Dec 29,2003

Dec 29,2003 Dec 28,2003 Dec 21,2003 Dec 20,2003 Dec 18,2003 Dec 17,2003 Dec 16,2003 Dec 15,2003 Dec 13,2003 Dec12,2003 Dec 11,2003 Dec 10,2003 Dec 9,2003 Dec 08,2003 Dec 07,2003 Dec 06,2003 Dec 5,2004 Dec 4,2004 Dec 3,2003 Dec 2,2003 Dec 1, 2003

End of year. What will 2004 bring?

For me, I have three new jobs which aren't really new. More old wine poured into new bottles at new locations.

The IV&V Research Rover: 25% of my time will be doing research chair stuff, but via the phone. How's this for a telecommute: Washington state to West Virginia? Oh, and for a month prior to SAS'04 I'll be back at WV.

Research Prof at PSU: In order to find grad students (the fuel for research projects), I'm teaching data mining (or something else) at PSU Com.Sci.

Will think for food: Got three research contracts with NASA for doing model-based software engineering stuff.

These mean that I have a day per week at PSU and the rest of the week sitting at home. I told Helen that I'll spend the time playing with cat. She snorted. "More likely you'll be on the phone all the time", she said.

Dec 28,2003

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Back from roadtrip. It was great! Death Valley. Biltmore Estate. Nearly killed by our fear of snow chains. Snow blindness at the Grand Canyon. The flat flat lands of Texas. Vampire Trucks. The lights of Las Vegas. And we don't talk about Albuquerque.

Had a little late XMAS.

Dec 21,2003

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Ying Hu, super grad student and the programmer that made all the treatment learning ideas a reality, has graduated.

(Actually, she graduated a month ago and I've only now got around to getting her graduation photo up on the blog. Bad supervisor. Bad. Bad.)

Its a darn shame, but she can't get a permanent job in Canada. The Canadian I.T. industry is just in a baaadddd way.

She writes that she has returned to China, doing some programming and some data mining back there. Their gain. Our loss.

Here is the learned Ms Hu, in some uncharacteristic Vancouver sunshine (in November, if you can believe that).

Dec 20,2003

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No more blog updates for a while folks.

Today I snatch Helen from Pittsburgh airport and we drive out west. Roadtrip!

The plan is to check out the Biltmore Estate, Nashville, the Grand Canyon, and Las Vegas.

Oh, and to blink twice and magically skip over the flat stuff in the middle.

Deer strikes and black ice will not be permitted.

C U n 04!

Dec 18,2003

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Waiting for the winter holidays to begin

Packing up.

Many trips to garbage bin carrying an infinite number of black plastic bags.

These black plastic bags are amazing. Whenever I turn around there are more of them! I think they are alive and reproducing.

My flat is now at maximum enthalphy and minimum entrophy; i.e. things spread all around and all over the floor.

How ever did I ever collect all this crap?

Dec 17,2003

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Toasted and roasted: I have to say, IV&V is the best place to leave I have ever been.

On this subject, I speak with some authority. since I've had four farewells from this place: (1)In 2000, I climbed the hill behind the facility and toasted the building with champagne; (2)at SAS'03, Wes gave me a farewell fob watch at the dinner; (3)a month ago, the research gang took me to the pub; (4)and today...

My coat went mysteriously missing at midday. As did my visitor. After much futile searching around the facility, I theorized that they had both fallen into a black hole.

Then Wes came and lead me to a large dark room full of IV&V-ers.

Hey, whattya know, it's my (latest) farewell party.

10) You can point with pride to fellow Aussie, Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter (as long as you don't want shorts).

9) You can use the phrases like "G'day mate" with authority.

8) No one really expects a small Australian (my favorite- a reference to my extensive girth)

7) You can never have too many grad students.

6) It's been a short walk to the rest room (my office was the closest to the bathroom).

5) There's always someone else to real with those pesky details (Lisa!)

4) You can XXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX out of the XXXXXXXX simply by losing their paperwork (this one I can't repeat in public).

3) Coming from a country funded by criminals and filled with dangerous and poisonous critters, the IV&V facility seems like home.

2) You can say any bloody thing you like in meetings and nobody bats an eye.

And the number one reason that it is good to be Tim is (drum roll)...

