One of these daysyears I am going to get a poster finished a week before the conference.
Let's see: Conference starts on Sunday, my poster is due to be on display Monday afternoon. The preceding Thursday lunchtime I am still doing an experiment and have not started work on the poster. All the rest of Thursday I design and draw a single figure. That leaves Friday to complete the poster, because my children will probably divorce me if I am not at home the Saturday before I disappear to Melbourne for a week.
It is though, I must confess, a very nice figure. And if I were not so disorganized I would have a copy of it to show you — but I turned my work Mac off so I can not scp the file here, and I forgot to bring the A4 proof home so that even if my scanner was not buggered it wouldn't help. Oh poo, said Hum.
And I managed to get the poster finished by about 4 on Friday afternoon, which was pretty good going, I thought. (This is not unusual, believe it or not. I have never known anyone been prepared for a conference, whether they're taking a poster or giving a talk, more than about 36 hours before their 'plane is due to leave. Is it just scientists who are like this? It's not always the case that they are waiting for that last piece of data, either. Maybe this explains why the vast majority of poster presentations at conference are, sadly, execrable).
But then it took me another two and a half hours to print and laminate the bloody thing, because Illustrator takes an absolute yonk to print anything but mainly because the Canon printer driver is a pile of dingo droppings and insisted on telling me that the media size was wrong, but going ahead and printing three copies of half the ruddy thing anyway — half because I stupidly believed it when it said it was the wrong size and couldn't print and so cancelled the job.
Fortunately the poster printer is only one floor down from the office.
Still, I got mine in the tube before most of the rest of the lab, so I felt pretty virtuous when I went home. We're all hoping that the designated rat remembered to pick the tube up; a dozen posters sitting in a lab five hundred miles away from the conference would be distinctly sub-optimal.
I should go to bed now. Check-in closes in eight and a half hours.
Comments
I can do you a poster. I can assure you that it will be accurate, on-time and beautifully printed together with A4 or A3 handouts. We'll even ship it to your hotel. And, should we be at the same congress for another reaon, we'll hang it for you and take you through how to present the fiddly bits. All this for the low, low price of six grand (UK flavour).
Posted by: Nige | February 6, 2007 01:39 AM