Category: Random observations

This morning I dropped Riko off at the airport. His stay in Australia has come to an end. He chose to have dinner at The Three Monkeys, so Nigel and I have eaten there quite a few times in the last few weeks. Sylvie-Elsa came along too. It sounds like Riko really enjoyed his trip around Australia. He saw Cairns, Darwin, Kakadu, Litchfield National Park, Alice Springs, Uluru, King’s Canyon and Sydney. He will stop over in Singapore for a couple of days before continuing to Germany. It was a pleasure having him as a housemate.

Yesterday Nigel and I went to see Finding Nemo at Indooroopilly. It was a very cute film. The animation was awesome. There was enough in the movie to keep adults entertained. In fact, there were some decidedly adult jokes that kids would not even have realised were jokes (at least, one would hope the kids didn’t understand the adult references, but who knows in this day and age). I’m not sure Finding Nemo is my favourite cartoon of recent times. Shrek takes a lot of beating.

Due to a severe pants shortage, I was forced to purchase a pair of jeans and a pair of drill pants. In the space of a few weeks, both my cargo pants and my casual dress pants obtained rips in exactly the same spot. Not sure what’s going on there. But anyway, the point is I couldn’t remain pantsless for too long, so I righted that situation yesterday. Not pantsless any more. I also bought a shirt for the hell of it.

On Thursday, after tutoring at Ipswich, I stopped off at Indooroopilly to investigate mobile phones and various mobile plans. I’ve set my sights on the Siemens M55, a nifty little phone. It’s probably overkill for my needs, but it looks cool, sounds cool and has lots of nice features. No Bluetooth, no IrDA, but to buy a phone with a colour screen as well as these features costs quite a bit more. The Nokia and Sony-Ericsson phones with similar features to the M55 are more expensive. I’ll be going with Vodafone ‘no plans’. It seems like by far and away the best deal considering the way I expect to use my phone. My resistance to the mobile phone era has finally caved in. I’ve been convinced to get a mobile phone by several people, over a long period of time, and by recent situations where a mobile phone would have come in handy.

My Penguin Classics collection has grown with the addition of Don Quixote by Cervantes, which I purchased while I was at Indooroopilly on Thursday. It was a toss up between a bunch of Thomas Hardy books, some Jane Austen novels and Madame Bovary by Flaubert. I guess it doesn’t really matter what order I read them in. They will all be read eventually if I get the chance. Perhaps I should buy the original Spanish version of Don Quixote, too. That would give me some Spanish practice while semester is out!

At 2.40 this morning, I got a phone call from some completely drugged out woman. I hope it wasn’t anyone I know!

I’ve added some more photos to my photo section, mainly for the benefit of Mum and Dad. There are photos of their unit in Caloundra, which is currently on the market. But there are also some new photos of the Maleny area and of my backyard. Yes, some more flower shots. So sue me. It’s just that I think they make excellent close-up subjects for my camera, and it’s fairly easy to take artsy type shots with them without having to specially compose the objects in a scene.

It’s been a good weekend. I went out with Terry and his friend on Friday night. I ran into some old friends from Nudgee College: Cameron Caldwell and John Jackson. It was great to see them again. On Saturday I visited Andry in hospital who has undergone a knee reconstruction after being involved in a rather nasty bicycle accident. So ugly, in fact, that the car which hit him had to be towed away from the scene of the accident! He seems to be doing alright. He has a button he can press which delivers a measured dose of morphine via the IV line going into his arm. Apparently he’s been pressing that button quite a bit. On Saturday evening Nigel and I had dinner with some old friends whom we’ve known since we lived in Glen Innes. A whole bunch of other young ex-Glen Innes folk came along too, but I didn’t know any of them. I didn’t realise there were so many people from Glen living in Brisbane! After dinner some of us went to an Irish pub at Garden City and watched England beat South Africa in the rugby. Then we came home and I watched Arsenal vs Chelsea in the Premier League. It was an absolute cracker of a match. Arsenal won 2-1. It’s just a shame the winning goal came through a comical goalkeeping error. Today’s been a typical Sunday: house cleaning, ironing etc etc.

