On to Portugal

At noon today, as I was checking into my flight to Porto, Heathrow Airport went quiet, part of a nationwide two-minute memorial for the London bombing victims of a year ago. Machines were turned off and everyone stopped talking and just contemplated. The silence was deafening.

So starts the second leg of my journey, a visit to colleague Luis Antunes. As a commenter mentioned I am in Europe but not going to ICALP next week in Venice despite having a paper there. I greatly enjoy going to conferences and workshops but find them quite exhausting and going to three meetings in a row is more, especially with the large and broad ICALP in the middle is more than I can handle. For those in Venice, enjoy the conference and good luck to Italy in the WC final. Afterwards, come on up to Prague for Complexity.

At the workshop in Bristol, the projector was a bit dim and we had some problems reading some colors, green on the white background and red on a black background. This led to a heated discussion on what backgrounds to use. Harry Buhrman argues for white, as one can see the text best. Any background color can work, as long as you don't use too many different colors for text and carefully choose contrasting colors. Though I find any plain color, especially white, a bit boring. I typically use one of the Powerpoint defaults, which Microsoft has designed to both look pleasant and have good readability.