Nov 30,2003

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Today was a drive home from Canberra, through Kangeroo Valley.

Lake George and, shock, horror, a fixed Australian road. Here's the start of the expressway that replaces that old goat track that used to run along side the lake.

Oh, where's the water in this supposed lake? Well, this is Australia and water is optional.

Nov 29,2003

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It has to be said, any day where you take 110 photos before breakfast must mean something is going right.

I woke up at Ulladulla at a little hill-top motel before dawn. Nothing was open so I decided to drive on to Bateman's Bay for breakfast

I might have been a little manic from low blood sugar but that pre-breakfast drive seemed like the peek experience of this entire trip, so far.

Pelicans in the morning mist.

But I don't envy him. His lifestyle will kill him. Blood pressure, most likely. He'll be rushed to hospital for emergency observation of light heart syndrome (symptoms: chronically low blood pressure and depleted serum stress levels). The next morning, they'll find his lifeless and smoking body. The coroner will be called but it will be an open and shut case. Seems Michael will accidently zap himself while tinkering around with the inner workings of a defibrillator (just to make it work a little smoother). "Happens all the time" the coroner will say, "to the terminally curious and whimsical".

Here's Tim and Michael doing what they do best: geeking it up.

After dinner, when the kids went to bed, Michael told me of England. Him and Bron took the kids to live there for two years, just before their eldest daughter started high school. They had such a different experience to me in the USA. Mike spoke of his fascination with England- how you can't spit without hitting the oldest road in the world, the oldest this, the oldest that. Pubs serving beer above while, down below, there's an archaeological dig in the basement cause the pub has been built on top of seven older pubs dating back to the dawn of time.

It was not his intent, but Michael's words shamed me a little. I clearly don't get as much out of the USA as he got out of England. And I really can't tell if there is just more in England (longer recorded history, smaller area, etc etc). But it made me think I need to work a little harder on making the most of the United States.

Nov 28,2003

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Today I drove too much to downtown Sydney, then south to Ulladulla for a weekend with Michael Priest and family at the great Ozzie caravan park by the great Ozzie beach. Really, on such a sunny summer Ozzie weekend, the universe demands that I must get warm sand between my toes.

Or so I thought. (Creep in music)

After lots of traffic, I (eventually) cleared Sydney. Round about 10pm, I called Michael from a phone box at Ulladulla to get directions for the last little bit to his caravan."How long to get there?" I asked. "It'll take you a while" he replied, "we aren't there till next weekend".

Oh dear- all that way and no friendly face at the end of the drive. Sigh.

I tried to blame Michael but he wouldn't have a bar of it. Seems some little details called "the truth" and "hard evidence" were against me. Michael checked his email and it turns out I'd read the first mail wrong and just compounded the error from there (all the subsequent ones said "next Friday this" and "next Friday that").

Michael commented: "the old this week/next week conundrum".

Time for plan B. Tim sleeps tonight at Ulladulla then on the Canberra the next day to see Michael.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before an evening in Ulladulla, I'd started the day driving into Sydney to give a seminar at UTS. Glorious weather! Bright sunshine! Lots to see! Re-acquainted myself with lots of the inner-city. Sun shining on rows of little terraces. Places I spent years of my Uni life. Street names with history (for me anyway): Abercrombie, Wilson, Redfern, Wattle, ...

Here's a building that changed my life.

This is the old test tower of Elevator Pty. Ltd. which is now some bizarre historical monument that remains even after the company is history. In the summer of 1983, a second-year Elec.Eng. student called Tim applied to Elevator Pty.Ltd. for some part time work. I didn't get the job- thank goodness- and I left that interview after seeing a little too much of the professional life of an electrical engineer. And I absolutely positively wanted none of it (something about dying of boredom poking at little circuit boards). "What's the fastest way out of here with a degree?", I demanded to know. And that lead to Com.Sci. and the Cognitive Science masters and, well, everything else.

The trip downtown was at the invitation of Yusuf Pisan, a former student of Ken Forbus, a man who knows how to car his cdr, and one of the more interesting men I've meet in my time.

