In and out

Two months and a few weeks before the start of the show... and my first post on this blog. Where should I start ? Writer's block, already ? Uhuh, don't get me wrong, I have plenty to write upon - otherwise I would not be here, would I ?

ICHEP is not the first conference for which I belong to the local organising committee, but it is definitely the biggest one. A conference with several hundreds of people flocking from all over the world is clearly a challenge for the organisers. We knew it from the beginning, and thus we have prepared it since... 2008. A good thing to plan things ahead -- but it makes the conference look very far away in time.

A few blinks later, it is already mid-May 2010, and even though you have kept on filling in Powerpoint slides, Excel sheets and Indico timetables, you have not realised fully that the conference starts... hem, now, basically. Writing this blog will definitely help me to keep track of time. Well, this and a couple of other tasks related to the conference, in particular the organisation of the parallel sessions... which will certaily take me more and more time as the opening of the conference approaches.

As both a physicist and a conference organiser I plan to provide you with glimpses of on-stage news but also off-stage surprises. And I expect quite a few. Physicswise, in addition to the fact that LHC is taking data to be presented here, we expect many other new results from high-energy experiments -- as shown by the number of talks proposed for parallel sessions. And as far as organisation is concerned... well, France is a country full of surprise, as I learned when I organised an earlier conference near Paris -- but I will keep this story for another post...

In any case, welcome to this blog, and welcome Paris for this new edition of ICHEP. We will do our best to make it a truly memorable conference for you -- as it surely will be for us !