Monday 5 June, 2017
I slept until about 02:00, then woke up and couldn’t fall asleep again. After a while I sat up and read some more, then tried to sleep again, but without much luck. I got up with the alarm at 07:30 and had a shower and dressed for the first day of the ISO meeting.
I walked over to the meeting place in the Intel campus, taking about 15 minutes to get there. Ken and Ed and a few other people were there already, and more arrived at the lobby while Neelam figured out where our visitor security passes were. We ended up getting name tags plus Intel guest passes, both of which we had to wear at all times. Then we had to be escorted down the corridors to the meeting room. We were also told that we had to be escorted if we wanted to visit the toilets, or leave the building, and three Intel employees would be hanging out in the meeting room just so one could escort anyone who wanted to leave the room for any reason.
The meeting began with the plenary session, which was much more casual than the first plenary meeting I attended in Sapporo in 2015. It was basically logistical and administrative details and not particularly interesting.
The plenary session ended early, and I joined a lunch group of Elaine, Susan, Rita, Dietmar, Robin, and Jonathan, who were going to a Japanese place called Izaka-Ya. I got a lift with Robin, and it was a good ten minutes’ drive away in San Jose’s Japantown area. We got there just before it opened at 11:30, and squashed around a small table. Someone recommended the bento boxes, so I chose the salmon sashimi bento box. This came with salad, miso soup, seven pieces of salmon, rice, two tempura prawns, vegetable tempura, and a chunk of orange as a dessert. It was good, and definitely filling enough for lunch.
 Bento box at Izaka-Ya |
We returned to the meeting and had the first session of the WG18 meeting. During this session I presented the details for this October’s WG18 meeting in Sydney, and also a summary of the JPEG meeting I’d attended back in March to establish the liaison for JPEG Pleno. And I also mentioned that Australia could host again in 2019, perhaps in Canberra instead of Sydney. It turned out that Scott couldn’t attend this meeting for some reason, and he’d emailed to ask me if I could run the ad hoc group meeting on JPEG Pleno later in the meeting. This was a bit of a surprise as I hadn’t realised there was an ad hoc group meeting for the topic! It turns out Neelam had someone at Intel who wanted to give a presentation related to it.
After lunch, Jonathan had brought in a big rhubarb crumble that he had made, and people were taking slices of it to eat. I grabbed some after the administrative regular session of the WG18 meeting, which ended just after 15:00. After a short break we continued with technical sessions on revisions of ISO 12232 and 12233. We finished these a little early, then had an hour to wait until Neelam would escort us over to the Intel Computer Museum for the meeting reception event.
 Altair 8800 computer at the Intel Computer Museum |
The museum building was being renovated, so I’m not sure if all of the museum was available. We entered and there were displays about computer chip technology and how chips are made, and a few historical computers. I thought there would be a lot more of the latter, and was a bit disappointed overall. But the space was nice and there was a buffet of food including flatbread, bread slices, and crackers, plus sliced meats, grilled vegetables, couscous, hummus, about a dozen types of cheese, dried fruits, and fresh fruit. I had enough to serve as dinner without needing to seek out more food later.
 Monkey suiting up for the Intel cleanroom |
Jonathan played viola in a string quartet with three of his friends, and Yoshida-san joined them on recorder for some pieces. Yoshida-san had also written a song while on the flight from Japan, and they performed it, getting everyone to sing along to the lyrics, “I. S. O. I. S. O. Standardisation. TC42, TC42”. Nicolas showed up to socialise, and I chatted with several people, then left as people began drifting out. I walked back to the hotel with Ed and Rita. She’s the delegate from Switzerland, here for WG5 meetings, which are in parallel with the WG18 meetings.
Back at the hotel, I felt like ice cream again, so got a tub of Ben & Jerry’s “Americone Dream”. After eating that, I spoke with M. over FaceTime, then finished this diary entry off and got ready for bed.