Category: Random observations

I am in Canberra. Yay! Using Ben’s dial-up connection, so I better make it quick. I’ll have more to say when I get home! But blogging from CANBERRA!!!

I think I’ve finished preparing my presentation for ICON. Now I just need to practice it once or twice before Wednesday.

The parents are in Brisvegas today. Taking them out for dinner tonight. I’d make Devonshire tea for them, like I did last time they came south, but I’m a tad busy ATM. Ain’t nothin’ quite like a home-made Devonshire tea of a mid-morning or afternoon, complete with mock clotted cream. I haven’t seen real clotted cream in Australia (the cows aren’t quite right :), but you can whip up something resembling Devon clotted cream in terms of texture and taste with a mixture of thickened cream, sour cream and castor sugar. There are much more elaborate ways to fake clotted cream involving cream cheese, gelatin and vanilla among other ingredients, but I think the simple recipe suffices.

Time to practice that presentation!

From Ben’s blog:

Ricky has very, um, kindly put up a video of me digging a hole. It is funnier than it sounds. Trust me.

Ricky should be reminded that he will get his when he comes to Canberra.

And looking forward to it too!

Assignment 1 marking is finally complete, save for entering the marks into the database.

Tonight, I’m trying my hand at cooking aloo gobi (potato and cauliflower curry). Flying blind. Playing it by ear. Smells alright so far! :) We’ll see how it turns out.

Yesterday, I finished reading Stupid White Men. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I thought I would. Michael Moore is great at ranting and raving, and he can often make his point in a humorous fashion. But this book contained very few really funny bits. Lots of cheap jokes, and lots of angst. To my mind, the best part was his solution to the situation in Northern Ireland (you’ll have to read it to find out what his solution was). Now I’m reading Prey by Michael Crichton.

Curse these annoying blackouts! We had a couple of half-minute blackouts last night, which means every clock in the house had to be reset twice! Also, my blog was not set up to come back online automatically after a reboot. Hopefully I’ve fixed that now.

Had a not too bad weekend, which I spent with my brother and a couple of my cousins (whom some of you might remember from my 21st birthday bash) in Redcliffe. Hanging out with my cousins means that I’m exposed to hours on end of hard core hip hop, which isn’t such a bad thing every once in a while. Some of it is very clever, and some of it even sounds OK. But it’s always nice to come back to the music of the sixties and classical pieces. Vivaldi, Bach, Tchaikovsky and company have been getting a lot of play time on my computer recently. Not that they were played with low frequency before. The thing is, I do most of my work at home now, and the classical pieces help to create a nice work environment. If I play lyrical pieces, I tend to sing along, which means I can’t concentrate on the task at hand. I seem to be able to hum along to Bach etc and not lose concentration. I think it actually improves it.

I’ve added some MPEG movies to my web site. They are here and here. They are quite small, so it won’t take long to download them.

This year I’m going to have to seek help from a tax professional in order to complete my tax return. Completing the supplementary section is extremely difficult. In previous years, Perpetual Investments sent me a very comprehensive guide telling me how to calculate different values that I needed to fill in at various places thoughout the supplementary tax return form. This year they’ve only done half the job, and recommended getting help from a tax accountant. I don’t even know what half the stuff means (nor do I really care): franked and unfranked dividends, discounted capital gains, CGT concession, modified passive income, foreign tax credits and so on and so forth. So Perpetual sent me a tax statement with all these different values on it, but I’ve not a clue what to do with them (it’s not a simple matter of finding the right box on the tax form and copying the values). I remember from last year there was a lot of adding and subtracting stuff together, which isn’t difficult if you know which stuff to add or subtract from which other stuff. Hence, my need for a tax accountant this year.

I’d hoped to do some Ph.D work this weekend. I’ve done nothing besides a tiny little bit of coding. I also have a paper to finish writing a presentation to prepare. The coming week is going to be very busy because, as I said in my last entry, I’ve still got some marking to do as well.

Had an appointment with the dentist today. All’s well as far as the old teeth go. Rather alarmingly, I found myself feeling quite relaxed and could easily have fallen asleep during the clean and polish procedure. Don’t people normally have the opposite reaction when visiting the dentist?

I’m helping RGW (previously identified as RW) with marking his lot of St Lucia assignments. Boring boring boring. But must be done, I suppose. I finished the Ipswich lot on Wednesday. I took twenty-odd assignments from RGW’s pile, so we’ll both end up having marked sixty each.

In other news, KMH submitted her thesis today! Yay! Woohoo! etc! I’m sure acceptance is just a formality, so she will soon be Dr KMH! Well done, but I still say the first version of your Acknowledgements section was cooler. ;)

AG’s back from her USA/Guatemala trip. She says she learned quite a bit of Spanish whilst she was in Guatemala. Excellent! I bet, after spending only a couple of months in Guatemala, she speaks more Spanish than I do. Immersion is everything when it comes to learning another language, and that’s what I’m lacking. Anyway, completely jealous. Whilst in the USA, she wrote a Red Book for IBM. Something to do with XML stuff I believe.

In somewhat sadder news, a whole bunch of people were laid off from the DSTC today. That really, really sucks. It was strange: I caught the ferry to uni with one of the people who later found out that he’d been fired. And he was a really great guy, too. If anything, this just provides me with more incentive to get away from here!

A few days ago SU sent me a poem that she really likes. I reproduce it here because I like it too. Perhaps it resonates with something that I’ve always held to be true, and in the last year or so has been shown to be true beyond any shadow of a doubt. Of course, the mention of God doesn’t make the poem any less appealing, and nor should it (a note for regular readers of this blog :). Anyway, here is the poem:

The Silk and the Moonlight

God made the illusion look like the real, and He made the real look as if it does not exist.
He covered the sea, but showed the foam. He concealed the wind from sight but manifested the dust.

This world is an old sorcerer who sells you the moonlight as silk;
in return he gets from you the gold and silver of your life.
When you come to yourself you see there are no silk clothes, but instead you have spent your gold and silver pieces. And your purse is empty.

From this magic market you can take refuge in nothing but Truth.

— The Tale of the Reed Pipe, Massud Farzan
E. P. Dutton, 1974

It must be dinner time, because I smell something gooood and my tummy is grumbling!

I added a few more photos to the Fairfield section of my photo collection. There’s an AWOL scrub turkey (we don’t usually get them around my place, even though they are nearing plague proportion at the university), a tapestry of Lustleigh village (where my grandparents used to live), and another tapestry of some other English village. We have many more tapestries in our lounge, painstakingly completed by my mother over the years. My photos of the other ones came out either too dark or were obscured by glare, so they don’t get to feature in my photo collection unfortunately.

No Berkeley for me. :( The paper was rejected in the end because the reviewers thought it was too much like a position paper, which is fair enough I suppose. But from reading their comments, I get the distinct feeling they read only the first half of the paper, because all the reviewers mentioned stuff about my ants-based algorithm, but didn’t even acknowledge the improvement I made to DHTs using complex systems theory, which was the second half of the paper. Not complaining. Had a good run up till now.