Jan 24,2004

Jan 24,2004 Jan 18,2004 Jan 11,2004

Busy little remote research chair this week. Teleconferences on research infusion practices, metrics collection, etc etc. Some screw ups on the time so I missed two meetings. AND I woke up at 6am for a tele-conference that didn't start till AN HOUR later. Must work harder on this timing thing.

Got suddenly all MOTIVATED to write cool web site on gawk scripts for data mining (as one does). Too exciting. Bad sleep Tuesday night- about 2 hours sleep. And the next day I taught till 9:30pm. Badness.

Sun came out, which is nice. All the locals are widely rejoicing, which is suspicious (guess its still not time to pack away the raincoats). Anyway, the sun made lots of things look pretty++. Here's Helen's campus with a view of Helen's mountain behind (the locals and call that mountain Mt. St. Helens in her honor).

A quiet rave with Dustin Thursday has given birth to BILL- bayesian iterative lift learning. He doesn't know anything about it yet. But he will!

This week, Helen had three lots of chiropratic treatments on her neck. Euphimismistically, these care called "adjustments". A more realistic name might be "total body assault followed by insertion into rack, where in the victim is shaken and stirred and stretched". Current verdict: doesn't seem to have made much difference but she's going back for more. Maybe its like cough medicine- anything that bad must be good for you.

On the weekend, we went for a walk in the hills behind the city.

Lots of stuff this week that I must only mention briefly- like Helen being a REAL faculty member and serving on certain time consuming committees. Like WVU having bother with the NASA grant and many more people looking into the quirks of that grant.

Much to Helen's horror, I now run a CABLE across the floor. My wireless card keeps dropping out all the time- but only at home. My card must be pouched.

But otherwise, she's a happy camper. She's sans laptop since October and today, taa daa, it came back from the shop. So now we sit on the living room couches, taping away, emailing each other (cause we look too busy to disturb). Memo: I am married to the right woman.

Jan 18,2004

Jan 24,2004 Jan 18,2004 Jan 11,2004

Another week in sunny (rarely) Vancouver not BC, Washington not DC.

Mr. Bush wrote to us this week. Helen got her work certification and my application for an employment card came through. Which means we can all work for Uncle Sam. Yoo hoo.

Spent two days sorting out paperwork and teaching at PSU. Tramping around rainy download Portland from office to office to get little stamps or little stickers or little photos or the form you need before someone else will give you little stamps or little stickers or little photos. Still don't have keys to my office but I can print and the wireless connection works. Rome. Build one day. Not.

After our big freeze, the sun peeks out occasionally.

Life has changed. For the first time in our lives, Me and Helen now are living and working together. Her classes started this week and I taught Wednesday night to a room full of keen students of data mining. My kinda of good time.

Jan 11,2004

Jan 24,2004 Jan 18,2004 Jan 11,2004

This is the beginning of my third week living on the East Coast. The last two months have flashed by- a month in Australia, then driving across the USA- all dim memories now.

Much happening here. Tis the season to write job applications: PDX, WSU, OGI,...

All my boxes have arrived and everything is unpacked (finally). For the longest time, there was a constant mountain of empty boxes at one end of the living room. Didn't matter how often we dumped them, more would magically arrive, spew out their contents, then jump on top of the mountain.

One the boxes were sorted, the apes have marked their new territory by hanging pictures and buying new furniture (the IKEA-style assemble-with-allen-key and make-permanent-grooves-in-hand stuff).

And, just to make us all welcome, Portland offered us a house warming present- the worst winter blizzard in a decade.

At first, it was kinda fun.

Then I realized that they don't salt the roads here. Which means that the roads are treacherous++ and its time to stock up the larder and STAY HOME.

We spent the days surfing the music channels on the cable television (bluegrass is currently the preferred station) and rationing out Joss Whedon's FireFly series. FireFly is truly great. Makes all other SciFi look truly LAAAAMMMMME! It only lasted one season but that makes it all the more precious (IMHO).

Every morning we took turns making an egg beater omelette breakfast (with feta, mushrooms, spinach) and offering it to the other for judging. I'm ashamed to say Helen's are clearly better than mine. Which also means that (dramatic chord), Helen is cooking!

The blizzard is all over now. There's still snow on the ground but thats melting away in the rain. Some blue sky today. We could even go for a walk (sliding around on the side walk).

Shuttle: In other news, looks like NASA will phase out the space shuttle and use Russia for a taxi service to the station. In a move approved by the ghost of Wernher von Braun, the plan is to build a heavy lifting rocket that could service space station and act as a ferry to Mars and to a permanent station on the moon.

For me, the shuttle is another experiment in reuse- the cost of building reusable device outweighs its benefits. Simple, one-off throw aways seem far more practical.

Cate Blanchett: Watched her on Inside the Actor's Studio. Gawd bless Australia. She blew them all away. Smart, talented, approachable, humble, assertive, pleasing, agreeable; delightful, delicate, strong, kind, tall..... Did I say that I thought she's not too bad?

Secret words: Helen has been teaching me the secret Burgess family language. Some words are simple. For example, mabbles is an expression of greeting or surprise and bogwek is a cobweb. But other words are more complicated since their meaning depends on the closest objects. For example, posseltar is a heater or a rotary floor polisher or (if neither are nearby), any household appliance. What complicated here is that "nearby" is not a linear distance thing- its more a prominence thing. For example if the moon is in view then poly means "moon". But if the moon is invisible right now, then poly means anything round.

No wonder she grew up to study English- its much simpler than Burgessese.