from beneath the toppling towers

It was never my intention to stop writing. This is my liturgy, of course, but in the case I really did return from Europe with every intention of continuing the renewed activity of blogging stimulated by the surrounds, stimulus and above all the great company I had in Europe. Life, though, and more specifically working life, took a hand.

I will not for a second pretend that I am a victim of overwork. I am not someone endowed with a work ethic, and having seen closely the commitment exhibited under great demands by those who are, I would hasten to say that I don't think what has been asked of me has been beyond me. It has, though, been a significant step up from what I was doing last year and before that, particularly in the number of responsibilities, which has gone from numerous to bewildering.

My trip, too, for all its aforementioned merits, came at an inconvenient time. As much as the visits I made stimulated my enthusiasm for research, it left me with a significant backlog of both teaching and service duties on my return to the campus, a backlog from which I have still to extricate myself two months on.

A big part of the problem has been that I spend a lot of time counting my tasks and stressing over them as opposed to doing them. When I have occasioned to list my outstanding tasks, I fairly easily run to and beyond a full A4 page, and I have had trouble seeing the trees for the forest (let alone the florist for the flowers, if I might be permitted a smell-the-roses/Lucksmiths reference).

Also, whether it is a subconscious devotion to the idea of work-life balance or a reluctance to admit the urgency of my obligations, I have had difficulty getting work done at home. As a general principle, I don't have a problem with this, but the practical reality is that I need to be working weekends at present, and that has proven difficult. Despite that, I have been actively depriving myself of some of my preferred leisure activities - shying away from starting certain novels (which isn't to say I haven't been reading them!), a complete abstinence from gaming - although on these fronts too I am not convinced that the deprivation has been in any way profitable, with the time redirected more to stressing about obligations than to meeting them.

There is some hope that over the next fortnight or so, I will be able to extricate myself somewhat and restore some kind of normality to my work-related stress levels. This hope, perhaps better qualified as an imperative, relies on my really pulling my finger out in the short term to meet some fast-approaching deadlines. Hopefully their successful resolution will, if nothing else, allow me to not work at home without the overbearing sense of guilt.

Berlin wrap-up

Having been so energetic about blogging during the first week and half of my trip through Europe, it behooves me to finish off the story a little.

My original purpose for being in Berlin, other than establishing and reaffirming relationships with various other researchers, was to attend the DSAL workshop, where I was coauthor of a paper with some collaborators from Germany and Luxembourg. That was done by Tuesday, so in theory at least, I was a little more at my leisure for the rest of the week. In practice, it changed little; I wasn't presenting the paper anyway, and we in fact spent more of the week working on a paper submitted the following week.

During the DSAL workshop, in one of the duller talks (yes, there are dull talks at academic workshops - a shocking revelation, I know), when I wasn't plotting running tracks, I discovered that there was a concert in town on Wednesday night by the Shai Maestro Trio.

Shai Maestro is a young Israeli pianist who played on a couple of albums by Avishai Cohen, who has in recent years been probably my favourite jazz performer. Maestro's playing had really impressed me, and I have been looking forward to his new album (now released, in fact), so I was pretty excited at the prospect of being able to see him live. The gig was at 10pm in town, necessitating a train a little after 9, and upon inspection, the conference social event, a boat cruise, was scheduled in the programme to finish at 9, right next to the train station, so I figured I was all good.

The boat cruise was pretty good, out on the lake around which I had run earlier in the week. The company was also good - as I had been for much of the week, I surrounded myself with French-speakers - Jacques, Max, Jean-Marc (who came along for the Wednesday and Thursday morning), Phillipe from Nice and Joerg from Montreal. We had some really interesting discussions, about French politics, Swiss ice-skating, and Dan Simmons novels, and the time passed quickly.

By around 8:45pm, though, I was getting antsy - the boat showed no sign of returning to port, and time was marching on. Time continued its march, and by around 9:30pm, still not ashore, I had resigned myself to missing not only the start of the gig, but most of it. We ended up getting back to shore a little after 10pm, and with a 15 minute wait for a train, I decided that the game was lost, and headed dejectedly back to my hotel.

I felt particularly guilty at missing the concert as I had boasted over Skype to Paul, another Avishai devotee and Shai Maestro admirer, about going to the gig, and telling him I had been in Berlin and still missed it was an unappealing prospect.

