Flip side

Two updates in one day shocker!

The last one was a little downcast, though, and I felt a need to pass on something awesome by way of balance. Here it is:



Perhaps you're thinking "Huh? Who's this guy?" or "What's with the cake?". You've been missing out if that's the case. Jonathan Coulton (for that is the man's name) is a computer programmer turned unlikely rock star (You scoff? He has a song in Rock Band. I'm having trouble thinking of a better benchmark), who's become something of a geek standard thanks to the somewhat unlikely nature of his subject matter (one song has Pluto's moon singing its condolences regarding its loss of planet status).

The song itself is the song over the closing credits of the game Portal, which is, quite frankly, an absolute fucking work of art. You probably know that I'm several different flavours of nerd and so JC's* stuff appeals to me on a fairly base level , but I'm not a hardcore gamer. I have above average social skills, leave the house regularly and I prefer making love to playing computer games. There. I said it, and with a completely straight face. But that game is complete genius, through and through. I think Valve do amazing work in everything they do, and the fact they got JC* to write the song for the closing credits of one of their games makes me grin from ear to ear.

Check out some more of his stuff, it might make you smile. If you do and it does, leave a comment telling me about it, because that would make me smile**.

Update: His website is here http://www.jonathancoulton.com/ And you can buy (and download for free) all his music there.

That is all.

* No, not that JC

** At the risk of me smiling so widely that the top of my head falls off.

Ferðalangur

I've been traveling around for work for the vast majority of the last month, so generally speaking I've been anything but at a loose end. Evenings were full of work or spent with the colleagues / friends I was traveling with. But now I'm back and finding that I don't know what to do with myself a lot of the time. It's giving me time to think about things, and that never ends well.

I think my PhD is in better shape than I had been supposing. I found a couple of stupid mistakes in my code today and now it actually seems to be working quite well. With a bit of tweaking of settings it might produce valid, or even impressive, output. This is good. It means I can stick to my plan to only put in eight hour days at the lab (though I might do a bit of writing up at home). An eight hour days feels pretty short just now. Thus the stress levels may reduce. I've more or less been running on stress and adrenaline/caffeine for the last few months though, so once again: time and head space to think about things.

It's making me very uncertain about a lot of things. The financial market is clearly well up shit creak, and it ate its paddle some miles back. This also coincides with a financial meltdown of my own, precipited by my funding running out and exaserbated by my purchase of a car. Yep, I reckon I'll look back on that one as a particularly retarded mistake in years to come. I've got things on a more or less stable footing now, but my long term security is... clouded... not what I'd like it to be... in a lot of respects.

I also find myself thinking about sex, love, friendship, their relationship to each other, and my relationship to each. Things I had, things I've lost, and things I want in the future. I'm not feeling quite introspective enough to textualise any of that just now, but you should probably be thankful for that.

These are indeed uncertain times.

I've also decided to try and get back into going to the gym. I've had no time for excersise in the last month and have probably been eating a little too well and it's stating to show. I went for the first time in what feels like an age last night, and, you know what, it felt pretty good. I've missed that post gym sensation of having actually done something and made my muscles (such as they are) work for a living.

I just looked out of the window. The sun is shining! Time to go out into it, I suspect!

Being Yvan Petillot

So.

There I was, sitting across from a senior manager from Thales and two Professors, one each from Cambridge and Robert Gordon's Universities, discussing the precise definition of the term “emergent behaviour”...

Wait.

No.

Rewind.

Thanks to my current uncharacteristically basy schedule, I arrived late to the Forum on Unmanned Systems and Artificial Intelligence, an event designed to facilitate a high level discussion of these areas, and create the beginnings of a coherent plan for their future. In order to do this it brought together the foremost expects in the relevant fields, from both industry and academia.

And me.

Ah. No. See, there's a serious failure in continuity and a complete lack of explanation here. I am a terrible narrator (and worse still, I'm stealing Shane Black's material). Rewind again.

Actually invited to this forum were exhibits A, B and C. Namely: Doctors Yvan Petillot (Head of the Vision and Robotics course at Heriot-Watt University and SeeByte Chief Technical Officer) and Jonathon Evans (Former Head of Research a the Ocean Systems Laboratory and SeeByte Head of Engineering), and Professor David Lane (Head of Ocean Systems Laboratory and SeeByte Chief Executive Officer and Board Chairman).

Enter stage left: Exhibit D, yon plucky PhD student and sometime SeeByte “Development Engineer”, myself. Exhibits A, B and C were unable to attend for various reasons, and so Exhibit A (that's Dr Petillot for those of you not keeping track) asked me to attend in his stead, get a feel for what was going on, and fly the respective SeeByte and OSL flags. This suggestion was redoubled by Exhibit B, but never actually discussed with Exhibit C, who's inclusion in the program suggests the organisers were in some doubt regarding his attendance, or the lack thereof. This is not unusual.

And so, a mere 12 hours after arriving back in my beloved Edinburgh, fresh from my jaunt to Iceland (which I will write about in due course, once I can trust myself not to gush too unabashedly), I caught a plane to Bristol (it has a very impressive bridge, you know) and subsequently found myself in a room surrounded by people considerably more qualified and important than I. I'll leave it to you to make a judgement as to where on the scale between “high opinion of me” and “low opinion of this forum” the exact mark which led to this eventuality lies.

But what of it? I strongly suspect that I shouldn't go into much (or indeed any) detail yet, and the detail might in fact be supremely boring to the vast majority of readers. Suffice to say that it was an interesting experience, if frustrating reminiscent of the episode of The Simpsons in which the MENSA members take control of Springfield for much of its second day.

I found Bristol quite depressing, but for the reasoning behind that you'll have to wait until I've talked about Iceland some. For context, you see.

Well... Here I am...

...In Iceland!

I wanted to come here for a long time (this is no secret), and as the result of a highly unsubtle campaign of strategic hint dropping, here I find myself. It's not under ideal circumstances, though. I'm here for work and so I'll be spending most of my time working 12 hour days, doing fiddly embedded computer programming and ridding about in boats waiting for robots to do their thing. I'm also here with my boss (or someone far higher up the chain of command than myself, at least), and though he's a really nice guy there's always going to be a significant disconnect. He's not my first choice(s)* to share this experience with. I'd rather be here with my friends. My friends are awesome, you see.

A particular subset of my awesome friends, appropriately: the Icelandic ones, have furnished me with a list of things I might like to see, do and eat while I'm here. It's not a challenge on the scale of "cook every single recipe in a recipe book", but it's a fun list all the same and one I plan on making an impression on. I've found a guide to Icelandic punctuation online and am even working up to actually asking for some of the foodstuffs on the list, rather than simply writing them down, pointing at them and smiling hopefully. We'll see how it goes. Hopefully it won't be a repeat of the Turkish "thank you" debacle**.

So far I like it here. It's pleasantly calm and quiet (except for the boy racers who just went screaming past the office). We went for Italian food last night (not my choice), but I'm hoping for something a little more geographically appropriate tonight. Perhaps I'll try puffin, it's always good to try new things. More news as I get it.

It might amuse some of you to know that I've typed this while my boss was out of the room, launching into a long explanation of... something.

More news as I get it.

* Why is there no legitimate plural for "first choice"? That's a linguistic deficiency, right there...

** It's about 20 syllables long and never elicited anything more than a blank stare from anyone we said it to.