my name is mwd

Made it back from my trip to the US. After my first abortive attempt I managed to get to and from Portland relatively painlessly, though I failed to visit Seattle like I’d hoped – another time perhaps.

For the most part I was attening an Intel Research Symposium at Skamania Lodge, which is up about 20 miles up the Columbia River from Portland. We spent most of our time in a window less room, and this might explain why I had a bad time with jetlag – no visual clues to help my body adjust. Still, I did have an excellent view from my room:

IRSYM, as it was known (last year it was IRCON, and presumably next year we could go for IRWOR?) is an annual get together of most of Intel Research. Whilst the short talks they’re forced to pack in suffer from being too short to get any meaningful content across, you do get a feel for what work is going on, and personally I think the main benefit is to meet the other researchers once a year.

In addition to IRSYM I made a trip out to Jones Farm, Intel’s main site out in Hillsborough, just outside Portland in the other direction. A nice reminder of how lucky we are that we don’t live in cubes (yet…), though they have much better catering there than we have at the Gates building :)

Portland is a nice city, as I blogged minimally last year. It’s very relaxed, and in some wonderful countryside. I’ll post some more pictures later, but I failed to really capture the look/feel of Portland, but I quite like it. It’s probably something of a half way between a busy city like Glasgow and a town like Cambridge. It has a very workable public transport system, making it easy to get from my hotel in the city out to Intel using the Tri-Met Max tram:

There’s also no sales tax, so as a European I find shops work as I’d expect. I also was shown an excellent coffee shop by Rolf, Stumptown which does both very good cappuccinos and nice German wheat beer :) Portland also has a busy music scene (most famously I guess as the birth place of the Dandy Warhols) so Rolf and I sought some out, and found a bar called Dante’s which had a set of small bands on (found thanks to Willamette Week free paper).

Anyway, I’ve refreshed my vow to go spend some time exploring the Oregon/Washington region at some point. It’s wonderful countryside up there, they have local microbreweries, and it’s most relaxed. I hear the coast is nice up there too, but I’ve not managed to make it out yet.