an academic conference rather than just reading the papers in the proceedings is to get to talk with the people at the conference about related topics, or to ask them questions, and this is just not a good atmosphere to do that in.

I am definitely going to PDC (Microsoft's Professial Developer's Conference) next year, though. Mark was telling me about it during dinner last night. I almost don't care how much it costs (I don't think it could possibly end up being as much as I've spent to go to this conference), but Mark was telling me they had student discounts.

Apparently the format is like GDC but less "let's screw everyone out of their money" (a property that E3, GDC, and this conference all share). There are lots of different simultaneous tracks ranging the entire gamut from lectures to round tables to birds-of-a-feather (a category missed by GDC, a category that is more of a directed panel discussion that's still open to audience participation).

Pretty much _all_ Microsoft developers are there, so all work at Microsoft pretty much dies during that week. There's soda and coffee and food out continually during the day. Otherwise, everyone would pass out as the conference starts each day at 8am and sessions don't end until _1am_.

Well, I'm off to walk over to the building the SPIN conference is being held in. I'm going to watch all the Tool presentations there. *Will cover the two talks he saw this morning in a later post.*