I awoke without need of an alarm on the second day and went for a run at 6 am. It was dark and rainy when I started out, but the rain had stopped by the time I returned to the hotel. The Marriott was pretty close to town, and I found “The Hitching Post” as seen in the movie “Sideways” while I was out running. There’s also a note in my mournal about drinking a lot of wine the previous night. Wine was omnipresent at the conference.

The morning session focused on sodium channel dysfunction, including talks by Robert Kass, Jonathan Makielski, and Yoram Rudy. They, like several other talks at the GRC: CAM focused a little more on genetics than I’m used to, which at times became confusing. Interesting to note was that one of these talks discussed a situation in which a markovian model predicted behavior in an experiment. That says a lot in favor of computer simulations, I think.

We went to the Kalyra and Sanford wineries early that afternoon, both seen in the movie “Sideways.” I’m not one for being quite so touristy, but they did have good wine. See the previous entry for a pic from Kalyra.

At the poster session that afternoon, I discovered the wonderful Eagle Castle Zinfandel (2000), which many others agreed was very tasty. It also runs under $20. I may order some from the distributor (Wade’s Wines).

My journal from the evening session hints that between dinner, alcohol, and a long day, I was pretty tired by the time the evening session rolled around. I later took it easy on the wine and discovered that I continued to be tired at evening sessions even still. They were long, sometimes stressful days. The evening session was all about potassium channels, with talks by Jeanne Nerbonne (who later complimented my backpack), Louis J. Ptacek, and Anatoli Lopatin. I didn’t take too many notes from the most of that session. I think I kind of spaced out.