Saturday April 17, 2010

The last day of the conference was a bit short. We had a business meeting at the end to decide where the 2014 Evolang. The 2012 one will be in Japan. We made some progress toward establishing rules for a sort of informal society, with more decisions possibly to be made next conference.

We also had some closing speakers, like the Fitch lecture I mentioned earlier.

The real excitement was that after having dinner with a group from the conference, I went back to my hotel and checked, and sure enough the Amsterdam airport was closed until further notice and my flight back to the US was officially canceled.

One of the frustrations I’ve had with airlines is that they don’t like to admit that there’s a problem. They’ve gotten much much better about this, but a few years ago, it was ridiculous: You could look out the airport window, see that there’s no plane at the end of the ramp, the next terminal is being consumed by a black hole, it’s raining liquid sulfur, Godzilla is eating the radar tower, and all the while the info screens and the web site and the employees at the desk all happily tell you that your flight is on time, up until five minutes after it was supposed to take off, then they admit that there may be a slight delay. With the volcanic cloud, they were waiting until about six hours before each flight before declaring it canceled. But by Saturday night, it was clear from the news that the cloud was going to be around for at least several more days…

So I shrugged, went to bed, and figured I’d do something about it on Sunday.