As much as I had a good time on the boat cruise, I'd still rather have seen the gig.

up the creek

Some people who follow me on twitter and had some inside connections already knew this was happening, but it probably warrants a proper announcement for anyone else who's still subscribed here or elsewhere.

A couple of weeks ago I tendered my official resignation to QUT. In just over a week I will be starting a new position as lecturer in the School of ITEE at the University of Queensland.

futures

Yesterday I went along to a meeting to do with developing a new research program for the next iteration of the construction CRC (to which I'm seconded this year). There was a lot of talk about the network the CRC has developed, the shared but not identical research goals of the faculty and the CRC, and about co-investment to further those goals.

Afterwards, I had a chat with Karen about the subtexts of the meeting. I had felt that I was essentially there as a show of force for my (absent) boss, but Karen made me think about whether that's really the case.

I haven't really thought much about my career path in the last year or so; I've been happy enough to just toil away at whatever I've been working on, without thinking about where it might be leading. Yesterday made me wonder whether the time has come to work out where I want to be heading, and to make some moves towards getting there.

Hi ho, hi ho

It's off to my new job I go.

pot calling the kettle balck

After 3 years of correcting my colleagues' franglais, the shoe passed to the other foot last week, as I pulled my finger out on writing the french summary of my thesis. Franck C, Franck F, Jacques, Sophie and Erwan all helped me with my copious spelling, grammar and style problems.

Coming through my various (and admittedly not particularly deep) studies of English throughout high school, I was usually the kid who had only a few comments on his assignments when they came back. I was kind of a nerd. Shock, horror. It was weird this week to get documents back awash in red, blue and even green ink. It gave me a little insight into some of the students I went to high school with. Its not that I didn't understand the rules of french grammar. Its just that when I read English, errors just seem obvious, whereas in French, I really have to look for them. Anyway, the net result is that I'm pretty crap at French written expression.

I declared the french summary innings closed today, though. I actually played the bureaucracy game last friday, but the doctoral school handed me a Skip-A-Turn card because my boss had signed the wrong page of my thesis. Fortunately, the scolarité (postgraduate studies?) didn't seem to care, and processed the rest of my paperwork with nary a batted eye.

Tomorrow I'll take my thesis back to the doctoral school, and I should be done with it until my examiners come back with corrections.

to london, to london, to milk a fat pig

When I'm done with INRIA soon, I will miss its seemingly eager approach to travel funding. To cash in while I still can, I chooffed off to London last week for the MAST workshop, having initially been invited by Laurie way back just after the Australian cricket team finished belting the English 5-0 in the Ashes (just in case anyone had forgotten).

I flew over from Rennes airport via Paris, bringing to three the number of different modes of transport (with train, ferry) I have now used to get across the Channel. Upon arriving, I headed straight over to Earl's Court and caught up with Afe and Trish for dinner. We had a pretty intense talk about movies, something I've enjoyed doing in the past with them, and something I haven't done often enough in the last few years. They seem to have settled in really well in the last couple of weeks.

The workshop was really good, but I'll leave that to my other blog. After it was done, we adjourned in good research fashion to a nearby bar, and then to a dinner with waiters with an obsession over maintaining our glasses entirely full. After that was done and they booted us out, Laurie and I went for one more in a pub in Holborn.

On Thursday I made the worst of the miserable weather and went for a walk. I walked from my hotel up to the Natural History museum for a look through a couple of exhibits, then from there up past Imperial College to Hyde Park. I walked the length of Hyde Park to the corner tube, and jumped across to Piccadilly. From there I walked over to Leicester Square, where I temporarily surrendered and went into Starbucks to read my book for an hour or so. I met up with Ben for a nice Japanese lunch, and we continued walking, down to Nelson's Column then down Fleet Street to St Paul's. By then it was time for me to fly home.

I think the whole time I took one photo, in a continuing pathetic lack of photographic effort. I'll probably put it up sometime, if it doesn't look too awful.

petit pas

I gave a copy of my thesis to my boss yesterday, complete except for the conclusion. This is a good thing. I'm getting closer.

choose your weapon

My biggest distraction over the last week has been choosing my examiners. Its a weird process, whereby I don't specifically choose my examiners, but am extensively consulted with by my boss in the selection. It comes back to the same thing. Its a weird vibe, kind of like choosing one's own firing squad. If I have top-notch examiners, it looks good on my CV, and makes me feel validated if they approve of what I'm doing, but it does expose me to more risk.

