I’ve just arrived back from a weekend at Caloundra. It’s Mum’s birthday tomorrow, so we celebrated it today instead. Yesterday we took her to a movie of her choice – Japanese Story – and shouted her lunch. We also got her a bottle of Red Door perfume. Then today Dad shouted us all to a Jazz breakfast. A fantastic weekend! I also ended up buying a Siemens M55. I got it from Allphones at Maroochydore for $389. Vodafone turned out to be the most expensive of the lot, asking over $500 for the M55! Now I just need to go to Indooroopilly or the city tomorrow and get connected.
Friday was the Innovation Expo where honours and Ph.D students from IT and Engineering got to show off their projects to industry representatives, lecturers, school children and general passersby. I had a poster on show. It was actually a lot of fun explaining what my project is all about to other people, many of whom may have no idea what service discovery is all about. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be a large delegation of visitors from industry. But I had to leave at 5pm. Perhaps all the industry people came along after they finished up at work. One person from industry was really interested in my work, but having thought more deeply about the intended application that he described, I’m not sure service discovery is the best solution. Nevertheless, I have to e-mail with the details of my work. There were quite a few interesting projects around the expo to look at, and it was great to learn about what other people around the school are doing.
The Information Environments program at Ipswich campus had their expo day last Tuesday. I would have really liked to go, but two days a week at Ipswich is already quite a bit, and I needed to get a move along with my own work. Some of the projects at Ipswich are really, really cool. Many of the projects had something to do with physical/virtual hybrid environments. For example, one project implemented an air hockey game where one player plays with a real mallet, and the other player uses a virtual mallet on screen. Another was a race between a team in the physical world and a team in the virtual world to defuse bombs. So there were some really great demonstrations, and the lecturers from St Lucia who attended were really impressed.
I’m really glad that a lot of my Ipswich students appear to be putting in a lot of hard work for COMS3200. When I can see the students are really trying, it makes it so much easier for me to put in extra effort to help them along. I really hope they do well this year, and I have confidence that some of them will.
