hello, goodbye

Footprints from the sky,
Cast darkly across cacti,
Wavering in heat.

Arizona is more gorgeous than I remembered.  I haven't been here in... what, like 8 years or something?  Anyway, it's been a while.  Flying in, I was once more enthralled by desolation from the air.  Excuse me for a moment while I wax poetic about the scenery, and then I'll get to talking about Grace Hopper:

Desert towns make no concessions.  Grids cross their space in the sand, and they don't taper off so much as they just stop when civilization does.  Sometimes a street will waver with a suggestion of organic shape.  The roads that connect the towns are Hugh Hefner-straight across flat, sandy inbetweens.  There are no curves to follow around hills.  There are no speed limits.

Dark veins of runoff channels spider across the dunes, giving the desert an appearance of old life.  Dots of brush don't seem like much from so high.  The outlines of sanguine mountains in the distance are made fuzzy by saguaros, which up close seem to be classic cowboys with their arms askew.

On the ground, one sees that there is more to this place.  The burning sun and the dry heat it brings are interrupted occasionally by a plane-shadow: the footprint of some great, rigid bird-god.  A lizard suns himself on a rock.  Some of the cacti are blooming--strange spots of bright in a landscape of brown and muted greens.  Some of the cacti are dying, but there is a romance in the extinguished ones covered in spiderwebs.

At sunrise and sunset, when Helios is at an end of his long drag across the southern sky, the silhouettes of hills and flora make dramatic backdrops for the southwestern dance music floating out of the conference centre.

Ok, anyway, I really loved the desert and actually am rather going to miss it.  The conference was way more fun than I expected, too, and I learned about a few really awesome grad school opportunities that I'm going to have to look into (including the Media Lab at MIT).  I think I also landed an internship for the spring, but we'll see how that goes.  ;)

There were lots of cool talks about things ranging from Lego Mindstorms to expanding involvement of women in technical fields (no surprise there) to how to best use the fairly extensive penetration of mobile phone service in Africa to improve medical care.  There was also a really inspiring panel about interdisciplinary research, which is most likely where I'm going to find myself.

There were also, of course, parties and lots of swag (Sarah and I got some great umbrellas from Bloomberg).  The platinum sponsors of the event were Google, Microsoft, and Intel, but there was a lot of participation from Amazon, Yahoo!, Bloomberg, IBM, Raytheon, and others.  I came away with a lot of free t-shirts (and 5 sets of Google sunglasses for the llamas back home).  I also got the chance to squaredance with Alan Eustace, to set up Guitar Hero and play with the Intel folks, and to jump in a pool fully clothed, which I haven't done in years, haha.  :)

I had a good time.  I hope that I have enough time to get my homework done on the plane flights home, but we'll see how that goes.  Oh, the life of a jetsetter.