Yesterday’s travelling sucked. Just long and really boring. Almost as bad as the previous day. When travelling to Heathrow, a train in front of mine managed to fall off the rails or trip over a leaf or something. Well, the journey time to London Heathrow from Cardiff ended up being over 6 hours. Rubbish.

The highlights of yesterdays trip was passing the Ice Sheets over Greenland, which was awesome, and passing a very active thunderstorm somewhere over the middle of the US.

I arrived in Austin last night at about 9pm (3am UK time) following a shared mini bus ride with Zach Inglis, who I met at Washington Airport passport queue. When I arrived, needless to say, I was a little jet-lagged but I still managed to unpack and get myself sorted. At about 11pm I finally succumbed only to awake two hours later. Lots of dosing later and at around 5.30 am I thought I may as well get up and begin my first day in Austin.

I met up with Andy for breakfast at the sociable hour of 6.30am. After a while we headed over to the conference centre to get all registered and stuff where we bumped in Faruk and Zach. Off for lunch in the baking temperature - which is easily 30c presently - for a slap up Mexican feed at a quant little cafe where we had to walk through the kitchens to get a table. Nice grub though.

Tomorrow, at 10am, I’ll be sitting on the Traditional Design and New Technology panel at 10am - One of six panels to kick this year’s conference off to a, hopefully, good start. If you’re in Austin, please come along and say hello.