I gave a seminar to Yusuf's department- not a large crowd but they listened politely as my data miners juggled competing requirements. No one from the UTS SE or OO group showed up. Geez, not even the great NASA draw card could flush them out. I guess if you abandon a country for another, then the abandoned can abandon you right back. Or just ignore and forget you. It left me with a strange and sad sense of irrelevancy that dented my ego (which, it must be said, could always do with a few knocks).

But there were some friendly faces there. Gordon Menzies came along he frowned seriously and professionally and appropriately all through the talk.

Mark Sifer there too. Him and me go back to 1986 and Stowe Computer which had a sign out front: "Australia's Computing Future". Yeah, right. But that's another story for another time.

Back then, Mark was a little scary to me. He was doing a (gasp) Ph.D. and little old me could not understand anything he was saying. Which was just silly on my part- Mark was just a more careful and disciplined thinker than I could handle.

But the day was marked by massive traffic jams. UTS is right downtown and, at first, I was congratulated myself for sneaking out so easily on a Friday afternoon.

But pride comes before a fall. Or a full stop. The M5 was pretty much bumper-to-bumper and 5-20kph all the way to beyond Liverpool.

Talk about depressing. Here I was, after two and half hours driving, and I was still locked in traffic.

But I was surprisingly upbeat. The day was warm, the views were lovely and, heh, I was still in Australia.

Nov 27,2003

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Dead set, this place is gorgeous. In West Virginia, there is almost a bias against having free and open and pretty public places.

This was very strange to me- I'm used to beach suburbs in Sydney where a walk in any direction takes you to some drop-dead beautiful park maintained by the local council.

So it was with much amazement and happiness this morning when, before breakfast...

I just walked up the road from my little flat...

Nov 26,2003

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Spent a little too much time today in the pub.

A quiet drink in the afternoon became three, a pack of twisties, and a huge plate of chips and watching of rock video clips.

This was followed by some burping and belching, then a less-than-linear stroll home beneath gum trees and through warn sunlight. Back at the flat, time for a little nap, a lot of television, and (I suspect) much loud snoring.

The Uni pub is modeled after a wool shed.

Nov 25,2003

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A day of:

• programming,
• writing web pages
• writing reviews,
• reading papers.

We went down to Wollongong harbor (where I ate day one). Truly stunning place. I bored Bob to death with how great it is. He took it well "Yeah, its all right", he remarked.

Nov 24,2003

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Gave a talk today on TAR3 and SE to a technology outreach day. One of the audience, Tim Coleman, came up afterwards with a data set and we started playing data mining. Hope to get a paper out it.

These two techy nuns attended- maintain the on-line store for their convent. Very politely, they watched and smiled and nodded enthusiastically for a day of multi-agent systems and non-monotonic reasoning and constraint satisfaction and data mining and lord knows what else. The poor dears- all they need is a little scripting, some CSS and a ISP with a decent search engine.

Made me remember how silly us academics can be sometimes- rushing off to do the hardest thing when something much simpler will often do.

The day was opened by the local state government member. He's an Australian bloke from the Australian Blokes Party. He was a nice guy and definitely a good bloke. Sadly, his staff is more erudite than he is- they wrote him a speech that had him tripping up on the big words ("dama, dynama, dynama, dynamicism,..."). Bad staffers. (Or was it actually some clever act? Good blokes can't be seen to be too clever. Maybe this guy really has a Ph.D. in philosophy from the School of Realpolitik at the Nicolo Machiavelli University. See, he just bloked it up for the audience to secure re-election. Oh what a cunning bloke.)

Nov 23,2003

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Stayed the night at Gordon and Marian's place then spent Sunday morning driving back to the Gong. The afternoon and evening was spent tied to the laptop working on stuff.

But before work, there was much driving slowly down little back roads. In the United States, this trailer would be a historic relic. Here, its the treasured escape vehicle of some Ozzie family. If only they didn't haul it around with a tiny little engine that needs a cardiac by-pass. Oh well, at least it gives me time to gaze at the country side.

Nov 22,2003

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Today I went to see my brother Gordon.

He lives at Springwood (about 90 minutes west of the Gong). Gordon is married to Marian and has two kids: Iris (aged 8) and Lydia (aged 6).

