Max

This morning I sat through three hours of lectures covering some of the many techniques used in one of our solvers - that I need to master in order to improve it. By the end, having not had breakfast because I was too busy yesterday to go shopping, I was ready for my lunch at the Mensa. 

Afterwards, I managed to get an empty office for us, where I listened to an awfully dull seminar in Edinburgh about a useless property of a solution method in which I'm an expert. This was immediately followed by an online meeting with three people from an open source energy modelling company, the boss of which is our friend Max. We'd guessed that he was in Berlin and, when we told him we were here, the first five minutes of the meeting were spent discussing how to meet up and where go to dinner. 

I then spent the afternoon dealing with solver issues, while И and our former developer L worked out what they believe is the final fix for a long-standing bug. 

Hence we were in a good mood when waiting to be picked up by Max, who drove us to a very good schnitzel restaurant in the city centre. There he paid for a meal that was much more expensive than the one I paid for in Edinburgh when he was a PhD student just three years ago. 

Tomorrow I've nothing first thing, so will finally be able to go shopping and have breakfast!