October 31, 2003

October 31, 2003 October 22, 2003 October 20, 2003 October 15, 2003 October 11, 2003 October 7, 2003

Web pages=155

I'm so happy- slept in till 3pm. So content under the covers.

Why this good mood? Well, many reasons...

Saw Helen at Austin Texas last weekend. First time since August. Such a treat! And, two weeks from now, I get a repeat treat when, on route to Oz, I see her again for a whole weekend in Vancouver.

Also, I have finally gotten over the cold that hit me and most of North America. Today I feel myself again for the first time in ages.

I'm getting lots of kind feedback about the Data Mining for Very Busy People paper (it came out this week in IEEE Computer).

Kicking butt on the programming front. I've tamed WEKA's feature subset selection tools. Gave a great lecture Thursday night to an awed (?scared) class showing hundreds of lines of wonderful data mining shell scripts. Walked away unreasonably proud of myself.

Even the stars are glowing this week. There was a big sunspot flare and if you get away from the lights of Morgantown, there are some great skyscapes to see. Photo courtesy of Tim Reyes.

My grad. students are making me very happy. Picture the scene: me and Justin and Dustin all camped in my office scribbling silently away over proofs of the two research paper we are all currently writing. It don't get better than that.

NASA is going well. There's good signs about changes to NASA software processes. And in local news, this week Ned and Martha approved the 2004 WVU University Initiatives. Ned even added some top-up for admin support (the WVU research director and my rover position).

Here's Ned signing the approval letter for the 2004 money. Getting that signature gave me a few heart stopping moments. I had to reply to numerous queries and reservations about some of our proposed research. Wrote my little butt off, all the while thinking "if I get this wrong, my faculty colleagues lose $$$ next year". It seemed to work- all our research was finally accepted as originally proposed.

This week's funding decisions meant I could work out my salary next year. I now must reverse my prior pessimism. Seems I won't be Helen's unemployed toy boy drone parasite next year. Pity. I was looking forward to lounging round the pool, whining when Helen doesn't come home early enough, doing my nails, and gossiping in a high-pitched nasal drone to my girlfriends (imagine Michelle Pfeiffer in Married to the Mob).

Instead, It seems I'll have enough cash to phone her from far-flung conferences saying things like "I just bought you an air ticket. Get your erudite over-educated English butt over here so we can do a road trip around, say, northern Italy".

Speaking of trips, in two weeks I'll be on an Australian beach. Officially I'll be working on logic programming. Unofficially, I'll be working on the tan and counting the dolphins that swim by. I was thinking that life without Helen was kind of tedious. But then I remember: in the period Oct 21 to Nov 16, I will have traveled to Pittsburgh, Austin Texas, Ohio, Portland, then Australia. If that's "tedious" then perhaps I need a new dictionary, or a new attitude, or both.

Had dinner with Todd and Lisa last night at Oliverio's (yummmm). Todd's real happy cause hunting season has started- an event that makes WV men happy, WV deer very sad, and WV women very deserted.

Todd was kind enough to bring me up to speed on the whole bow/rifle/front-loader season thing. Rifle season is shortest cause its easy pickings. Front-loading season is longest cause reloading and repacking those muskets gives the prey enough time to get away. Me, I'm still prefer Bambi walking around, not sizzling or the grill.

I think if it was up to me, I'd ban the bows and rifles and make the front-loader session last four minutes on midnight every leap year in a dark room just full of human hunters. Afterwards, I'd let the deer in to graze on the human remains.

October 22, 2003

October 31, 2003 October 22, 2003 October 20, 2003 October 15, 2003 October 11, 2003 October 7, 2003

Just back from two days of NASA-ness on engineering of complex systems. Great photos of Pittsburgh. Nice river cruise- thought it was going to be a dud but the photos came out great.

ECS was good. Stuff happened there that really makes me thing that NASA has reached a turning point in its attitudes to software engineering.

The autumn riot is nearly over.

October 20, 2003

October 31, 2003 October 22, 2003 October 20, 2003 October 15, 2003 October 11, 2003 October 7, 2003

Sick. Generation of great phlegm. Phlegm, phelgm, phelgm, phlegm. Lots of phlegm.

Tired. Cause of the phlegm. Helen rang up and I had nothing to say about anything I've done cause I've done nothing. Except produce phlegm. Lots of phlegm.

Teaching was fun. When I left the class of Thursday night, I left behind a lecture room full of little groups of students. They were all fussing about t-tests and shell scripts and all that good stuff. The work seem to be happenning, the students seem to be learning stuff and thinking hard about stuff.

Trying to write a 10 page paper. I'm up to page 14. Writing is exhausting cause I'm tired. Tired of phlegm.

I get to spend a weekend with Helen in 8,7,6,... days. Sweeeeeet.

Did I mention the phlegm?

October 15, 2003

October 31, 2003 October 22, 2003 October 20, 2003 October 15, 2003 October 11, 2003 October 7, 2003

Reading: Finished The Da Vinci Code. Great read. All history and all religons are a dynamic reinterpretation of symbols. We fight and kill in order to create or preserve some preferred, but arbitrary, interpretation of this symbol or that symbol We can't avoid it- our culture and arts and language are all soaked and saturated with these symbols. I'll never look at The Little Mermaid or The Last Supper the same, ever again. Can't tell you more: you'd better read the book.

