WUSS So far

If you are not at WUSS you missed world-famous statistician Stanley Azen SINGING the conclusion of his keynote accompanied by an original score on the piano that he had written himself , thus setting an impossible standard for any other presenter to top.

My only talent being judo (I was the world champion 26 years ago), I tried to get WUSS co-chair Marian Oshiro to be my partner and open my presentation this morning by lifting her over my head and then throwing her into the audience. She refused. You would think a conference co-chair would have more commitment than that, wouldn’t you?

Despite the nice weather and being right on the bay, I have yet to spot anyone sneaking out of sessions to lay by the pool. If you are not here, other stuff you missed :

– Coder’s Corner, where I spent most of the day. This is 10 minute talks on anything, really. You get people who it is their first presentation (like my co-author on the supercomputing talk, Ernesto Flores) so it seems less threatening to do ten minutes. And, you get a lot of very experienced people showing some cool thing they learned and thought might interest other people, too.
* Qiweng talked about shading the area between a curve and reference line in different colors.
* Nate talked about using a macro that defaults to ALL (sites, flights, categories, whatever) but allows you to put in a parameter for the macro variable if you do want just one.
* Dmitry talked about the different ways to handle lists with SAS and why you would use each, an interesting topic I had never really thought about before.
* James talked about outputting SAS charts directly to a worksheet in Excel using XML

There was more way cool stuff but now I have to go give three presentations back to back starting at 8:30 a.m. This being the first time I have been up at this hour since an all-night party in 1978, I suspect the session chair is getting nervous about now that I’ve overslept.