If it doesn’t fit elsewhere, it goes here.
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.
Another working week begins. No fire alarms today; nothing exciting at all, in fact. Did some more marking. Hopefully will finish that by tomorrow afternoon. I attended the complex systems lecture as usual. This one was on economics from a complex systems point of view. It seemed very high-level to me, but then my mind started wandering toward the end. And just now I got home from my spanish lesson, during which we were introduced to yet another tense. I have tenses coming out of my ears now!
Shortly, tomorrow or the day after, I should know whether I’m going to Berkeley, California for a conference. The notifications of acceptance should have been sent around on Friday, our time, but for some reason they’re running late. Fingers crossed, anyway.
We received some Liberal Party propaganda in the mail today. Apparently local elections are coming up. They’re promising to build five tunnels thereby creating three river crossings (not quite sure how that works) at critical locations to ease traffic congestion. I’ve promised myself not to take too much interest in political issues, world events and suchlike, for a while anyway. So perhaps I shouldn’t be reading Stupid White Men right now. Hmm.
I just remembered I still haven’t filled out my tax return! Better do that sooner rather than later. When’s the deadline, I wonder?
This evening I finished reading The Three Musketeers. I found it to be enthralling, inspiring, romantic and tragic all at once. The Disney movie is certainly very different to Dumas’ novel (although, I like the movie for what it is). The novel is a tale of intrigues and comradery, and shows how men in positions of power can use that power for their own ends. If anyone wants to read it, let me know because I own a copy of it.
Yesterday I bought a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, another of Dumas’ novels. This was written at the same time as The Three Musketeers. This was my grandpa’s favourite book, so I’ve been meaning to read it for quite some time. I’m finally getting around to reading these classics, and I wish I’d started a long time ago. Tess was brilliant, The Musketeers I enjoyed thoroughly (but being a translation from the French, the quality of English writing can’t compare with that of Thomas Hardy’s; he was a master, as I’ve said before), and I’m sure I will be kept absorbed by Monte Cristo having seen the film and knowing that the book is always better than the film. I’m buying any classics that I wish to read, so slowly I’m building a Penguin Classics library.
I think in the last entry I wrote about my reading, I’d just finished Tess and was starting on Last Chance to See. The latter is an amusing look at some of the world’s endangered species, Douglas Adams style. If anything, that book caused me to reaffirm my status as a vegetarian! I must thank the great book lender in the sky for the loan of this book. Since finishing that, I’ve read The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. The Manifesto itself is only forty pages long (as published in the Penguin Classics format), but the 2002 Penguin Classics edition has 187 page introduction, most of which I found boring, and is published with seven different prefaces! To be honest, I’m not quite sure what to make of it all, and will reserve judgement until I’ve had a bit more time to digest it. I daresay I’ll be reading the forty pages again. On my first reading, it seemed like a call to the Proletariat to rise up against the Bourgeoisie, rather than being an all-encompassing ideology or economic paradigm. That brings us up to date with my reading (not that most of you care, I suspect :). I now start Stupid White Men by that most engagé of activists, Michael Moore. Courtesy of RW. (Thanks mate!)
Nigel and I went to see Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday (Saturday, though by the time I submit this, yesterday will be Sunday). Highly entertaining cinema, though by no means a great movie. Johnny Depp was very amusing as the perpetually inebriated Captain Jack Sparrow. See it if you want to laugh a bit or if you like lots of swashbuckling.