1) It doesn't matter if you're right or if you're wrong; if you say it with enough enthusiasm the government will fund it!

Aw shucks, you guys are so sweet! Sarcastic, but sweet!

(In mid-party, I took Lisa aside and debated telling the assembled gang that technically, I'm not actually leaving. See, I still have a 25% job next year with Ken doing what I am doing now. She gazed around the room at at the noise makers, the Incredible Hulk pinata, the cake, the gifts and advised "Well, maybe not just now...".)

Winter's Silver Lining: Ok, ok, sometimes winter can look pretty cool.

Highs and Lows: Wanna be machocist? Be an academic! HASE accepted the blind-spot paper (ranked in the top 5 of 70). Hooray! But, in this week...

• ICSE'04 dumped my two submissions (13% acceptance rate, can't really justify too many tears).
• TSE rejected the paper I wrote with Houle and Powell about 100 years ago (this act might be the last act in the long long saga of that paper).
• The west coast called. The NSF turned down the PSU "Science of Learning Center" thing.
• And NASA turned down the ECS applications I put in with John Powell and ALSO the one I put in with Jim Kiper.

I guess sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and sometimes you lose and sometimes you lose and sometimes you lose and sometimes you lose and sometimes you lose.

But whatdahell. I'm still sunburnt and have sand in my wallet from an Aussie beach.

Dec 16,2003

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Tis the season to be jolly.

And to be extremely jet-lagged.

And to stare at an impossibly long "to do" list and the disaster zone that is my flat.

Sometime between now and Saturday I have to convert my life into a bunch of boxes, make about a hundred phone calls, sort out this, chuck that. Then grab Helen from the airport late Saturday night so we can drive off together into the West.

Tis also the season to make the rounds of folks and say bye-bye.

Here Bojan and Vijay.

Dec 15,2003

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The trip back from Australia was uneventful.

Some emotional scenes at airport when fickle users dumped faithful luggage carts at the gate. "Come back," they cried pathetically, "what we had together was wheely good!".

(I tell you, outside of a plane, 2Fast2Furious is a piece of derivative crap. Inside a plane, in the middle of a long Pacific flight, I want it to last forever. See, if ever it ended that would leave me alone in the dark with hundreds of total strangers, all of us inches away from explosive decompression and an icy fall to our screaming deaths. Not that I obsess on these things.)

14 hours of that flight, followed by 6 hours in a terminal at SanFran, then 4 hours in a plane to Pittsburgh, then a missed bus to Morgantown, and a (very) expensive cab ride home. Driving through the night through a bizarre empty alien silent snowy wilderness. .

Toto, I don't think we're in Kakadu anymore.

Dec 13,2003

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Bye Oz! Its been great! I'll be back soon.

Say, why don't you come over and visit some time?

Recipe for last day in Australia:

Have breakfast at fabulous cafe overlooking a stunning suburban beach. (Bit of aw rite, heh?)

(Ah mate, see that waterfall there? I was in like Flynn. )

And nearly as much fun as throwing that tour guide bloke over the cliff. Mate, I swear, all the way down he was crapping on about the majesty of the view and our friend the bloody dolphin.)

Dec12,2003

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So I fly home in 2 days.

:-(

So, soon, I get to see Helen again.

:-)

Which means I get to be scratched by Lucie.

:-(

Oh, there's a pirate chasing me

.-)

followed by a woman unhappy with her breast enlargements

:-(8

and someone mad at giving birth to a squirrel.

>:-(-(9

There's a duck,

(:<>

and a beaver,

(:=

And over there is a cyclist

%

riding beneath an unhappy Cheshire Cat,

(

owned by Helen Keller.

-

Today I gave a talk to Aditya's supply chain workshop. Tried to pull together all the threads of the stuff we have been working on. And there are several interesting threads. Duc seems to have an idea how to automatically translate AgentSpeak to LURCH. Chee Fon has ideas on mapping argumentation strategies to HT4, then HT0, and then LURCH (which would give Bob Brown an executable to ponder over).

Overall, Aditya seems happy with how this all went. And if money talks and bullshit walks, he is talking. Seems there is some line item somewhere with "Tim Menzies visit" being written into next year's budgets (still pending, yadda yadda yadda).

Much of the debate for the evening was about "Bruce or Belinda" at the next table. My money was on "Bruce" but Aditya was learning towards "Belinda".

