It turns out that there was a trip to the San Diego Zoo after the first day of ISCA. I was slightly confused during the last couple presentations today when people kept asking when and where the buses were picking people up. Apparently the bigger conferences have fancy trips like these for a night of adventure and mingling.

After the shuttles brought us to the zoo, we switched over to the guided tour buses that would bring us to the dining area. And just as we pulled out of the boarding area.. a peacock!

Peacock sending us off on our merry way through the San Diego Zoo

The rest of the tour had quite a few animals showing up with an 80% attendance rate – perhaps the missing group were tired from the day and went to sleep already. (Hrmm.. sitting around and getting fed while people watch you could be a tough job..) So of the ones that did show up, there were all sorts of birds and boars to meerkats and antelope-like creatures. A note about the meerkats.. they have one of them standing guard to alert the rest, so you probably won’t see many of them – let alone the one that stands motionless blending into the area.

There’s nothing here! ?

At the end of the journey, there were drinks and a ton of food (desserts too, but those disappeared quickly) for all the computer architecture people to sit down and chat. It was an interesting experience for me because I just joined while a lot of people have been around for many many years. I got to meet some people and hear what they’ve been doing in this field, so I could get up to speed and see where things are going. But I won’t go into all those details here – instead, I’ll fill the rest of this post with animal pictures. 🙂

Is the polar bear thirsty or looking for a swim?

The elephants were having dinner… right next to where we were having dinner

A fuzzy little koala (squinting causes the camera to blur ?!)

A bunch of pink flamingos partying late at night

The History of Programming Languages conference is pretty neat because programming languages designers describe how they developed the language and reflect on how it has progressed. There have only been three of these conferences with the first being in 1978, so it was nice that I was able to attend and listen to all these important people.

Just last semester at UIUC, I was attending a dynamic language virtual machine seminar where we went through quite a few Self papers – all of them had David Ungar in the author list. And it turns out the Ungar was around to give a presentation and ask some questions at the panel at the end of the conference.

David Ungar asking questions for Larry Wall (far right, Perl guy) and Olin Shivers (middle, Scheme) about their goals for making programming languages

I’ve been wondering what San Diego looks like – near the Town and Country where I’m staying for the week. As the taxi drove me on I-8 towards the hotel last night, all I saw were signs for hotels and even more hotels, but I suppose that’s why the street is called Hotel Circle.

So from the room’s balcony looking towards the front of the convention center, there’s a bunch of palm trees, a flag, some hotels, and the highway. And looking from the front door, there’s an exciting view of more palms and a shopping mall carved out of the hills. I guess that explains why the trolley stop was called the Fashion Valley stop.

Some reason there seems to be a constant haze when looking further than half a mile.. and San Diego has been much cooler than I expected – at least compared to the Bay Area.

Palm trees line the way to I-8

Even more palm trees at the back

I’m taking a quick “vacation” from Summer of Code and traveled down to San Diego for my first time. 😉 Actually, officially I’m here with my UIUC research group for the Federated Computer Research Conference (FCRC) to attend the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) – also my first time at one of these types of conferences (but there’ll be plenty more as I continue the Ph.D. program). FCRC is a combination of a bunch of other conferences, so there’ll be sessions about programming languages, theory, and more – it’ll be interesting to hear about the exciting new research in those fields as well.

The flight from San Jose was just over an hour, and we landed in the Commuter Terminal (so if you ever have a short flight out of SAN, make sure to go to CT and not Terminal 1 or 2). I met up with another of my advisor’s Ph.D. students, and we taxied to the hotel/convention center and took the trolley to Old Town to find some dinner.. mexican food! I’m sure there’ll be plenty more in the days to come before I leave Wednesday night.

About to land at SAN – flying past the baseball stadium