John the Math Guy breaks out of the blog, Feb 2013

John the Math Guy continues to make appearances outside of this tiny little blog. He also continues to refer to himself in the third person. Here are the JMG sightings for the month of February.

Annual TAGA conference

TAGA (Technical Association of the Graphic Arts) has always been one of my favorite conferences. This year's conference in Portland (Feb. 3 through the 6) was no exception. Disclaimer: I am on the board of TAGA, so I am required to say good things about the organization. Anti-disclaimer: I wouldn't be on the board if I didn't think the organization was peachy-keen.

The conference got a bit of post-press. Here is a sampling -

Brian Lawler of Cal Poly shared a GigaPan image of Portand, taken at the conference.

TAGA is unique in its high level of student participants. There are roughly 15 active student chapters of TAGA scattered all across the globe. They are regular attendees, of course, but they also participate in a competition for the best student journals. The Grenoble (France) chapter took away the highest honors this year. Here is a blog post from the Ryerson (Toronto) chapter about why they go to TAGA.

Sandy Hubbard, who has the enviable title "Print Futurist", blogged about the TAGA conference.

Since none of these folks explicitly mentioned my favorite topic (me), I have to make up for this oversight. A recent blog post ("A spectrophotometric romance") was adapted from my presentation. I also have the paper itself ("Evaluation of Reference Materials for Calibration of Spectrophotometers") available on my website. 

FlexoGlobal magazine

Laura Hatch, of FlexoGlobal magazine incorporated an adapted version of one of my blogs in her magazine last month. Do you think a dear friend like Laura would be content with just one article? I think not. Sure enough, I got a call one morning at 2:00 AM. Thinking the call was the Nobel prize committee informing me that I had won, I answered the phone. Well, it was Laura, telling me about another blog post of mine ("Why does my cyan have the blues?") that was incorporated into her magazine.

I like it when I get published without having to do any extra work!