Wired is a great magazine. Today I learnt that that most of the universe is dark energy that pushes apart the very fabric of space. That is, its not "big bang" vs "steady state". Rather, we live in the middle of an perpetual "bang". This is old news to some folks (the Science journal listed dark energy as 1998's top scientific discovery; and its been nearly a year since a team at Jodrell Bank Observatory, UK decided that most of the universe is dark energy). But its new news to me and I'm excited. See, I grew up on science fiction writers like Fred Hoyle, James Blish, etc so spent my teenage years either worrying about girls or "big-bang" vs "stead-state". Anyway, you need to care about this. Continual expansion means that there won't be a big crunch followed by another expansion. So listen up- I won't be saying any of this ever again.

October 11, 2003

October 31, 2003 October 22, 2003 October 20, 2003 October 15, 2003 October 11, 2003 October 7, 2003

Moving: Helen got into the new flat today at Vancouver. She all excited about it and (as much as I can be from the other side of country) so am I. This place sounds like a cool little nest for the two of us.

But before the nesting comes the heavy lifting. There's no lift in the block and every day brings more boxes to be hauled up three flights of stairs. That's all very trying but Helen can't really complain. Moving's real easy if you know the trick- just be 3000 miles away when it happens. I haven't broken into a sweat all day.

Concentration: Concentration shot to hell this week. No deadlines to drive me to any conclusion. Some low-grade sinus thing that makes me sleepy all the time during the day. Sadly, I'm also waking up for hours at a time in the middle of the night. Learning a new programming language (Python) and what would normally take me minutes now takes hours and hours and ...

Autumn: The annual festival of the color camera is in full swing. The view from the front porch keeps changing dramatically.

Eliza: Eliza passed her master's exam last Friday with flying colors. Impressed the hell out of one her reviewers- he asked that she repeats her seminar to his SE group. Also, if I can sort out my NSERC money, then he's happy to act as Eliza's supervisor in FY04 while we work out how to get her into the USA.

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Today a stranger asked me about my accent. When I told her where I came from, this woman exclaimed "Australia? Is that a fact? Well you know, you sound more Australian than that Schwarzenegger fella". And she wasn't joking. I didn't call her on it- its a natural mistake. After all, its a mere 9891 miles in between Vienna (Austria) and Canberra (Australia).

For the record, this isn't the first time this sort of thing happens in West Virginia. Locals have complimented me on my English, even though I'm not from the United States. And once, a local bank here couldn't contact my bank in Sydney. When I checked, I realized that did not know to use the international dial prefix (011-61). Seems they'd never, ever, had to call out of the country before. Boggles the mind.

Marking: Gave back the data mining mid-terms today. Not a pretty site. Suddenly the subject snapped from "a whole lotta fun" to "oh shit, I'm getting marked on this stuff". But my students should take heart. I too was marked this week....

DDF: Had the experience this week of my (NASA) peers declining some of my offered research. They argued that the defect detection stuff was not related to their business. It set me back a bit. All that work I do and they say its not relevant.

I checked around and my NASA peers are not 100% right. True, culling the inspection work using static code measures is not done frequently. On the other hand its not a rare thing to do either. Which means my work has (some) utility but won't be fuel for any sort revolution (reality check: nothing can be really revolutionary at NASA since, like any other large bureaucracy, NASA takes great care to fully manage its own revolutions).

Grants: Every cloud has a silver lining. That set-back forced me to think hard about what exactly is the goal of the static metrics work. No bad thing. Also, I've been adding up all my proposals that are out right now. Gawd help me if they all come in.

Research: And speaking of money, when I first came here, NASA was giving CSEE $550K per year. This year, unless there's some budget shortfall, that number could be as high as $1,006K- nearly double. Yeah me.

October 7, 2003

October 31, 2003 October 22, 2003 October 20, 2003 October 15, 2003 October 11, 2003 October 7, 2003

Marriage: Bought air ticket to Atlanta yesterday. Helen is there for a conference in 18,17,16,15... days.

Shopping therapy: Spent too much $$$ on clothes on the weekend. Best buy was this cool, ultra-light silk sport jacket.

Becoming an American: George Bush wrote to me and said my applications for work authorization, travel clearance, and green-card would be processed in 60,80, and 420 days (respectively). Spent time on the weekend doing the West Virginian thing of taking a pleasant stroll over cement sidewalks around car parks. Always thought that was an insane thing to do but now I get it. After weeks in my tiny little apartment, even walking around on a gray autumn day feels good.

Helen: Helen called Saturday, all aglow after a meeting in Seattle with the Smithsonian (she's a consultant to their traveling exhibitions). That meeting was mostly administrative- fussing about on admin details. Important but not breathlessly exciting stuff. Then Helen gave a presentation that blew them away. She has a natural advantage when talking to the Americans- she sounds British and despite a revolution and centuries of separation, the Yankees still love the Brits. So they listened attentively as she started in 500 b.c. with Sapho (you think you will be forgotten, but one day you will be remembered), leapt forward to the 1939 worlds fair (where we meet yesterday's tomorrow) and finished in the future with a Kim Stanley Robinson character talking about the past. At the end, the ultimate accolade: "Yes," said one of head honchos from the Smithsonian, "you've reminded me why we have scholars on our board". Thats my gal.

Students: Dustin got his first paper accepted (to NASA SEW 2003). Andres has broken through the research barrier and now we have meetings where he tells me about things (kernel estimation, merits of likelihood for guess-timating support, etc etc). Greg is sick as a dog with some middle ear infection horror. Kareem is in writing hell- now he must write in English (which he hates) and not in JAVA (which he loves).

Movies: In the last two weeks I have seen the old and young Marlin Brando and Martin Sheen in A Streetcar Named Desire, the West Wing, and Apocalypse Now. Strange to see the young Brando wolf in the ruin that is Colonel Kurtz. And good to see Sheen made it out of the jungle and got a nice steady job.