From Florence!

Just came back from the closing plenary address by Bill Buxton at the CHI 2008 conference here in Florence, Italy. It's been quite a hectic week - with 20 hours of student volunteering, lunches, dinner parties and a smattering of completing assignments in bits and pieces thrown in. Florence is charming. It's got a charm about it, the streets, the air, the life in the city - almost purposeful and poetic at the same time. It was also fun to meet again with people form the Office Design Group at Microsoft including my manager during the internship! I also met with lots of people whose papers I'd read not knowing woh they really are. Oh, Natasha and I also ran into Jonathon Grudin late last night looking for directions while we were getting some icecream!

We didn't make it to the final four teams at the Student Design Competition ( I must say I hated the part where the time for judging was not allocated uniformly and we got the short end of the stick on that one). One of the judges was really nice though.

Anyway we shifted to the ArchiRossi hostel from our apartment today. The person at the desk was very helpful again! In half an hour we're going to the Central Part Disco for a student volunteer party!

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