Dec 11,2003

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Spent today at Brisbane- Peter Lindsay at UQ Com.Sci. was kind enough to invite me up.

I gave a talk on LURCH to a bunch of scary formal methods people. They seemed to smile benignly, and with even a little interest, on the technology.

Peter is the former captain of the wrecked ship SS SVRC (don't ask- long story). Nowadays he's a "systems engineer" which means he is methodologically obliged to not talk solutions till he has saturated himself in the problem space. We were talking and I was doing my SE-chair thing of drilling down to their capabilities, finding out their runs on the board, current directions and toolsets, etc. He squirmed in his chair and said I was weirding him out, staring at him like I was.

Then it hit me: I'm an ideas predator, not an ideas dancer! And this is an American thing I've picked up. The Aussie/UK tradition is very much dreaming spires and gazing into the blurred distance. But to the Americans, research dialogues are fuel for the next funding submission: "hello, how are you, and lets write a grant on that".

Peter holds the Boeing Chair of Systems Engineering.

The Com.Sci. lake was cause for much reflection on my part. Now that the Dot Coms are Dot Gone, we nurds are no longer the next big thing. Its time for some humility; time to take a shower; time to acknowledge that our fashion sense is not endearing but appalling; and time to practice politeness and good grace to whatever next big thing follows us (Biotech, Nanotech, Bioinformatics, whatever...).

But we should tell the next big thing that while the hype is on, try and build an infrastructure that means 30% of your people are still alive after the gold mine collapses. For example, one might confuse essentially simple processes by creating a dominate vendor who wastes their time (and ours) patching their hacked and buggy implementations while locked into a pointless and public pissing war with a single lesser vendor that distracts users from realizing that most of our technological disputes are actually orthogonal to issues of quality, reliability, usability, etc etc.

Yup, thats what we should have done. But us nurds could never have been so organized.

All in all, UQ is a pretty flash campus staffed by daggy Australians. At 10:30, all the dags go to morning tea. Note the "Swiss Rolls" on the table. Swiss rolls are like Hamburgers and Pizza- no one from Switzerland would ever acknowledge this sickly sweet creation as a fellow countryman.

Bob had this huge impact on my career. When I was a scum masters student, Bob was doing his Ph.D. No one else ever seemed to do anything at UNSW Com.Sci. except for Bob who seemed to do it all tirelessly and effortlessly. I can still remember him wondering up to white boards and start drawing up the data structures for his multiple-worlds Prolog engine ("and this is a 14bit unsigned int and...").

Later on, when he was an I.T. manager at CSIRO, he teamed me up with some researchers who wanted a Pig expert system. That lead to Australia's first exported expert system: written (version 1.0) by me! So I owe him my career in (a)commercial expert systems which lead to (b)my career in OO. FYI: I thank him for (a) and blame myself for (b).

Bob took me to my favorite coffee shop in the whole world. Wordsmith's is built into the trees.

I was a very dogmatic I'm afraid. Berated him for not applying his own precision and rigor that I had found so impressive in my early career.

Bob! Please forgive me! The Banff KA days have left me pathologically adverse to the "O"-word!

When I left UQ, it was a beautiful day. I drove out to the airport via my Granny's old place: Rocklands at Toowong. Didn't know what to expect: crumbling ruin? Demolished for some horrid 90s flat?

No! It looks great! Well kept house and gardens. The classical Queenslander.

Sadly, I don't remember much else about a woman who who kindly threw open her doors and let four Menzies kids and her daughter and her strange son-in-law live with her for months and months.

It's a little hard to explain what happened next. At this moment, I was pretty exhausted- very wired and weary. "Home to bed! Fast!" was all I could think of. Yet as I stared at this orgy of concrete, waiting for the parking lot bus, something BIG broke free inside of me.

I realized that I've been somewhere and I'm going somewhere. Rocklands proved it- the past can continue on and be proud. This airplane terminal proved it- planes, steam and speed! Places to go! Things to see! At that second, I stopped trying to go back to some past Australia and just accepted the presence and present of this trip, of this country, and of me. The weariness lifted, and I started grinning like a fool.