When he finished his economics Ph.D. (from Oxford, don't you know), he walked into a tenured faculty job at UTS.

The sound track for this photo is Gordon squealing at me to take the darn photo so he had get rid of this revolting thing.

Marian is both more practical and more ethereal than Gordon. A country girl, she's the one that instructed me on the best back roads to their place. A skilled artist, she has a sense of color and composition that I envy. She understands materials and how to combine them.

After a summer of eating revolting play mints, we had a collection of hundreds of Mintie papers. So we did what every other 13/11 year old would do- we declared our own currency and formed an independent country within our parents household.

Oh, the rest of this page shows our clear understanding of the principles of practical politics. Here we allow freedom of press with the small caveat that non-government papers have to pay a tax of 150 million per issue. Paid directly to the king and prime minister, of course.

This game kept us busy for many months to come. After a while, I broke away to create a separate state called New Scotland where all Tims are free to be Tim.

Gordon's response was swift, mature and considerate. His state police expunged Senator Timothy from the Cainneburg legal system (see bottom right the sinister note next to my name: Assinated!)

Nov 21,2003

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Friday was good tucker day. The school's financial wizard (Karen) declared that I was enough of a reason to declare Friday lunch a "visitor lunch"; i.e. there is such a thing as a free lunch. So I sat round in room of large rowdy gangly gawky Australians all shouting at the top of their voice.

Lunch was a lamb stew washed down a large bottle of wine and accompanied by bread that tasted of bread (you have to be an Australian living in America to get that joke).

Karen is really really really loud. She boasts that the kitchen can hear her voice through the din way in back of the bistro. She must be wrong: no single sound would survive the cacophony of an ozzie bistro on a Friday lunch.

Friday dinner was great Chinese in Chinatown. I drove into downtown Sydney to see the ex-Tharunka folks (a university newspaper I helped edit back in the mid 1980s). The drive in was thrilling: Mt. Kiera was in total fog. Thrilling and life threatening: a 14 car pile up going the other way (!!).

After an eon or two of crawling forward with hazard lights flashing, the fog cleared and I speed into Sydney. I was such a homecoming. I remembered all the back streets and short cuts. I found a legal car park right down town. Flinders Street Station was grand- huge, hulking granite covered in pigeon shit. I loved it.

Sonya Thompson was kind enough to organize this little get together. She does something she won't describe for the NSW government. Department of Fair Trade. Sounds like spies to me.

During dinner with my fellow former revolutionaries, I came back to the topic from the previous night: why were we so revolting and the current generation is not? I thought about what we were and what we had become. We were the under-dogs that went to university at a time when fees were cheap. Then we got our degrees and went to work. It was like we were the last generation of revolutionaries. Our enthusiasm was accepted by the system which assimilated us and made us work very hard on its problems. Dave Cox runs QANTAS (ish) and John Olip leads a team of designers doing wireless stuff. I help NASA spend its software assurance research budget. Kay helps folks talk better to folks. Gordon Farrer is a cultural judge and jury in Melbourne (he edits the events section of the newspaper). Sonya does what Sonya does (sssh, its a secret).

The point is, what kind of role models do we offer the current generation? We seem very busy little bees working inside the system with incomes that keep us placid. What lesson did we offer the future? Certainly not "take no prisoners!". More like "beeee gooood" and "work hard" and "play well with others".

Whatever. Afterwards, a new experience: easy driving in Sydney. Years of my life was spent sitting in Sydney grid lock but that has all changed. The new M5 shot me out through Sydney suburbia at 110kph. 50 minutes later, left at Picton and back to the Gong in just over an hour. Amazing.

Nov 20,2003

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I am here in Oz at the invitation of the Wollongong University Design Systems Laboratory and its director, Aditya Ghose.

I envy Aditya's lifestyle. He sits in his office and ships in play pals from around the world.

Here are the Indians that preceded me: Sujata De (left) and Prof. Mihir Chakraborty (right). High church logicians. Is logic-one stronger or weaker than logic-two? Errr. yes? I mean, no? Or none of the above. I think.

