I am … unhindered by talent

After many days of preparing to start to begin to get ready to go on vacation (e.g., packing and cleaning the apartment in Colchester, traveling to Preston, etc., etc.), we are finally here in Spain and can start Having Fun (TM). We first arrived in Madrid, where we had a few hours to kill, so we wandered out and found a restaurant where Sub-Evil got an excellent swordfish steak, and I had some cool aged local cheese of unknown name and description.

We then took a brilliant train to Toledo, checked into our hotel, and wandered the tiny cobbled streets of the old town some. We had a fine dinner outside, with my meal being a stew of sorts made from free range local rabbit. I was having real trouble getting any meat off of one piece until (after much poking about) I realized it was half of the head (split right down the middle, top to bottom when looking at it face one)! (I took photos, but I’ll let you sift through the full set on my “events account” to find those.)

The old town is a gorgeous medieval city with stone buildings crowding in on narrow cobbled streets that are quite something to drive on. Many are so narrow that pedestrians have to step into doorways to make room for the car to pass.

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Today we travel south from Preston to Birmingham, and tomorrow morning (early) we fly south to Spain for nearly 3 weeks of well deserved R&R!

We’re not likely to have much internet while we’re away, so there will likely be more of the same non-activity that you’ve come to know and love here in the last few months.

We still love you - we’re just not speaking to you :-).

Best wishes all!

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I just had to take four on-line safety courses here at Essex in order to get money from our research grant. I’ll spare you the horrors, although I did twitter on about of some of them as I went as a sanity saving device, and will share a couple:

“Keeping your workstation and office tidy is crucial to short-term and long-term health and wellbeing.” I am doomed.

[The] Irony of spending much of an hour wading through a tedious online lesson on risks of spending too long at the computer is not lost on me.

As if the exams themselves weren’t annoying enough (and trust me, they were), the people that assembled them implicitly assumed that everyone in the world is in Microsoft’s pocket. I eventually became so frustrated that when I’d verified that I’d passed them all, I sent the following along to the folks that put all this together:

While I’m here, I should mention that there were several pieces of media that seemed to assume that one was on a Windows box. Quite a few images (clip art, I assume) didn’t load on either a Linux box or a Mac. Also the PowerPoint in the “Working at height” lesson assumed that you had PowerPoint or some compatible viewer, which isn’t always going to be true.

None of these problems were fatal for me. There didn’t appear to be important content in any of the images that I couldn’t view, and I was able to view the PowerPoint file in another program. Still they were confusing and frustrating (especially at first), and it would presumably be fairly easy (if somewhat tedious) to convert them all to a more standard and open format.

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Regular readers here will likely remember various past posts extolling the virtues of Dagstuhl, this really wonderful computing research facility in Germany. I’ve been lucky enough to attend several seminars on the Theory of Evolutionary Algorithms in the past, and have taken (and posted) quite a few photos from those trips.

A few months ago I had the (totally) unexpected pleasure of being contacted by Christian Lindig, a member of Dagstuhl’s scientific staff, and asked if I would be willing to return to Dagstuhl for the specific purpose of taking photographs for them. They’re apparently in the process of re-doing all their brochures and such, and liked what they’d seen on Flickr.

As a result I’ve spent a very pleasant few days back at Dagstuhl in some gorgeous spring weather (I’ve only every been here in the winter before), enjoying the company of a fine group studying the Design and Analysis of Randomized and Approximation Algorithms. (They’ve been very patient with an intruder who always seemed to be waving a camera about, and for this I am grateful.)

I’ve taken something over 1,000 photos, with a few more planned for tomorrow morning before I leave. Some of the participants have asked if the photos will be made available. I have uploaded everything I’ve taken this week to my “events” account on Flickr, all under a Creative Commons license, which means that participants are welcome to download and use any that they wish, as long as they provide attribution. (Note that I am not, and can not, provide any sort of permissions from individuals photographed - that’s their right and prerogative. If you want to use someone here in a beer ad, you need to get their permission first.)

Where are they all?

• Everything I’ve taken this week is on my “events” account.
• I also have a Dagstuhl set on my “real” Flickr account that has some of my favorites (with cleaning, cropping, etc.) from my various visits to Dagstuhl. At the moment this set is heavy on shots from previous trips, but I hope to add more from this visit as time allows.
• Earlier this year I posted everything (without cleaning or editing) from the Jan/Feb seminar on Evolutionary Algorithms to my “events” account.

It’s not yet clear what all Dagstuhl may do with these, but they will contact anyone who is recognizable in a photograph for permission before using your image in any of their materials. If anyone objects to being included in these vast oceans of photos, please let me know and I’d be happy to remove the photo in question.

Thanks again to Christian for inviting me out to Dagstuhl, and to the Randomized and Approximate Algorithms group for being patient “hosts”. Enjoy the photos!

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Penguin’s promoting some exploration of the concept of “book” in their We tell stories series, where six authors have contributed new works, each of which explores some aspect of on-line story-telling, sometimes quite distinct from more traditional printed books.

Not all of these are equally successful (I thought the idea of “The 21 steps” was better than the execution). My favorite of these is probably “Hard times”, by Matt Mason and Nicholas Felton. It’s a short, but (for me) very effective collection of data points making it clear how much things have changed and are changing, and hinting about what it might all mean down the road. Most of the info was at least somewhat familiar to me, but I love the way the details are brought together into a compact compelling argument — a sort of data poetry.

From Part VII: “Ideas are travelling faster” (crediting the data to Seth Goodin’s Unleashing the idea virus):

The time required to achieve Ten Million Users:

• Radio: 40 years
• Television: 15 years
• Netscape: 3 years
• Hotmail and Napster: < 1 year

Part IX-A has a tremendous title — “Our parents killed bad ideas with music. We kill bad ideas with new buiness models” — and delivers excellently on that promise.

Thanks to jakebouma for the cool photo.

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Sorry for the lack of activity here - an EPSRC grant with Riccardo came through, which is big happy news. The downside is that there’s a ton of research work to be done in a very short period of time. We were lucky enough to have Ellery Crane visiting for the last two weeks, and the two of us did some pretty massive hours while he was here. We got a bucket of really good work done was he here; we built several large new systems and got some early results that suggest probably at least a couple of papers.

I’ll try to post at least sporadically in the upcoming weeks, but I suspect things are likely to be light here well into the summer.

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