So the score thus far in the process is 2-3, in that 2 of the people I've asked have said yes, and 3 have said no. The no's have been bigger, in that they've come from the side where I know fewer candidates, which has led to a good deal of head-scratching between my boss and I. I only need two examiners, but two of them have to be professors (strictly speaking, have HDRs, but that pretty much means profs or readers), which is not the case for one of the two who has accepted.

If anyone has suggestions, I'm open to them :)

3 years and counting

Someone asked me on Saturday night how long I'd been in France, and I realised it had been 3 years. My first post to this blog was on the 20th of January, the day I arrived in France, and talked about taking myself out of my comfort zone, which I guess happened, albeit that after a period of time I have pretty much adjusted.

So anyway, its a little shocking to me that its been a week since I posted. I've been unsuccessful in having a complete draft (minus french summary) ready, but that's not overly surprising, I guess. Still disappointing, though, because I think I'm still a week away from that point, albeit not because I haven't made progress. I went into the lab yesterday for the arrival of my new office-buddy, and actually made reasonable progress, so went in again today hoping to duplicate it, with only moderate success.

On Saturday I went along to see the Avenir girls rack up another 100-point game and easy win, then followed them over to RPA to watch the Ouistreham game. I probably could have gone on to the creperie with them afterwards, but conscience drove me to bail and go home, not that I was likely to get any work done between 11pm and 1am. Anyway.

sup

I guess, while I'm posting gruesome photos, I might update, since I haven't done so since Christmas.

I had a quiet Christmas, really. I chatted with Chris and Mick in Basel, and my family in Toowoomba, both via webcam, and also with the extended family who were in Mullumbimby by phone. I watched a bunch of films, and had a pretty luxurious dinner with ham and smoked salmon, followed by a roast chicken, and date and walnut pudding for desert. A bottle of Champagne awaited me in the fridge, but my medications forbade it, so it remains in the fridge, perhaps awaiting submission of my thesis. I also managed to find a nurse, who came around in the evening to give me my shot of anticoagulant.

The nurses (3 in all) came every day until last Monday, to give me my heparin shots, change my dressings and take my blood test. On boxing day, I also started physio, which I've been doing 3 times a week since then. I've been impressed with my progress, which has been noticable, and the physios tell me I'm coming along very quickly. The rehab doctor, who I saw last Friday, agreed but encouraged me to take it slowly.

In between physio and being stabbed by nurses, I've been making progress on the thesis. Its been a bit sporadic, though. After Christmas was pretty slow, then I had a good week after New Year's. Mick arrived for a few days on the 5th, which slowed me only a little, since he was happy enough to amuse himself for at least one day catching the train down to Vannes.

I went into work last Tuesday for a meeting with Jean-Marc, and he seems to agree that I'm still on schedule to send it off in early February. I hit a bit of a speed-bump on Thursday, with a design change to Kermeta setting my finish date for Chapter 3 back by a few days. I got back moving yesterday though, and today has also been productive. With a little luck, I will start Chapter 1 tomorrow, and after a week or so on that and Chapter 5, I can give Jean-Marc a fairly complete draft. Mark has been kindly riding me to keep making progress every day, which is good of him.

I guess the other thing I've been doing is watching films in ridiculous quantities. I've seen 42 in just 22 days since getting out of hospital, which is obscene.

Anyway, back to it.

cut up

Monday, after submitting my paper, I checked myself into hospital. I had the afternoon to myself, since my operation wasn't until Tuesday, and amused myself watching the fourth day of the third test (after consideration I will, for Mr Tratt's benefit, write up my thoughts on the ret-urn in another post).

On Tuesday, a nurse came by around 11-ish to shave my knee. After that, I took a betadine scrub shower, and jumped on a trolley to be wheeled downstairs. They punched me full of holes for a little while: for a drip, a hip-catheter (for pain blocking), and one in the back to knock me out from the waist down, in what they called rachianaesthesie (something like, but not the same as, an epidural).

Then, after a small wait, they wheeled me into theatre 13 (unlucky for some) and hooked me up to some machines that went beep. People buzzed around me and occupied themselves with my right leg. It was a very strange experience to see them moving it around in preparation and not feeling anything. Before the surgeon started, they strung up a sheet between me and the battlefield, so during the exciting part I really couldn't see much. To be honest, it was a little lonely there, while everyone else was busy behind the sheet, with only the anaesthetist to keep me company from time to time up in the DMZ. I was very coherent, too, which surprised me. Others had suggested they'd drug me a little to calm me down, but I really felt more tuned than normal rather than less.

