Category: Random observations

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.

NOOOoooo!!! FIFA has overturned its decision to give Oceania a direct qualification spot into the 2006 World Cup. This is incredibly bad news. I cannot believe FIFA could do such a thing. I sincerely hope that this news will not have an affect on Frank Lowy’s bid for control of the Soccer Australia board.

Nigel and I just now returned from shopping. We purchased rather more than we set out to, an occurrence that is rare with us. Having found the item Dad requested for his upcoming birthday/anniversary, I proceeded to buy the Essential Bach CD with 36 of his greatest compositions; Mission Impossible and Mission Impossible II on DVD, which were on special at K-Mart; two shirts and the Penguin edition of The Three Musketeers.

I finished reading the Discworld book Wyrd Sisters on Thursday. It’s been my favourite Discworld book so far. It is really a set of parodies on various parts of Macbeth. Even the title itself, Wyrd Sisters, is taken straight from the play: Saw you the weird sisters? says Macbeth to Lennox towards the end. But mainly, this Discworld book made me laugh a lot more than the others. The Fool was an especially funny character, but not in the way you might imagine, and the "Bubble bubble, Toil and trouble" bit (again a parody of a scene from Macbeth) had me in stitches.

I’m now reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy and enjoying it thoroughly, if enjoying is the right word for a story of such tragedy. I’m really zipping through it, finding it hard to put down even at 2am in the morning! I’m sixty odd pages through the novel proper, but there were another sixty-eight pages of introduction and history written by various scholars of English literature. The history of the book was itself an interesting read. It’s amazing Hardy was able to produce a comprehensible book at all, considering the way in which he was forced to apply self-censorship to various passages, which led to him having to alter other passages so they remained consistent. The Penguin edition, which is the one I’m reading, presents as authentic a version as possible. But as the history of the novel explains, through a complex set of circumstances, it is impossible to call any version of Tess original. There simply never was an original. If I keep up my current pace of reading, I shall have completed Tess by week’s end.

I have just witnessed one of the most beautiful sunsets I’ve ever seen. In fact, it was probably the most beautiful sunset I’ve ever seen. The best part of it was the southern sky, which featured a bright double rainbow over a gorgeous orange horizon. The western sky was bright orange and mottled with clouds, while the eastern sky was the bluest of blues. People speak of beautiful sunsets, and I’m not usually one of those people, but this one was truly amazing. I’m cursing myself for not bringing in my camera! Michael Lawley managed to take a few pictures, but the best of it was over by the time he started to snap. There’s no way pictures could have done it justice anyway.

NSW wrapped up the State of Origin series last night with a thoroughly deserved win. QLD was hopeless. They showed none of the famed QLD spirit of years gone by, but even that spirit wouldn’t have helped this bunch. They were truly outclassed. Andrew Johns was magic, as usual. IMHO, he’s better than Wally Lewis ever was. Game 3 of the series will still be played in a few weeks. NSW will be attempting to make it a 3-0 whitewash, and QLD will be endeavouring to save face.

According to the research plan I’m staring at on my office wall, my model for service discovery ought to be complete by the end of June. Not likely, but I’ll make my best attempt anyway. I sense the plan mocking me, with its big, bold letters and its ambitious set of deadlines. The nerve of the thing, to deride its own creator. I’m sure it snickers when I turn my back, but I will show it, ha ha! I will put it in its place!

I finally submitted my complex systems paper for review. It was a bit late, but the submission web page was still open so there shouldn’t be any problems. I think the paper turned out pretty well, and I hope the reviewers agree.

KMH didn’t take too kindly to the hanging of Bob the Bear with his own scarf. I needed a five minute distraction because a bug in my simulation code was starting to frustrate me, so I decided to string up Bob the Bear. RW was humoured. KMH was not altogether impressed when she saw Bob hanging from the top of her computer monitor the next day. The funniest bit is that she automatically suspected RW for the evil deed. I could get away with murder in that place, honestly. RW and I maintain it was an assisted suicide anyway. The distraction fulfilled its purpose, as I fixed the simulation and eventually got my paper submitted (two days later).

I’m not sure if I ever mentioned what happened with our Freddo Frog experiment, (or indeed if I’ve even mentioned the Freddo experiment previously). After three or so weeks, nobody had been tempted to take Freddo off our door. We had many people ask us why there was a Freddo Frog taped to our office door, but we said nothing. Eventually, instead of eating Freddo, some twisted soul decided to crucify Freddo by taping a crucifix to the door and then pinning Freddo to it. That marked the end of our experiment. I believe Freddo is still lying around in our office somewhere, recuperating from his ordeal. Anyway, I’m sure that means that I win the wager we three had going. My conviction was that Freddo would remain there indefinitely (meaning the duration of the experiment, which RW and I agreed would be a month, though I’m unsure whether we ever consulted KMH on this matter). It provided a bit of fun anyway. Students and lecturers were suitably amused by the chocolate frog strapped to our office door.