On the way to Ipswich on Thursday morning I finished reading He Died With a Felafel in His Hand. This book is extremely amusing, and would probably put any sane person off share-housing forever. The book is basically a succession of anecdotes relating the author’s share-housing experiences. Lots of drugs, lots of sex, lots of complete and utter madness. Since Nigel still hasn’t finished reading The Count of Monte Cristo, though he is making good progress, I’ve picked The Penguin Book of Etiquette out of my bookshelf and started reading it cover to cover. I’ve probably read the whole thing in bits and pieces, but thought I’d read it straight through anyway. I think it might be time to invest in a few more Penguin Classics. There’s a whole bunch of Thomas Hardy I have to buy, some Jane Austin and Cervantes among other works. Oh, and Shakespeare. Lots of Shakespeare. Macbeth is the only Shakespearean play I own at the moment, so this sorry state of affairs must be remedied immediately.

On Thursday night Nigel and I watched two episodes of Black Adder II on my computer. I will never tire of that show. I can’t think of another comedy that can compete with the witty sarcasm that is sprinkled throughout the show. The actors deliver the lines perfectly.

Friday was the most productive day I’ve had in ages in terms of getting Ph.D work done. I coded the ant-routing layer for my service discovery protocol. That leaves the hashtable-routing layer and the discovery layer itself (which is really just query matching and description construction). Then I need to implement the automated gateway prototype that will allow a Superstring client to discover services advertised under a different service discovery protocol. However, I still have a lot of design work to do on this first. In order to stay productive, I’m switching between thesis writing and coding. I think next I’m going to get a big chunk of my literature survey out of the way. I can lift a good deal of this from my confirmation report and from papers I have written since then.

In order to get my thesis submitted as soon possible, I’ve decided I won’t be tutoring next semester. That will give me a lot of extra time to work on my Ph.D, especially considering the last time I tutored COMP4301 I ended up writing the assignments and doing all the marking myself, as well as supervising the pracs.

Two minor accomplishments today. I went to H&R Block to get my tax return done. As it turned out, my tax return was very simple to complete. The second minor accomplishment is that I finally had time to rework one of the sections of the paper I’m writing with TM and JI. Hopefully it reads a bit better now.

I had a most relaxing weekend. A portion of it was spent reading a book on a beach underneath a tree in Caloundra. Other bits of it were spent walking through Buderim forest and at Gardiner’s Falls in Maleny. Both of those places were fantastic. More photos to publish :).

I finished reading Prey by Michael Crichton. It got a little weird toward the end, but worth reading. However, I swear Crichton’s writing style is not as good as it used to be. It’s like he’s writing in such a way that minimal work will need to be done to convert the book into a screenplay. I’ve also finished reading the Penguin Classics edition of the Tao Te Ching, which has been sitting on my shelf for quite a while now. There are some great pieces of advice, but there are other pieces of advice that I will never heed in a million years. For example,

Without stirring abroad
One can know the whole world;
Without looking out of the window
One can see the way of heaven.
The further one goes
The less one knows.
Therefore the sage knows without having to stir,
Identifies without having to see,
Accomplishes without having to act.

I’m sorry, but travelling is in my blood, and experiencing different places and cultures is the best education one can have in today’s world (IMHO). But then again the Tao Te Ching extols the virtues of keeping the masses uneducated. As I said, there’s bits that I agree with, and bits that I don’t. Having now read the Penguin Classics edition, which is a translation by D. C. Lau, I can say I prefer Stan Rosenthal’s translation. I read this quite some time ago. It’s much easier to read, and one gets the feeling that Rosenthal does a better job of translating the intended meaning of the passages than Lau. But of course, I can’t be sure of this.

I’m now reading He Died With a Felafel in His Hand by John Birmingham, courtesy of BJK. It’s been very amusing so far. The book tells of the share house accommodation experiences of the author. All the stories are supposed to be true, but I’m not entirely convinced. I mean, what are the chances of breaking up with your wife, moving to the Cocos Islands in an attempt to get as far away from her as possible (though it must be said, the Cocos Islands aren’t all that far away), only to have her turn up in the same place? Irony at its best, but hardly believable. Not that I care. It’s a very entertaining read, but very short by the looks of it. Hopefully by the time I finish reading it, Nigel will have finished The Count of Monte Cristo. But I don’t like my chances. He’s read 500 pages, so he’s got another 500 odd pages to go!

Looks like I’ll be doing extra hours out at Ipswich until the end of semester. They want me to run a study group for a few hours per week to revise the tutorial material. Probably a good idea. We still haven’t started marking assignment two. We’d better do this pretty soon!

Nigel and I are living on our own at the moment. RB returns for a couple of days before heading back to Germany, and SEM has found alternative accomodation during the mid-sem break. She’s not exactly sure how long she’s staying in Australia, but her contract was almost up, and the parents won’t be letting any rooms after November. She still wants to hook up for movies and hip-hop and whatnot. So that’s cool.

