AAMAS concluded

Well, I was getting all pissed that no one else has updated their blog today, and then I realised that it might be my turn.

So the final installment of the AAMAS saga is as follows. On the Friday it was Jen’s turn to give a talk.

And Tony had provided her with the slides for the talk. (For those not in the know, Jen was attending the conference, but not giving a paper. Then Tony had travel issues, and she was asked to read his paper for him.) The paper reading went quite well, and was followed up by some good questions from the audience.

After one last conference session we were done, and ready to take a cab to the airport. I was becoming quite concerned about the weather though, it had been a downpour all day.

Many people are quite surprised to learn that the american flight system can’t handle a bit of drizzle, but it is inevitable that the whole flight network is destroyed. Here’s why just a few minutes of delay on a few flights can destroy the flights on half the continent. This is because planes line up to depart, filling the ground up with giant planes full of people. This causes inbound flights to have nowhere to go (the ground being full of other planes) so the traffic controllers prevent them from leaving their departure airport. This is further compounded by aircraft availability problems. A single aircraft may fly from city A to B, then NOT return to A, instead going on to C and then D and so forth; but if it is delayed at A because B can’t accomodate it then passengers travelling between C and D are screwed. Unless the airline cancels another flight somewhere else (stranding those passengers for no reason) to get the plane over there. The end result is that someone spits across a runway and a hundred thousand people are stranded on the ground.

Anyway, after that rant I’m sure you can guess what occurred… yes, our flight was cancelled. Because of the rain. Anyway, it turned out to be OK because I have this great credit card with “flight delay/cancellation insurance” so we were able to stay in a good place that night. I have now put in a claim to the insurance people, so that’ll be the real test.

Here’s some nighttime photos from our stay at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square.

The next day we got up and grabbed breakfast. We felt sorry for Tony’s grant and so decided to subway it back up to Columbia to take a cab to the airport. This was a giant error in judgement. A later look at a map confirmed that we would have been closer to go from where we were. Plus, we had a very bad cab driver. We got onto the tri-borough bridge at around 2:00 pm. Immediately after getting on the bridge it became apparent that this was a giant mistake. Traffic was totally stopped. Totally stopped. At this point the cabbie pipes up that he’d heard that there was a problem on the radio earlier in the day. There was a problem. Just on the other side of the bridge (on a road we had to take for about 10 kms) an overpass had collapsed. All traffic on this 6 lane bridge was being removed from the bridge onto local streets at the far end.

We entered the bridge at 2:00pm. We left the bridge at 3:50pm. We arrived at the airport at 4:00pm. For our flight at 4:30pm. Did I mention we were flying out of a U.S. AIRPORT! In NEW YORK CITY! Not the place you want to be arriving with 30 minutes before takeoff. Anyway, in the end we did make the flight. And if I had been less silly about our checked bags in Toronto we might have been able to stop and see May and Dan on the way. Anyway, live and learn on all fronts.

This concludes my report about AAMAS 2004.

return to cmh blog

2004-08-14 20:11   ...1