Wow, long day of conference-ing. I walked to the hotel where the conference is held this morning and got a bit lost along the way. I think I managed to take the long way even though it was supposed to be pretty easy to get there. So I ended up getting there a little bit late. And as if the day couldn't start any better, I didn't see our poster and abstract in the huge book that they gave us. Turns out, we were supposed to reply to say that we're coming to the conference after the poster got accepted. I think I just missed that part in the email entirely. I read the email in a rush and didn't re-read it until two nights ago. Partly because I wasn't sure we were going to make it to the conference. Anyway, talked to the organizers and they'll try to squeeze us into the poster session venue. But the abstract isn't in the program... Sad... would be nice to see my name in these things. oh wells, guess I'll just have to submit more stuff in the future! Many more opportunities. I'll be keeping a lookout for them.
The theme of the conference is Earthquakes Without Borders. So a lot of the talks are about the San Diego and Tijuana area. Some of the talks got pretty specific to the San Diego region. It was nice to know about things that are going on in this area, I guess. Some of the topics were interesting. Not sure all of them have been very interesting. But I think tomorrow will be more technical so I'm looking forward to those. There are a lot of important people in the earthquake engineering community attending this conference. I guess I shouldn't be surprised but it's pretty amazing to see the names of all the attendees. I haven't been doing so well with the networking at this event. Definitely not in the game.
I hope there is some sort of earthquake engineering community in Hong Kong. It's not a very seismic region. They can feel the waves from earthquakes on nearby faults but there are no active faults in HK (that I know of). And it's just not the same... There was a younger member panel and one of the students asked if it was necessary to live in a seismically active area to really get into earthquake engineering. I really think the answer is yes. They do earthquake stuff out on the east coast but in non-active areas, it's more like a hobby. It's not something that you live with. It's just different when you live next to a major fault and have to think about bolting down your furniture, having enough water in case of an event, etc. I've heard that the head of the earthquake engineering for Arup is in HK though. I have seen his name on a few internal publications and have been wanting to meet him for a while. It would be cool to get on some seismic design projects just to keep learning about the subject.
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