It was like I could let the past wash over me and it would be fun. To prove it, on the drive back to Wollongong, I treated myself to a quiet walk late on a warm and dark summers night around Liverpool hospital. I spent four years of my life in a half-mile radius of that place. Ron Dunbier house. Forbes, Goulburn, Bigge Streets... The large playing field back of the high school I used to cross at dawn on the way to work. Hart Street where I lived with Dave (memo to Dave: "Dsylexia Lures K.O." is gone).

Dec 10,2003

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Today was spent on route to Brisbane.

Stanwell Tops looking south to a distant Wollongong

How? What is his secret? Can't be a stress-less life. He rode shotgun on the school exploding in size during the Dot Com boom (now its over 10% of all students at the university). And the Dot Coms are Dot Gone so the school is set of for hard times (read, less money, jobs, etc) as it slams down the other side of the boom. (Prediction: two years of lean times, fewer students and money. Followed by two busy years of more students but no money for more staff. Then some saner level of activity from 2008).

Apart from his agelessness, other things are still the same. Our discussion in 2003 could have come from anytime in the period 1991 to 1998. I launched into some complicated description of my latest and greatest technical idea. Paul wouldn't accept any of it. And why should he? Of anyone in the whole world, Paul has had too much experience with my latests and greatests ideas.

He tried to say why he didn't buy my new idea #1345 and I didn't understand his remarks. Which was how we operated: we rarely seemed to meet on technical matters. Suppose thats why we stopped publishing together after my Ph.D.

Meet one of Paul's current Ph.D. students who said he is basing his literature review on stuff I wrote way back last century (the KL-A, KL-B thing). The student knew of me and had an exaggerated count of my number of publications (200!). So I seem to have a little legacy at the school- some spooky specter telling grad students to publish more.

Paul and me strolled across the campus to some XMAS party, talking in the sunshine.

The party was at the Squarehouse. The Squarehouse! The halls of (non-)power for the Students Union. The old 1985 Tharunka (student newspaper) cooridoors! How many sleepless nights; pointless debates? petty intrigue? petty theft? petty sex? and alcohol/dope/speed was had in those hallways? FYI: My personnel answers are: many, lots, lots, none, none, lots/a little/none

Raced to get to the plane and was too rushed and disorganized to take the camera to my seat. Then I was treated to the most fantastic view of Sydney beach suburbs at dusk. Would have been a great set of snaps. Frustrating, yes, but encouraging in a way. The world's a big and beautiful place (well, Australia is anyway) and there's always be something else I can try to chase for a photo.

Got to Brisbane, tired++. Peter Lindsay and his wife Jan took me to dinner the night a wonderful cafe in Toowong. Sensational food. Now there's a good Ozzie name for you: "Toowong". Picture a sharp sudden bird call across a grove of gums around a little creek in the middle of low red hills and the thermometer exploding out of its column.

Peter's got a chair at UQ Com.Sci. and Jan does contracts at UQ. Her and Peter zip around Australia. I can't keep up with their travels. This was Wednesday evening and, as near as I can tell, they'd spent that week in Canberra, Melbourne and, oh yes, Brisbane.

Dec 9,2003

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Paused today for a beer at the pub. Had a schooner of Old, and watched gum trees blowing the other side of the big glass skylights.

Moved++ by the music videos there. The Whitlams did Buy Now and Pay Later with the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Most excellent.

This was followed by Don Henley doing Boys of Summer. I can still remember watching that film clip in (??)1982 at the UNSW Roundhouse (at the time, I was eating a sausage with chips and gravy). Years later, I still find the song riveting:

Empty lake, empty streets\ The sun goes down alone\ I'm drivin' by your house\ Though I know you're not at home

It nearly all made sense. Those days are over. Mourn them, review the past just once, then hit the accelerator and leave! All well and good. Move on.

Out on the road today, I saw a deadhead sticker on a Cadillac\ A little voice inside my head said, "Don't look back. You can never look back."\ I thought I knew what love was - what did I know?

I agree. Confused by love? Join the club- the very large club. Get over it. What's past is past. But Henley won't let me get out it so easily:

Those days are gone forever\ I should just let them go but-

"But"? Why "But"? No ifs or "Buts". "Bye-bye" maybe, but surely not "But". Ignore the chorous that follows. Its just all wrong, a waste of time, of life, of CPU:

I can see you\ Your brown skin shinin' in the sun\ You got that top pulled down and that radio on, baby\ And I can tell you my love for you will still be strong\ After the boys of summer have gone

Dec 08,2003

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Ozzie trip is drawing to a close. In 6 days, I trade this land of much sand and much mock and much to see for the land of teams with much to do and no time to see anything (if there was anything to see...)

