knitting update: the left front panel of the jacket is approaching completion. w00t.

kitten update: the kitten discovered my knitting today. Well, he discovered me knitting a few days ago, and has already developed a fascination for the non-business end of my knitting needles. Presumably the patterns they make in the air while I knit or something. But today he discovered the ball of wool at the other end of the knitting; and also discovered that the yarn gradually makes its way up my leg to my hands… and promptly followed it, claws out, up my leg to investigate what happened to it up there. Oh joy – it joins the knitting needles! Kitty heaven! The whole process of discovery seems to have exhausted him however, cos now he’s curled up behind the desk and fallen deep asleep.

(yes, gaga. see previous post.)

(Okay, sorry about the three exclamation marks. But I thought they were necessary.)

We are babysitting a kitten. (Kittensitting?) It is veeery cute. It is mostly black, with one small patch of white and just a hint of stripes in its blackness to tell us that one of its parents was probably a tabby. It is also a bundle of endless energy. It is currently sitting under the desk, having been finally dissuaded from chewing on the power cords. It very much enjoys playing with christmas decorations that it finds around the house. And our cat has let it know that it is not at all welcome. I guess they’ll learn to get along – probably just in time for the kitten to go home. Oh well.

So I’m gaga. Deal with it.

It has been drawn to my attention that people actually read the drivel that I write on here. Which is a bit of an odd feeling. Suddenly I feel all self-conscious about this. On the other hand, it would seem rather dumb to stop posting just when I discover that people are actually reading. And I guess that blogging as a replacement for a mass-email update-on-my-life is probably a more respectable pursuit than blogging because I believe I have something profound to say to the world. (Believe me, I am under no such illusions.)

And now, having put something on the blog again in the vain hope that this time my cookie at Blogger.com doesn’t expire, and having moved that previous full stop inside the parenthesis to keep Lynne Truss happy, I will end this post by shouting out a big Merry Christmas and my wishes for a Happy and Successful 2005 to everybody to whom I didn’t get around to saying such in time for Christmas. (Oh, and to everybody else as well, so that you don’t feel left out.)

I’d better get back to cleaning the spam out of my inbox. Load is currently sitting happily on 30. Perhaps piping 1500 messages to spamassassin all at once was a mistake.

That about says it all, really – the Logic Summer School has classes from 9am to 6pm, and an evening seminar from 7 to 8pm, so there’s very little time to do anything else except absorb formal logic! I’m writing this in the DSISE computer room because the college we’re staying in (Ursula Hall) doesn’t provide Internet to casual residents. Urg. And as well as a handful of LSS participants, the college is playing host to a conference of evangelical societies from universities around Australia. Halleluya, brother! They all wear T-Shirts saying “I believe Christ saved us” and “Jesus is my homeboy” and so on. eek. Anyway, I better get back to lunch, cos it’s a 15 minute walk from here to the college (god ANU is huge) and classes start again at 2pm. Will post more the instant something interesting happens (well, besides formal logic).

(oh, i should mention that there are plans on Saturday to visit the NASA tracking site at Tidbinbilla. I reckon that counts as ’something interesting’. Either that or lunch/dinner/something with Lu.)

Well, it’s about time I wrote something again. I have arrived in Sydney, and I said to myself that I would post something when I arrived in Sydney; but so far I’ve been here 3 days with scarce time to collect my thoughts, let alone put (metaphorical) pen to (metaphorical) paper. (or “fingers to keys”. Yes, let’s stick with “fingers to keys”.)

The first thing to notice here in Sydney is…

Temperature
It’s hot. Damn hot. It was around 40 degrees on Sunday when I arrived, with a kind of burning heat hanging in the air. I don’t usually mind the heat, but this was painfully hot. Yesterday was kind of pleasantly hot, and today is sweat-pouring-out-of-veins hot. I guess the fact that the college computer room isn’t air-conditioned probably helps. Well, anyway, I arrived on Sunday and caught the 400 bus to the UNSW campus in Kensington, and walked the ~100m to arrive at…

Warrane College
This is where I’m staying for my 10 weeks in Sydney. $200 per week, 3 meals per day, seems like a good deal. On the whole, it’s cool. (except, it’s hot. but whatever.) Not all that similar to Ormond, really… no locks on doors (lockable cupboards and drawers instead; tiny rooms, but much more common-room style facilities; no phones in rooms; much worse food (well, I have to say it); and internet access in rooms is limited to UNSW websites. Ouch. On the other hand…

Internet
UNSW seems very mercenary about their Internet access. They have campus-wide wireless access, but you have to let them install their own VPN client on your notebook, and then you pay for every bit of data you transfer. The CSE department grant you IP quota, which gets eaten away steadily by your web browsing, email checking, etc. Even Warrane only give you 150Mb quota per month, after which you get cut off (I believe). Seems the grand Internet is much more of an optional, user-pays, luxury here than it is at Melbourne. Too bad most papers and stuff that needs to be read is online…

Location
Well, it’s not Lygon St, Carlton. Kensington and Kingston (which are the suburbs near here) are predominantly Indonesian/Malaysian; this is also good food (I went out for dinner on Sun, yum yum) but it’s all a bit more dingy and a bit less urban than Carlton. On the other side of Uni there is Randwick with the h-u-u-u-u-u-g-e racecourse, a nice view of the city, and a decent shopping strip. I think that’s the destination of choice for things like Coles, clothes, etc. Of course, a 10 or so minute bus trip gets you to the city, or Bondi Junction where there’s a humungous (no really) shopping center. And from Bondi Junction, 5 minutes on the bus gets you to the beach. (well, maybe a bit longer, I didn’t actually time them). And I tell you what, when the temperature hits 40 on a Sunday, the beach is packed.

Facilities
Well, the Faculty have said that they will provide us with swipe-cards to get into CSE labs, but that seems to be “in the works” and will take a little longer. NICTA have their own lab in the EE building, which looks like the lap of luxury – modern coffee machine, lots of big cubicles, new computers, a projector and screen, couches, a view of Sydney, etc. That’s where we’ll be mostly working, I think. NICTA are working on getting us swipe-card access to the NICTA lab, and that should be ready some time this afternoon. We hope. There’s a wireless network at CSE which is quite convenient for my little notebook; I haven’t checked to see whether there’s anything in the NICTA lab.

Research
Here’s the fun bit. I’m one of 3 students working with researchers in the KRR (that’s Knowledge Representation and Reasoning) group in the AI department (that’s Artificial Intelligence) in the school of CSE (Computer Science and Engineering). Got all that? Anyway, my project is to do with ‘empathic computing’, also known as ‘affective computing’ (which kind of sounds like ‘affected computing’ which means something completely different ) Background can be found at http://affect.media.mit.edu/ which is the website of the MIT group who came up with the idea and are working on it. The plan is to come up with an ontology of physiological, visual and audio signals and emotional states, for possible future use in an emotion-sensitive computing application. If we have time we can then do some fun programming by creating an example application to use our ontology. Fun fun research! Also, next week and the week after we’ll all go to Canberra for the Logic Summer School at ANU. That will be fun too.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now, I’ll check back in when I think of something else, or if anything interesting happens. (like, anything else interesting.)