Tuebingen: Day 1

First few pics are of the hotel: Am Schloss ("The Castle"?). A quaint little hotel on a rather steep hill. I hiked it on up here all the way from the train station, about 1km (about 2/3 mi) but it seemed longer with the luggage and hills. I was drippin' sweat when I finally got my bags up to the 4th floor!. The room is fairly typical-European: small beds with quilts. Hooray for quilts. Why do Americans insist on that silly sheet/blanket combo when a quilt is much nicer. The amenities are nice; I often end up judging the place by the quality of its shower. Is it tall enough (yes), powerful enough (yes), etc. And there's a nice pub just two doors up from my hotel "wing" which is most convenient :)

Then in the last pic you see what would normally be a joy to behold to any traveling geek: one's very own wifi router, with large, imposing cooling fins so you know the signal strength is going to be almost like being on the hardline. Unfortunately the thing started flaking out not about 3 minutes after I got my laptop hooked on. It started out ok, then you could see the little wifi icon blip, blip, blip. I looked at the net config window and the blipping looked like it was this router coming alive (you could see the base station nic address changing) and changing my IP address in the process. I must have initially been on another base station somewhere else in the building. The weird thing is that this router changed my IP address from what looks normal to me (broadcast 255.255.255.0) to one that looks like it's on a "subnet once removed" (broadcast 255.255.0.0). I can't claim to fully understand networking so I don't know whether that's a correct set up or not, but I know that once the IP change happened I was no longer on the net even though the idiot indicators suggested I was "connected" with excellent signal strength. Yeah, signal strength I don't doubt, but the actual routing configs I find suspect. Anyway, today the whole hotel was offline so who knows, maybe the thing was doomed to failure anyway. (Of course my unplugging and plugging in and otherwise "troubleshooting" the router probably didn't help matters, but once a geek always a geek, eh? ;)

These last three pics are of the old town section of Tuebingen. The open market was just down the street from my hotel. Lots of fresh fruits, veggies, meats, all sorts of things. Beyond that there are numerous cafes, etc. Outside the old town the city takes on a normal appearance. The hotel people couldn't tell me how to get to the conference hall but I happened to find the tourist info house and they gave me the right directions. Turns out it's within walking distance from the hotel, via several windy and hilly streets (to get out of old town) and then down a normal city street. It's hard to tell from the pic but the hall has a banner outside advertising the APGV conference alongside the other one running concurrently (TWK or something; something on perception, so the topic is relevant, but not a conference I'm familiar with). Registration open in just about another hour which is where I'm heading to next. Then tonight's evening program is a tour of the Max Planck Institute (MPI) where the reception is to be held. Talks start tomorrow and conclude Friday afternoon (it's a small conference, not unlike ETRA). I present in the last session on Friday.