Today I hope to finish my poster for the UQ Innovation Expo and do some work on the journal paper I’m writing with Jaga and Ted. I haven’t touched the journal paper in quite some time.

I’ve added to my web site a selection of the photos I took while in Sydney and Canberra. Some of them turned out not too bad at all. Feel free to use any of them for desktop wallpaper etc.

Back from my Spanish lesson. After two weeks of no Spanish it was hard to get back into the swing of things. At least there were no new verb forms today!

While I was in Canberra I picked up two CDs for $3 each. The first one is the soundtrack from The Mexican. There are a few good tracks on it. I especially like These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ by Nancy Sinatra and a track called Oye. The other CD is a classical one. It has Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor by Rachmaninov, Concerto for piano and wind instruments by Stravinsky and Prometheus – Le Poéme du Feu by Scriabin.

I’ve returned to Brisbane after a week spent in Sydney and Canberra. My presentation at ICON’03 went well. The questions at the end were very tame, thank goodness. Sasi’s talk also went very well. He shouldn’t be so nervous in the lead-up because he’s really an excellent speaker.

I spent last Saturday (27/9) evening with MM. It was his birthday, so I shouted him dinner at an Italian restaurant down the road from my hotel. The food was good. I especially liked the gelati! Then on Sunday my two cousins Annette and Charlene showed me around Sydney. We saw Darling Harbour, where we sat and chatted for a while because we had a lot of catching up to do. They are both in the process of getting their law degrees. Annette has almost finished. Charlene still has a couple of years to go. Had lunch at the Star City casino, and then headed over to the Opera House. We did a lot of walking. We headed back to Darling Harbour for dinner at a place called Blackbird Cafe. It has nice views out over Darling Harbour. Very cool.

The conference itself was OK. There were only a few papers I found really interesting and relevant to my own work. There was a paper on multi-space distributed hash tables and another one on a service discovery protocol. There were a few papers on peer-to-peer protocols and analysing their topology and so on. The conference dinner was on Tuesday night. It was a dinner cruise which left from Darling Harbour and went up Sydney Harbour before doing a U-turn and coming back. I sat at a table with some RMIT people and guy from Taiwan who has a degree in nuclear engineering, but decided he like computer science better.

As soon as Sasi had finished delivering his presentation on Wednesday I hailed a taxi and went to the central station coach terminal in the city. Getting out of Sydney was a nightmare. I assume there were some accidents. Anyway, it took over an hour to get out of Sydney city on the bus. We arrived in Canberra about 45 minutes late. But BJK was waiting there to pick me up. Whilst in Canberra I saw the National Museum, the National Gallery, Old Parliament House, New Parliament House and the War Memorial. Everything was very, very interesting. The guided tours around the two parliament houses were great. Old Parliament House was fascinating because everything was open to the public. The Prime Minister’s office is exactly how Bob Hawke left it when he moved to the new Parliament House. The Prime Minister’s Office had a peep-hole in it so the secretary could see if the Prime Minister was "busy" before interrupting him. I saw the cabinet room, which Gough Whitlam once called the leakiest room in the country. He meant this in more than one way: the ceiling was not water tight, and the press sometimes climbed onto the roof to eavesdrop on cabinet meetings. Presumeably, some of the cabinet members were also eager to leak information to their buddies in the press, too. The War Memorial is fantastic. Not something you can enjoy because of the subject it deals with, but very interesting. It’s not only a memorial. There is also an extensive museum, and this museum is great. You can spend hours there. You get a free guided tour through the place, and our guide was very knowledgeable. Actually, most tourist attractions in Canberra are free. The only thing I had to pay for was Old Parliament House, which cost a whole $1! It’s $2 if you don’t have a concession of some sort.

Canberra was pretty much as I expected it to be. Lots of people don’t like it because it’s kind of quiet, and not busy and bustling like other capital cities. But I think that’s precisely the reason I do like it. I could live there and like it.

BJK gave me a tour through the engine of his 1982 (?) Mazda RX7. I know a little bit about rotary engines now, but I’ll never be the car enthusiast that BJK is! Hopefully his car becomes a classic in a few years, which means he can sell it for much more than he paid for it. Ben and Marice were excellent hosts, and I enjoyed my stay very much.

I will publish all the photos from my trip shortly. Now it’s back to uni work.