I have to come back here more often- none of this once-every-five-years silliness. I have a new ethic: American is best for my mind but Australia is better for my soul.

So much happening: my new motto seems to be "will hack Powerpoint for food". Trying to get some stuff to the point where I can leave and it all keeps going without me. Working with Tim and Dave on data mining for e-business and geology; Duc and Chee Fon on the negotiation stuff; Aditya on the bigger picture (always); James Gibson on the structure of an ideal SE course; and various other researchers who want to bounce some ideas (today's list was GPs for DM and LURCH for checking security violations).

This is a vacation? If I am this much work-a-holic-ing I'd rather be back living with Helen. At least then we can not say things to each other in person, hacking at opposite ends of the same couch (with breaks for coffee and cuddles and meandering strolls down the street and getting scratched by the cat).

As it is, I kind of avoid my little flat. The bloke who lives there never puts anything to eat in the kitchen. And there's no where comfortable for a big bloke like me to sit. So I spend my time at my office hacking in comfort. Nothing bad in that- Bob leant me some speakers and I play my MP3s loudly into the evening. But like I say above, its just grows stale without strolls with Helen and scratches with cat.

Meanwhile, I'm no longer breathlessly inspired by every glimpse of a ghost gum tree with blue sky behind.

We drove up Mt. Kiera at sunset yesterday (me, Aditya, Hui-Ling, and Aranya). No blistering heat to burn away the haze.

I'm much more on my own now. All the staff here have gone off to decompress after the exam rush. So there's fewer brash Australians to mock and be mocked by.

Exception: James Gibson seems good for a self-mocking. Here he's protesting the path of modern software engineering education.

Dec 07,2003

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Severe mind explosion today. Nothing less than my life's work.

All those books and tools on SE? Its got to be easier than that. It has to be, otherwise dumb apes like me just wouldn't be able to get anything done.

The texts all talk about X,Y,Z. What about A,B,C? Writing requirements that make sense? That include goal statements and examples and test cases? And a test engine that can extract and run the examples as tests?

So here's today's mind bender: the basic unit of software is the fable. Fables are short, fun, and have a moral. A lesson to tell us.

Here's a test: is your software a good fable? Does it have a point, a conclusion it can offer you? If yes, then you can write down a test suite to automatically test your system (exception: HCI stuff). If no, then the functionality of your program is a myth, not a fable.

Knuth nearly got literate programming right- but the audience is not a compiler and an algorithms expert, its the users and the test suite.

Take the simplest mark-up language and add annotations for examples and test cases. 20 lines of AWK should do it.

Assume that users have goals and goals have requirements and requirements use data. Assemble the system after selecting the goals and rejecting the dull stuff. Another 20 lines of AWK.

Keep going. Reproduce the canon of SE. All the way from requirements engineering to model checking over finite statement machines (another 40 lines of AWK) to machine learning (Bayesian treatment learning, of course) to the knowledge level (abduction, informed by Bayesian treatment learning- 60 lines). Software as stories that execute and explore themselves.

A hundred AWK scripts. Don't say I'm using AWK- rather a cut-down simple interpreted C language called C-minus-minus, or CMM for short. Yes, I know that name is already being used but calling it CMM is good a giggle to give up.

Now all I need is a year to write the book. Yeah, that'll happen in the near future...

Dec 06,2003

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Today I solved one of the fundamental problems in artificial intelligence: how do kids learn? Based on a sample of, er, a few folks, I conclude that they don't. Rather, they suck the pre-learnt brain cells from their parents.

Don't believe me? Check out the dinner conversation of your sparkling urbane friends before and after having kids.

Before having kids: "To really understand the open source movement we need look no further than the pre-historical tradition that appears in all cultures, that of the gift economy."

After having kids: "Ray! You take that diaper off your head, you but it back onto your sister!"

Something has clearly happened to their brains cells. But what? Where have they gone?

