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So I'm back from a week in Reno, Nevada.
I don't plan to go back. Reno's not a place I'd intentionally return to.
One begins to wonder about the future of the human race when confronted with a place like Reno.
My purpose for being there was work. Specifically, SuperComputing 2007 at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. In all, a strange place for a few thousand computer and science geeks set on rubbing elbows with the fastest and geekiest computers ever assembled in one place on Earth.
More about SC'07 on my work blog.
But there was one moment where my life-worlds did clash. A group of us were walking back to the hotel after some free beer and finger foods at a pub along the Truckee river downtown (the only civilized part of town, perhaps). A nearby restaurant was playing some canned music in their outside patio. It sounded extremely familiar. It took me a few seconds to realize it was Copland's Rodeo, but most oddly played by a synthetic electronic "orchestra".
But when I recognized what it was, even in this weird version, I wanted to exclaim this discovery to my colleagues, I quickly caught myself in mid exclamation, realizing that, in fact, they probably wouldn't know what I was talking about. Wrong crowd. It would be similar to talking to my musician and composer friends about how difficult it can be to convert a sequential linear equation solver into a parallelized version running over a cluster of Sun Blades using MPI on Solaris Express. I'd get blank stares, followed by "gee, thanks for sharing" or some such probable dismissal.
So, I spent most of the walk back to the hotel contemplating the strange orthogonalities of my parallel lives.
And in Reno, of all places.
