Month: July 2003

SEM is seeing North QLD with her parents. So for the last week, one of SEM’s friends, Julia, has been boarding with us. She will stay until July 21, when she goes trekking around Australia and then heads back to her homeland of Germany. Anyway, Julia decided to cook for us last night. It was chicken, dhal, a chunky tomato sauce type thing and salad. The meal was delicious, but of course I didn’t try the chicken.

While I was sitting at my desk this morning, I suddenly started wondering about where all my friends from primary school are and what they’re doing. Strange how these things just pop into your head for no apparent reason. I know Michael Martin is working for an IT company in Ipswich, or at least he was a year or two ago. I’ve no clue what anyone else is doing, so if by chance anyone who was at Victoria Point State School about thirteen years ago should read this, make sure you send me an e-mail. You remember me, right? ;)

About to head over to Indro to pick up Mum’s wedding anniversary gift and to have some lunch. Already got Dad’s present. I should also get something for Ben’s landwarming: perhaps a bottlebrush or some other fairly hardy native plant. But if I’m getting a plant, it’s going to have to wait, because there’s no way I’m bringing back a small tree on the bus and bringing it into my office!

Had a nice weekend. Saturday morning was spent tidying up the garden a bit. There were leaves everywhere from the recent windy weather. I could have filled a small truck with them I think. Some of them ended up in the wheely bin, the rest were spread around as mulch for the garden beds. For once, it was actually enjoyable raking up leaves. With this change in attitude, the garden may receive a bit more attention from me in the future!

Meanwhile, Nigel was at his motorcycle course. I get the impression he thoroughly enjoyed it, and he’s looking forward to his next two lessons.

In the evening we went and saw Bulletproof Monk with Nigel’s friend, Max. It was a dodgy movie, but not quite as dodgy as I was expecting. I was prepared for dodginess of the worst kind, but it never reached amazingly dodgy heights. After some dinner, we went to Bubbles Cafe on Albert Street, just off the Queen Street Mall. I’ve been there before, and it’s become one of my favourite coffee and cake bars. Max is Nigel’s friend from school, but I always enjoy chatting with him too.

Sunday was taken up with watching TV and doing the normal housework bits and pieces. The World Game showed the 1990 World Cup final between West Germany and Argentina. It wasn’t very exciting, and the play acting of the German’s and the bad refereeing marred to spectacle. West Germany were the best team in the tournament, but they could have won the final in a more convincing way. A dubious penalty decided it very late on in the game, and this was after another dubious incident when an Argentine was sent off because Klinsmann did his best impression of being hit by a bus when he had hardly been touched.

I managed to do quite a bit on my lit survey paper today. In fact, I think I did more work today than in the whole of last week. Now I’m going to leave work a bit early and finding something to do at home.

Irony: Colin Powell says of the mounting furore over the evidence used to justify the war in Iraq

I think this is very overwrought and overblown and overdrawn.

It’s already Thursday again. At least I made it to my office at a decent hour this morning. I had Jaga wondering what was going on because I was in at 9am, and she was justifiably surprised to see me in my office at that hour of the morning! So what will I be doing today? I have a paper to review, and I’ll continue working on my latest paper, or papers. Ted McFadden from the DSTC is working with me on a journal type lit survey, and RW has approached me to work with him on a paper about trust in pervasive computing environments, and service discovery protocols in particular. We’ll see how that goes.

Earlier in the week, I had a meeting with Ted where we discussed the aforementioned paper, and he gave me some feedback on my previous papers. He like the complex systems paper, so hopefully that’s a sign it might be accepted. I believe this is called "wishful thinking".

Stayed with Mum and Dad last weekend. I needed some recuperation time for various reasons. We checked out the newish botanical gardens in Buderim. It’s complete with a Contemplation Garden where you can, um, contemplate stuff, I guess. Anyway, very peaceful place in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.

Speaking of recuperation, I was contemplating ;) taking a few days or weeks off, since I’ve used hardly any of my annual leave so far. But I’m not sure if I want to, because Ph.D work is going pretty well at the moment, and my reasons for needing to recuperate have been finally removed (I think), after months of being miserable. At least I managed not to cause other people to be miserable too, until the last few weeks (sorry folks!). There’s a lot more I could say on this matter, and I understand some of you would like to know what the heck has been going on with me, but I’m afraid you’ll all just have to guess. I can’t promise, but hopefully I’m back to my good old pre-2003 self again! This should be cause for celebration in itself, so maybe I will take a few days off afterall! We’ll see. I just hope that my relatively good Ph.D productivity of late was not as a result of my being pained, because that would suck big time! As I understand it, Ph.D work should cause pain, not benefit from an orthogonal source of pain! I also hope that people aren’t weirded out by my sudden lift in spirits. Screw them if they are! I don’t think I’ve written a paragraph with so many exclamation marks in it for a very long time. According to some, exclamation marks should be unnecessary. These people hold the exclamation should be implicit in the context and clever wording of the sentence. But I think exclamation marks are great! Thomas Hardy, being my new god of English literature, uses exclamation marks, so I can use them too. Here’s an extra one!

Hmm, it seems I’ve been writing this blog entry for over three hours. It was interrupted by a seminar on the Go! language for multi-threaded deliberative agents, given by Professor Keith Clark from Imperial College in London. Interesting, but not altogether relevant for my work. Speaking of which, I’d better actually do some.

Today I completed reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles. It is, plainly speaking, the most well written book I’ve had the chance to read, and I thank the person who recommended it, and indeed lent me a copy it. However, it is a book that is hard to enjoy, simply because the plot is so tragic; the heroine’s lot in life is one of hardship and utter sadness. Having said that, though, I fell in love with Thomas Hardy’s style of writing from the very first page:

On an evening in the latter part of May a middle-aged man was walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott, in the adjoining Vale of Blakemore or Blackmoor. The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line. He occassionally gave a smart nod, as if in confirmation of some opinion, though he was not thinking of anything in particular…

But perhaps the best aspect of Hardy’s writing, in Tess at least, is his character descriptions. One gets the feeling that Hardy knows how people think, and his mastery of the English language allows him to relate the personalities of each of the characters he created with astounding clarity; unless, of course, he chose deliberately to create ambiguity in the character. The heroine, Tess, is the prime example of this. Hardy gives the impression of having studied the complexities of human nature for quite some time.

I find myself launching into a book review, even though I promised myself I wouldn’t because it takes something away from having read it. So I’ll stop here. I zipped through the book as I found it un-put-downable, despite its depressing plot. My reading list will most definitely be updated to include more Thomas Hardy novels. Having finished one book, I now begin another: Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine.

SEM’s parents arrived in Brisbane yesterday after seeing Sydney, Uluru and Kakadu. Nigel picked them up from the airport. They stayed with us for the night, but have relocated to a hotel in the CBD. Although they don’t speak much English, and I don’t speak much French (read as "I speak no French"), we were able to communicate quite well by arm waving and whatnot. SEM’s father was especially keen to chat with us about Australia, France, IT and nuclear power stations (he is employed by one). I must say I thoroughly enjoyed his company for the short time he was here. They gave me a copy of Le Petit Prince, which I mentioned in casual conversation to SEM once a while back. Nige was given a French comic book. We are determined to read through these books no matter how long it takes! Or we could just get SEM to translate them for us, but that wouldn’t be much fun. In addition, they left us a brochure-cum-map of the area of France in which they live. They live in a small town called Vaux-en-Bugey, which is between Lyon and the French-Swiss border. It looks like exactly the kind of quaint little village that I adore. SEM and her parents will be leaving for Cairns on Monday, and will also visit some other points along the Queensland coast.