Oh well, they are probably as wierded-out about my empirical stuff as I am of their logic stuff. In any case, the Indians are most excellent dinner companions. We went to a wonderful Vietnamese restaurant and drank Australian wine and talked into the night. It was a great dialogue. I found a kindred soul- Mihir is an ex-60s radical puzzled that the current younger generation seems uninterested in rebellion. Something that worries me as well, btw.

Nov 17,2003

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Welcome to Australia where the weather is fine, the people are kind, and every street corner in Sydney is familiar.

For a month I have left the land where everyone MUST have a good day. Here, a good weekend means that it was better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. That's my kinda people!

Sadly, you won't see me living here in the next decade or so. Sure, health care and education are still cheaper than America. And legal advice is not required if you bump someone at the pub. But in this lucky country, more is spent on private high schools that universities. Here, tenure is being replaced by performance-based evaluations. And the politics is getting nasty- awful fear-based racial tensions fueled by conservative politicians who artificially polarize the community to get re-elected. Sigh.

But there are still many admirable things about Australia. For example, pause and be humble in the face of these bananas. These real bananas. These really big bananas. Not the tiny slivers of yellow sold in America. These yards of yellow contain mountains of marvelous mash. Trust me on that- I've looked.

Everyone in America loves this guy but no one in Australia will give him the time of day. Seems they tried airing his show a couple of times but it just bombed in the ratings. Score one for Ozzie common sense.

The flight Portland to Sydney was not too evil. On the plane to SF, I meet a manic Macintosh man whose voice had a volume knob stuck on LOUD. He was kind of like me, with less control. An informavore with attention deficient syndrome. He told me (and everyone else on the plane) all about the Mac virus wars on the early 1990s and how decent virtual machine condoms kept the Mac virus free. I was fascinated and I'm sure all my flying companions enjoyed it too.

The Pacific flight was comfortable. Just enough leg room for giraffes like me (so no leg cramps). Five movies (or was it six?). The best was House in Umbria (Maggie Smith was just grand) and the worst was Alex and Emma (Luke Wilson being dull- can you imagine it?). Uptown Girls was great when Dakota Fanning was on the screen. Otherwise, just fluff. I also watched Terminator3 on a tiny postage stamp sized screen. But what the hell: it still got me hot.

It might have been the jet lag, but Australian suburbia seemed wrapped in cotton wool- sterilized with sunshine and all the sounds dampened. Even the cars seemed quieter here than in the US- all tip-toeing past the station on whisper drive.

A seagull attacked my fish, as it sat in my hand. What cheek! But can you blame it? There I was, grinning like a fool shoveling in my tucker, drooling over this fast food delight. Heck, if I wasn't me I would have attacked me as well.

Nov 16,2003

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Over to Oregon for a taste of next year's life.

Up at 5pm to get an 8am flight. Much much too early for human life.

Stop over at Chicago airport. Its a perfect airport- big and busy and bustling. Lots of my life has been spent, jet-lagged, staring at views like this.

Nov 13,2003

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Kind of my last week of work. I'm back for a week in December but that'll be a fussy time sorting out this and that. So this was the week I sang my swan song.

It was a rush around kind of week. When you leave some place, you become like a father confessor. Folks feel they can tell you things in safety, because soon you won't be around to whisper their secrets.

I learnt more about the NASA/contractor relationships in the last 5 days than in the last 5 years. That's the way it goes I suppose.

Nov 9,2003

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Autumn is over. Begin early winter.

Fogs and frosts and fuck its coooold.

Its Sunday and I'm blogging away at a Ruby Tuesday's at Cambridge Ohio on the way to give a talk at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio (the Americans love stealing everyone else's names). The chicken fajitas are fine, the coffee's hot and I feel strangely at home on this little road trip. Its like after all these years in the USA, I finally accept it.

Next week I go back to Australia for the first time in three years. Will Australia still be there? Or has been replaced with some alien unwelcoming country at the end of the earth with a scary history and lots of scarier spiders? A place with a mean-spirited conservative government and populace? And an unsustainable tiny economy that is down wind from the farts of the larger nations? We'll see...

For now, I'm driving through America in the late fall. And loving the freshness and clarity of it all. The leaves are gone or hang dead on the trees. The air gives you a little nip you when you inhale. Standing in shadows is not recommended. And skies are dazzlingly blue and are painted with wisps of high clouds playing an exuberant game of tag with some jet stream.

