I am … unhindered by talent

We all arrive at Dagstuhl on Sunday night for the week’s workshop. After a long day of traveling we enjoy some of Dagstuhl’s exceptional food, meet with folks, and catch up.

Above is the conversation during dinner tonight. It’s not the sharpest photo I’ve ever taken, but I think it captures the spirit of the room quite nicely.

And then we (at least quite a few of us) get to work. The photo below was taken at 9:30pm (probably 2.5 hours after the previous one), and there were quite a few people in this lab at the time. And there’s another lab elsewhere in the facility, and the library, and people’s rooms. I’m sure that lots of folks were also hanging out in the coffee room or playing pool, but there were a lot of people working on a Sunday night as well.

It helps if you enjoy your work, and most of these folks are extraordinarily interested in what they’re studying.

While I’m at Dagstuhl this year I’m going to try (amidst all the “real” work) to capture something of what the workshop is like and, more generally, what it is to do (computer) science. This is hard because it’s not flashy high-action bull-riding kind of work, but it’s important, significant work and deserves to be documented. I’m just going to have work harder at it.

I’m also probably going to take more people pictures than I would be naturally inclined to. If anyone finds them self in a photo here and objects, let me know and I’d be happy to remove it.

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JOCP! It’s been almost five days since I’ve posted anything here, and I have so much backed up in the queue…

There’s a major conference deadline (GECCO 2008) in a few days, and I’m struggling to finish up four different (and only loosely related) papers for submission. On top of that I leave Sunday morning for an excellent week in Germany at a research seminar at the wondrous Schloss Dagstuhl. (Feel free to visit some of my photos from my last visit to Dagstuhl.)

So sleep is short and fun on the blog is shorter still. In two weeks, though, I should be able to get back in the game a bit.

The top photo is of a student (Tyler - now graduated) during a talk he was giving with another student (Andy) at a regional computer science conference (MICS) last April. On the next day the two of them received the best student paper award for this work :-).

I’ve spent numerous hours this week drawing and redrawing graphs and tables, so this is all too reminiscent of my life at the moment.

The photo below is from a beautiful snowfall we had during the Dagstuhl workshop two years ago.

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A tale of mismanagement, overly enthusiastic love of buzz words and the Next Big Thing, and hiring good people and making them do stupid things.

The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.

Thanks to MJ for the pointer. As he said “makes one weep for our kind”.

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While I realize that this is little more than incoherent link propagation (unlike my normally focussed prose-o-wonderment), hopefully pulling some of this fluff from the mighty tubes that connect us all will help clarify our various connections and communications.

A couple that our amazing progeny sent my way:

• How I failed the Turing test: How would you convince a random new IM contact that you were a person and not a bot? (Of course might wonder why you’d bother, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
• RIAA Declares Using Brain to Remember Songs is Criminal Copyright Infringement (satire): Fairly amusing piece on the “Music industry moguls remain willfully clueless” thread. I love how the authors felt the need to include “satire” in the title. Are we really that dim?

I’m not sure where I got this pointer from, but Bruce Schneier is exhorting people to “Steal This Wi-Fi” over on Wired. In a world where people expend tons of energy securing their wireless networks (and ISPs often require it of their customers), one of our major security experts chooses to keep his home wireless open. “To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.”

And in a vaguely related piece on security, a post from John Naughton on the dangers of publishing your bank details. Jeremy Clarkson, arch-conservative, petrol head, and (much to my dismay) highly amusing Top Gear presenter decided that the woo-haa was way overblown regarding the recent loss by British government officials of financial details of millions of people. So he published his bank details in his Sun column. According to the BBC, however, “Clarkson admitted he was ‘wrong’ after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.” Oops.

Well, my tubes are definitely clearer. Thanks for the Q-tip.

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Tuesday morning (4 Dec 07) I set off from our happy home for a few days in Dublin. To quote myself (how pathetic is that?)

At the kind invitation of Michael O’Neill, I am going to the University of Dublin to give a talk in early December, which will be lots of fun. I’ve been to Ireland once before, to give a talk at the University of Limerick, and really enjoyed it. I’ve never been to Dublin, though, so I’m quite excited. Dublin Tourism has a very cool set of free podcast walking tours (smart people, them) which I’ve been listening to as a way of figuring out where I want to visit in my limited tourism time.

Giovanni (my office mate) pointed out the helpfully obvious today, namely that I could probably get a tour guide to Dublin from our city library. Duh. I’d looked at some in shops, but spending £10 for a book seemed a bit daft when I’ll only have one solid day of touring to do. Checking one out from the library, however…

I’m hoping for some nice weather so I can spend a lot of time just walking around and taking photographs. The aforementioned walking tours are really nice and have me quite pumped. We are talking December in Ireland, however, so I’m not holding my breath. Happily, there are lots of cool indoor things that I also want to visit. Chief among these is Trinity College Library, as they have many wondrous things including the magnificent Book of Kells.

I’ll also be flying Ryanair for the first time. The flight is incredibly cheap, to the point that it seems fundamentally wrong. The true cost (including pollution and other environmental impacts) just has to be more than the £40 or so I’m paying round trip.

Thanks to Del Amitri for the cool photo, which I discovered using Flickr’s nifty “Places” feature. Being able to quickly sift through some very cool photos of Dublin has both given me some ideas of things I’d like to see and photograph, while also pointing out some clichéd shots I may want to try to avoid. (I’ll probably fail, since I’m a total sucker for a pretty cliché shot, but I can try.)

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In a neat confluence of recent posts on both Squeak and book marketing, Squeak by example is being made available as a free PDF or in printed form via lulu.com. Cool.

Big ups to open… for the tip.

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The internet here at the University of Essex has been zooming between deceased and intermittent all morning, turning all these computers into environmentally unfriendly paperweights. Man, have I become an on-line junkie or what?

I was actually forced to spend the morning reading!

Reading things printed on paper!

Good thing I had printed off some papers I needed to review, or would have been completely adrift.

Now I get to find out if I can actually sneak this through one of the tiny windows of connectivity and get it out there in the world, a tiny digital distress signal in a little WordPress bottle.

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