Getting back up to my room I was plugged in to 3 tubes: my drip with what I assume was glucose or saline or something, my catheter with marcaine, and another draining blood out of my knee. These were disconnected gradually over the next 48 hours, and by Thursday afternoon I was able to go for little tours up and down the corridors on my crutches and in my Big Lebowski dressing gown.

In between times, I managed to watch a half dozen or so films, read a couple of hundred pages of my book, and make yeoman progress on my thesis, mainly cutting and pasting in the recent paper, and blocking out structure for a couple of sections. On Thursday and Friday I also chatted with the third of my room-mates, a young bloke getting his patellar tendon seen to who had spent the previous summer in Australia, of all places. Also on Friday I had a visit from Liz and Sophie, whose brother had coincidentally had the same operation with the same surgeon a week earlier, and who was in for physio.

On Saturday morning it was all over, and Seb came in to give me a lift back to my apartment, via the pharmacy for my prescriptions.

In all, I was very impressed by the efficiency (from a user perspective) of the whole process. The hospital was clean, staff was helpful and generally communicative and neither before nor after was I burdened by administration at all. Even the food wasn't too disagreeable (although they did struggle with the concepts of cereal and tea for breakfast), which for a hospital is about as much as you can expect.

paper cut

Well, its been a while. Not much has happened. OK, I'm lying. Everything has happened.

First of all, I got a paper written, the first new paper I'd submitted as first author since March last year (although, in reality, the revisions to that one for republication in a journal were significant enough to count). After switching onto it after my MRI back in mid-November and an initial burst of activity, 3 weeks of slow progress had ensued. Then, with a week and a half to go, I perhaps predictably extracted my digit and got it done. In the end, the last 5 days or so were pretty comfortable, and I had the chance to give it a solid proof-read.

Nonetheless, the program committee for the conference has some significant names in it, including some I've cited extensively in the paper, and I probably expect them to reject it. That said, I'm still reasonably proud of it for the moment, and it has made its way into my thesis as a chapter, which is the bigger goal in any case.

If it does get rejected, it may well be the first paper I have rejected as first author (correct my memory in the comments). This is in part because with Pegamento we wrote as a team, and in alphabetical order I was typically one of the last names listed. I don't recall a lot of rejections there, either, though.

My thesis has a number

My thesis has a number, its 3523... doo do doo ...

I had this bright idea about a post sung to the tune of "My baloney has a first name", but the bastards gave me 4 numbers instead of 5!

and then there was one

Congratulations today to Jacques, who successfully defended his thesis today, and is now, I guess, Dr Jacques. He was either unlucky or lucky that his most critical (perhaps in both senses of the word) examiner was not able to attend due to an unlikely confluence of personal commitments. That said, he gave a good presentation, which elicited interesting questions from each member of the jury. To be honest, I didn't think he was at his best in answering him, but that takes nothing away from the mention très honorable awarded him.

With Franck having gone through a couple of months ago now, that leaves me. At least 3 people have approached me today to say "well, you're next". And they're right. Who knows? Perhaps that fact will help me to pull my finger out and make more progress this week than I did last. Shouldn't be hard.

the bright glare of progress and my dark gnarled hand

hand
Originally uploaded by jsteel.

My rapid progress has slowed a little with the transition from programming to writing. I started well on Wednesday getting the structure and some existing pieces of the paper in place and gaining about 6 pages. Between Thursday and Friday I didn't get very far, although on Friday Jean-Marc came back to me with a piece he had written, so I crept up to 7 pages.

Saturday was a tough call for work, as it turned it out. Mum and Dad called about 90 seconds after my alarm went off, so I was able to give their new webcam an inconspicuous beginning, with bleary eyes and a strong desire for coffee and a shower. From there I just never quite hit the work vibe, hovering between a new cricket game and the strong gravity of the intertron.

This photo has nothing to do with anything I've written, beyond a vague, perhaps plausible but ultimately apocryphal reference to being woken up and blinded by bright lights. I took it on the weekend though, so its not entirely non-sequitur.

on a tear

I had been coding like a tiger for a few weeks, chasing a deadline arbitrarily set at Tuesday, and in the end pretty much got there. I lost some impetus on the weekend when I realized that I'd gotten the implementation pretty much to where I wanted it. What remained was building a convincing example, which was less than inspiring as a task, and thus I didn't pound out the LOC like I had beforehand. Anyhow, its in a state where I can write some examples for my thesis and justifiably claim that it typechecks and works.