The clues have been around us all the time. Ever notice that, usually, kids have the same prejudices as their parents and that even though they may fight it, kids tend to fall into the same patterns of behavior as their parents? This is not nature vs nurture. This is suction. They act the same cause they are the same. Or at least, little bits of their kids's brains are the same cause they are cells sucked from the parents.

How does this suction effect work? Breast feeding! Our mistake is to assume that kids take only milk. We'll, they do but they that constant suction causes nerve fibers to be drawn into the nipple where they can be sampled by the kids.

Yes, yes, I know that this means that, by definition, bottle-fed kids are dumber and that men are inherently smarter (no brain drain from their tits). But this forgets two things. Firstly, men are pretty dumb to begin with. For example, I'm male and this diatribe is pretty stupid. And secondly, I was bottle fed and which just goes to prove, er, that is, what was my point again?

Which is a long-winded way of saying that today I traveled across Sydney to meet with yet more of my friends that have hit the GO button on the genetic photocopier.

My travels took me across the Sydney sprawl.

What I want to know is this: on that day, where were the Bondi boys?

Sherman and me have been having the same argument since 1987: me devising rational schemes for controlling something as out-of-control as the worlds and him denying the premises of my models (even the premises of my premises). After years of training and scholarship, our dialogue now is more erudite and our examples are sharper. But its like we choose our training to reinforce our biases. The song remains the same even if the reference list is longer.

Helen advises that our debate goes back centuries, at least to Kant: models have assumptions and you can't model without challenging the assumptions. Which is an infinite regress since that means challenging the assumptions of the challenge to the assumptions. Etc etc. I guess me and Sherman will be arguing for a while yet.

Actually, Sherman and his whole family makes me feel like such a slacker. His Mum rents out space to Australians on China's rockets. Sherman's just finishing a Ph.D. while raising two kids and totally redesigning the curriculum of his department. Oh, and buying a new house. And nearly getting to senior lecturer in the process (that happens ??next year).

When this land becomes the United States of Sherman, I tell people loudly at parties that I used to know him. And they'll laugh, "sure you did Tim, whatever".

After Coogee, I went to searching for my old Ph.D. mate Ric (that's "Enrico" to you). This guy had a huge impact on my life- when he started his Ph.D. his example showed me that Ph.D.s weren't necessarily things that other people did.

I found him reclining in the gardens of his manor. Not too foul.

This army shops at a little boutique called the Sydney Botanical Garden. Die back in the Aussie bush? Its just a plague of gay gardeners taking clippings for Ric's garden.

How to describe Ric? In a word- smug. Even before he had this house; his chair at Uni; his two doctoral degrees; his huge grants from the OZ government; his army of medical informatic minions; his international best seller textbook (now in its second edition); his place on committees setting the national IT policy on medical informatics; his (oh why go on? Time to start a new paragraph...).

Even before he had (very good) reasons to be (very) smug, Ric had this "cat that ate the canary" attitude. But I could never hate him and lord knows, I've tried. We did Ph.D.s at nearly the same time and just being near him fired all my competition neurons. But whatever he's accomplished, he's earned from hard++ yakka. He retrained himself from medicine into AI, then deported himself for years to England to learn the international software scene (and I know how hard that can be).

And he's just too sweet to hate. And funny! I remember us buying the last mattress in the world one XMAS eve. This was a life and death matter. At stake was nothing less that Ric's sex life. See, I was letting Ric use my place as a love nest over XMAS. Sadly, I had to take my mattress with me for my holiday house. Which left a bare hard surface for Ric to play on (not good for trampolining).

After a panic-stricken evening when every place we went was closed for the holidays, we found our Holy Grail. We fell about in the middle of a huge crowded department store, laughing till we cried, at the enthusiasm of our quest and the crappiness of our goal (a cheap foam mattress from Clark Rubber, Chatswood). Hooray! Ric could get his end in over XMAS! And the people rejoiced.

But before I tell anything more about Ric's love life, there's something in-coming on the smug-a-phone. What new event could possibly make Ric smile broader and the sun shine any brighter from his fundamental orifice?

Here's Ric with Lucca (the son) and Blair. Blair gets most of the credit for the Lucca generation. Ric's role was more... supervisory.