Image: Been studying West Virginia's image. Found a joke on the web that I like:

• If you run your car into a ditch, don't panic. 4 men in a 4WD pickup and a tow chain will be along shortly.
• Don't try to help them, just stay out of their way.
• This is what they live for.

What a perfect reputation for a state housing an IV&V facility- a place where folks will help you out with whatever sort of mess you've made of your software.

So I got to thinking about how helpful the WV folk are. Which lead to a strange idea. Suppose you are good with weapons. I mean really, really, really good with weapons. If so, then its totally safe to help strangers cause if the stranger ever gets out of line, its trophy time!

For example, there's Wes Deadrick- the friendliest civil servant you'll ever meet. Friendliest and deadliest. Shown here with the bear he killed with a single bow shot (forget gun control- Wes needs twine control). Conqueror of the Goddard (occasionally pronounced god-damn) NASA Goddard contracts office. Winner of trophies like deer heads and hundreds of thousands of extra research funding (SBIRs from Goddard). Of course he's West Virginian, born and breed.

Ups and down: Been somewhat manic this week- highs and lows. High on Tuesday- finished the Blind Spots paper where me and Justin show, for the first time ever, that there are stable conclusions from multiple projects. Proudly presented these to Ken who was horrified and the PD/effort ratio (<1). So then Ken mumbles to Mike (the patron of this work) that I've proved static defect detectors are a waste of time. Mike then is all grumpy and humprhy with me Wednesday morning cause my research could negatively impact his funding (which, in turn, would hit mine). So it was a gloomy ride home Wednesday till, halfway home, I realized something (something about low PF values- see the paper for details). That night I did a little coding and Thursday morning I could show Ken the results of a small simulation that convinced him, and hence Mike, that indeed there was value here. In short:

• While static code measures are too weak a method to be a primary IV&V method, they are strong enough to tell you where to place your primary method.
• That is, these can tell me where you aren't looking, but should be. Its kind of like IV&V for IV&V.

So that was happiness Thursday morning. The sadness Thursday night was that the data mining class carefully showed me how badly I defined the last data mining assignment. I've been treating them like research assistants all term- throw them half an idea and let them work out the kinks. That has worked just fine up until now (they've done wonders learning AWK and bash and machine learning and the WEKA). But now its the business end of the term when there's just too much other stuff going. They just don't have time now to work and rework my assignment specifications.

So Friday, I had to do an repair job on the assignment. But the same day, I realized that there were some real urgent fires to fight. I realized Friday that I'd misread my renewal papers. So my car suddenly became five days out of registration. Oops. But to register the car I needed some tax form that might be over with Helen in Portland. Double Oops. And, silly me, it seems I owed three years back taxes on that car (just what is a property tax anyway?). So that would be a triple oops. And Monday, I needed the car to get to Ohio to give a talk- a talk I hadn't even written yet. At this point I left "oops" behind and went straight for "oh shit".

And if that wasn't enough, the other discoveries of Friday were:

• WVU CSEE did not have funding for early 2004, because of the congressional continuations. Last year, WVU covered itself out of its internal funds but cash is too tight this year to do the same.
• I've been promising Ken a "theory of IV&V" for too long now and had to deliver it before I leave for Australia next week.

Ok- much to do. After the obligatory panic I settled into work. Stayed at home Friday and by Saturday midnight:

• I had told the class that the other half of the badly organized assignment was now worth double marks (i.e. they could ignore the weird bit).
• Ken had confirmed that he will transfer continuation funds in December. Actually, bless him, he was onto to this one months before me and already had that arranged.
• I had finished the version 0.9 of the Ohio talk which, strangely enough, was all about a theory of IV&V.
• After going through the paper work, Helen came back with the clarification I needed to sort it all out. Not bad for a woman I'd woken up at 8am her time (Helen does not do morning very well).
• Jim Kiper (bless him) hired me a car for the trip. Which was meant that I did not need to get tense about the car.
• Nevertheless, in an uncharacteristic rush of organization, I paid my back taxes paid ($320, ouch!) and got the car registered, all by 3pm!