To be fair, Tuesday wasn't entirely arbitrary as a deadline. I had a meeting with Jean-Marc scheduled for the afternoon and an MRI scheduled for midday, meaning that I was going to lose half a day anyway, making it a good candidate for thinking about direction rather than trying to write or code.

The MRI went pretty well. I was called only 20 minutes or so later than the appointed time, and from there was treated to an amusing parody of an old Seinfeld sketch I remember about doctors and hospitals. I was called and taken by someone into a small room, where I was told to remove my pants and wait. After 5-10 minutes someone else came and got me and escorted me to another small room for another 15-20 minutes of doing nothing. OK, to be fair, this second small room had a million-dollar MRI machine in it, and although I was doing nothing, I was inside a tunnel and the machine was going clunk-clunk-whirrr, so I guess it wasn't entirely time wasted. From there it was back to the original small room, pants back on, and another little wait. I then met the esteemed photographer in a third small room where he showed me pictorally how my ACL is, as suspected, not what it once was. Too subtle? It's torn, and my surgery will go ahead as the specialist had predicted. Anyhow, in all, I was back at work by 2:30pm, which was reasonable.

My meeting with Jean-Marc went pretty well, too. He had been watching the CVS stats, so it was no secret I'd been churning code pretty hard, and we had a good chat about the paper we have planned for the ECOOP deadline in a month's time, which will hopefully also cut-and-paste itself in as a chapter of my thesis.

workened

My ambitious tradition, begun last week, of trying to work on the weekends, continues. I put in about 5 hours each on Saturday and Sunday on my development tasks, and made a whole lot of progress until running into a fairly troubling bug in Kermeta on Sunday evening, fortuitously at about the time when I needed to be preparing a chicken and zucchini quiche in any case.

In between times I managed to negotiate the changing time zones in both Europe and Australia and talk to both of my sisters: Lee on Saturday and Em on Sunday, bringing me into a comparatively rare state of up-to-date-ness with all of my immediate family.

In hindsight, what I didn't manage to get done on the weekend was leaving my apartment for any length of time. I'm not too worried, though, since I got a little social contact Friday night with a trip with Liz over to Manu & Erwan's for dinner. Liz drove in her new car, and we engaged in a bit of Tiger Woods 2006, as well as a nice pot-au-feu courtesy of Manu.

time on the wing

Its hard, and not a little alarming, to believe that almost a week has gone by since my hope-filled account of mounting progress last Thursday. Since then I've sat down to implement my plans, with mixed success. The original plan was to finish off the little task last week, but it ended up dragging out until yesterday, a regrettable but not shocking slippage in the context of software development tasks.

In the interim, and on the advice of Mark, I sat down on Saturday morning and put in a determined 2-3 hours on my thesis document. I had previously downloaded and fiddled a little with the provided template, to the tune of 26 largely empty pages, but this marked, in my mind at least, the first time spent on the thesis. Significant things happened. I checked it into CVS, ensured that I have working writing/editing environments both at home and at work, and cut-and-pasted my SoSyM paper in as a chapter. That this ramped me up to 42 pages is nice, but what's nicer is the feeling of having dipped my toes into the stream and, for now at least, not found the current to be insurmountable. In addition, having it at hand and in some psychological sense begun, I can now record those high-level decisions I make in my implementation endeavours as jottings in the relevant chapter in my thesis, rather than on some random scrap paper floating on my desk.

so much time, so much to do

I had a meeting with my supervisor the other day, trying to work out a few things, like how I'm possibly going to finish my thesis even with a 3-month contract extension into next year. Its all a little daunting, this business of making plans for more than 5 months away, particularly when it pretty much depends on my working like a crazy man starting now and running right through.

In any case, its been a good week to date. I talked code with the engineers, and although they were unable to offer me the resources I was after, at least it helped me to clarify in my own mind what needed doing. Tuesday I met with Jean-Marc and afterwards button-holed Mark to talk about an algorithm problem I was having. I needed him as much as a sounding board and sanity check on my ideas as much as anything, but in any case it was very productive. Yesterday I was planning on going for a drink with Liz, so worked pretty hard through the day to salve my conscience in the event of leaving in decent time, but she pulled out, leaving me working through til 7 or so. At that point, I proposed beer, and Mark, just out of a teleconference, proposed pizza, so we went and had pizza and beer.