Thursday, September 28, 2006

AOIR Brisbane, Break-ins and High Rise Apartments

It's the first day of the AOIR 7.0 conference proper. Yesterday I attended the pre-conference workshop for doctoral students. The conference has been interesting so far but unfortunately the experience has been kind of eclipsed by a rather unpleasant incident that happened to me at the motel last night.

Without going into too much detail, a man tried to break in through my window just as I was falling off to sleep. I scared him off by yelling but the combination of the attempted break-in, giving a police statement, the motel not being able to offer me another room and finding out that the man who tried to break in was staying in the room next to me was enough for me to decide to get on out of there as quickly as possible, even though it was 2am. I rang my girlfriend while I was giving the police statement and she was able to get a booking for me at the Hilton for the rest of the night. They were kind enough to offer it to me half price. Today I spent a few hours moving to new accommodation that my girlfriend also found for me. Thank you my darling hero!

I'm now staying in an apartment in a high rise building about 7 minutes walk to the Hilton and right in the centre of town. The apartment is brand spanking new, not even the pillows had been taken out of their vacuum sealed wrapping. I'm surrounded by other high rise towers, both commerical and residential but the height off the ground (I'm on the 27th floor) is rather comforting!!


I would have like to have attended the public lecture at 6:30pm at the conference but had a driving headache and am feeling a bit sad and sorry for myself. A long bath and cup of tea and I'm starting to feel human again. It's a bit of a shame because I would have like to have caught up with some of the other attendees over a dinner but there's still the conference dinner tomorrow night.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

whoa! that is full on! what a stress to be having!?!?!?

i hope your AOIRing goes ok for the rest of it, and good luck with the paper!!

Ms M said...

that would be cool but like how do i know who you are??

Ms M said...

thanks glen, i'm fine now. the conference is really interesting. I wish I could split myself so i could go to all the parallel sessions...

Ms M said...

hiya MC, yes it was a great meeting of worlds to see you at the conference, and now that I know that your current interests are not far removed from mine I'll be keeping a close eye on your blog. If you are interested I can email you my paper.