Just a quick post today as it is the last day of the conference, and I'm slated to sit through 14 lectures...!

Over the past couple of days I've learned a thing or two about travelling solo, how god has a sense of humor, and how California microbrews aren't too shabby.

When I first got here I was pretty bummed because I made it all the way to San Diego, but really, I was still by myself. I felt silly going out to eat solo.  I'm not really big into networking and making random friends... thus I spent the first couple of nights by myself at the hotel bar. Pretty depressing really. After the third night I realized there was many other people who kept going back each night too. It kind of made me wonder if that is normal for people on business trips? At the end of the day, do we just go sit at the bar waiting to do it all over again?

Last night it hit me. There really are two kinds of people, those who sit around in the hotel bar and shrug about it, and those who say screw it and head out into the unknown. The past two nights I opted to say screw it, and out I went into the city.  Last night I ended up going into Downtown San Diego, to a microbrew pub restaurant for the Karl Strauss Brewery. Let me tell you what, that place is pretty good.

It took some divine intervention to push me out the door though. On Tuesday night I was lucky enough to win a business card raffle of an iPod Touch, cool right?! The only problem though was that on Wednesday morning I strolled into the conference room to see a huge picture of me on the rotating slide show... thus I became known as the guy who won the iPod touch. Literally, I was in downtown San Diego by myself, and four people stopped and said Oh hey you won that iPod right?.. Yeah.  Anyway, my point though is that I feel like it was some kind of divine intervention. It broke the ice a little bit for me. I ended up talking to some Australian guy when I got back to the hotel for a couple of hours. We talked about anything from exome sequencing analysis to doing a bar crawl from Pacific to Mission beach. In a way winning the iPod let me just relax a little.

My two saving graces, a lucky winning, and some delicious microbrews

I guess the summation of this post, is that really that any opportunity you have is really what you make of it. It is easy to sit and pout at the bar by yourself, but it is just as easy to make a change and go out and explore. It is easy to make the change, you just gotta figure out how to break the ice, to break out of the cycle.

Please note that this was my subtle hint to all those who haven't worked up the courage to head out and get fit to just go out and do it. Break the ice.