Yesterday I returned from a truly delightful trip to Europe, the primary purpose of which was to deliver a presentation to the 2013 NETTAB meeting. The slides are now available on slideshare:

http://www.slideshare.net/aclarkxyz/alex-clark-nettab-2013

For the benefit of the audience at the conference, I wanted to make sure that everyone present could easily access the apps that I was talking about, and so rather than handing out promotional codes on scraps of paper, I decided to simply drop the price of the non-free apps that I described in the presentation to zero for a few days. I didn’t tell anyone else about this, and figured that a few dozen people would accidently get a freebie or two. That’s not quite the way it worked out: in actuality more like a few tens of thousands of people got in while the going was good. Next time I pull a stunt like that, I might just shorten the window of opportunity a little bit, but if anyone out there is reading this, and you made the best of it, please consider popping by the iTunes AppStore and putting in a favourable review and/or rating!

Besides having the opportunity to meet a lot of bioinformaticians and semantic web experts (two adjacent fields that I have not been paying as much attention to as I should have), it certainly didn’t hurt that the conference was held at the Lido of Venice. This being my first time ever to visit any place along the mediterranean, I have to say the location is quite amazing. For a rustic colonial who doesn’t normally bother taking photographs, well lets just say I snapped several hundred of them in the Lido and main city of Venice. It’s one of those places that isn’t overhyped: it really is a must-see.

Nonetheless, there’s now a lot of work to catch up on. My list of cool ideas to try to prioritise was already pretty long, but many brainstorming sessions later, it’s grown a whole lot. So much to do, before or after the next trip, to the 9th German Conference on Cheminformatics.