Blair's job is to tell other people what to think. She was the voice of the Green Olympics back in 2000. Talked the government into all manner of innovations for the construction work (solar heating, ultra-low greenhouse gas emission, etc, etc). Tells the story that the Athens Olympics will be very different ("they don't even have a public transport net worked out- ForgetAboutIt!").

Blair is American ("that's one fucked up country", she says) and we spoke some about US/OZ. Starting a country with a revolution is a statement of "no limits! can do!". Starting a country with convicts is a statement of "you shouldn't have done that". So one land strives for everything while the other strives for nothing.

Ric and me also spoke a lot about Australia. We love our sunburnt country but its being burnt to the shithouse right now. OZ has taken a great leap into the 1950s. Now it's a racist backwards country run by an elite that restricts access to power and education.

We spoke a little about another land called OZ-in-the-80s where the race issue was more about tolerance, respect, and acceptance; where education was about broadening the skill and power base on the country; and folks didn't feel they had to run away from the country to be part of something that was growing. Sigh. That land is currently missing-in-action and not expected back for a while.

We also talked much about America and 9/11 and the Iraq invasion. If someone crashed into my garage and burnt alive my family, I'd go after them with guns blazing (that is, if I knew I had the right target...). But then I don't have the maturity of being a world leader; or the economic authority to sanction the shit out of another land; or the ability to turn the United Nations into an international guard dog with teeth; or the recent experience of a decade of ineffectual combat in Vietnam.

On the other hand, said Ric, I don't want all that lovely oil. And I don't have a dad who lead an insanely popular but ludicrously short surgical strike on the same weak desert country just over a decade ago.

But seeing as we are Australian and have to choose between an ally on other side of the Pacific with a reputation for massive over-reaction to events; or a more predictable and closer ally (like China), recent events would certainly give us pause for thought.

Dec 5,2004

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Today's events were a talk on A Theory of IV&V and visiting some old nursing friends. And I do mean old. We've known each other for 26 years (which seems like an impossibly large number). We've seen too much and can't forget.

Sadly, there are photos. Rose and Dave won't tell me how much it would take for them to destroy this picture of me at age 19. To think, this was the face of the nurse who might have to save your life. Now that would have inspired confidence (not).

Actually, Dave gave me my taste in music. B.D. (before Dave) I grooved around to Boston and Foreigner and I'm embarrassed to say what else. One night, I stumbled across one of the many compilation tapes he used to make. Interesting stuff. One track really caught my attention (The Doors singing The Wasp). I liked the poetry of the lyrics (I tell you this, no eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn). So the next time I saw him, I told him I really liked the tape and did he have any more?

That remark marked the start of our friendship. He introduced me to so much MUSIC Over the years, we went to about a thousand gigs (with the cool froods above). We also shared several flats and I got to sample his record collection. When I went to university, we kind of drifted into different orbits but its always a blast to see him and Rose.

Rose is impossibly nice. I'm sure once a year she tears heads off chickens on stage while singing obscenities in a nihilist punk rock band. But for the rest of the year she's just lovely. Here's Rose with me and Dave and some of his art work: just a little Jackson Pollock he threw together one day.

Fortunately, he is telling these tales to two members of the "whatevverrrr" generation. They squeal politely then review his work. "That was real lame Dad, you did much better last night".

Dec 4,2004

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This trip is flying by. Soon I'm going to BLINK and I'll be back in almost heaven.

Today I gave (yet another) talk on LURCH. And this evening Aditya and Hui-Ling were kind enough to invite me to dinner.

Insanely good food. Aditya was up to 3am the night before marinating this and spicing that. Much appreciated!

Dec 3,2003

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Today was spent in a Vulcan mind meld with Aditya's students.

Here's Chee Fon and the great paper on argumentation that is the spring board for all our thinking.

Dec 2,2003

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Another good data mining day. Spend some time with Tim Coltman today mining his survey on success factors in e-business.

Seems data mining needs a few screens, heh?

Dec 1, 2003

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I'm just back from bumping into Dave Stirling, an old data mining mate from the 1980s.

At 9am it was "Heh! you work here? Wow!".

At 9:30 it was "so what are you working on?".

By 10:15 we were running treatment learning on geological data predicting landslides in seaside towns.

By 10:20 we had a result that was as good and vastly shorter than anything ever seen before.

By 10:35 we were planning our journal article.

I love my life!