Back from NLDB 2010, Cardiff University

Got back from NLDB 2010 in Cardiff two days ago.
The conference was very well organized and the talks (as always) reached from very good to extremely poor.
Just to give you some examples:

• one guy managed to talk 32minutes on 39 slides though the time cap was supposedly 15mins for every speaker
• one guy literally (and figuratively) read his slides which weren't actually slides. They were some kind of script we he presented. Kind of a book reading. I do have to admin though, that his presentation still was kind of interesting
• two ladies spoke so loud during the presentations, we only knew they already started their resp. talks because we could see their lips moving
• one guy showed up at 09:47am for his 09:30 - 09:45 presentation. He kind of had a good excuse and was pouring sweat all over his body, poor bastard
• one guy did not manage to get the projector to work with his laptop, therefore he rebooted with the laptop hooked up to it. Then he punched in his password into the "user" field of his Suse linux OS. Well, we all know the name of his wife now
• one guy had a screen saver with (somewhat embarrassing) private pictures which ran for 2 minutes on the big screen before he realized he had just talked too long on the slide and that the screen saver already kicked in. Funny

As you might be able to tell, I had a great time and think my/our presentation went well. I met a couple of very interesting researchers and we found some common ground for research collaboration. Also, Germany won the game in a pub full of English. Not bad either.
And the hotel (Radisson BLU) was centrally located and pretty nice.

You can get the presentation here.

So long. That's my short report from NLDB.