Paul's Journal

As Wouter also mentions, I too noticed it is the top-something season again. However, more interesting to me and maybe others is to ascertain some of my personal top items of the year 2007 for some arbitrarily chosen categories:

Book: Legends of Dune. I know that this comprises three books, but I read it as one in one go.

Location: Lisboa. My first real conference location, very nice city.

Movie: The Fountain. Beautiful, artistic, emotional, quiescent, thought invoking.

Music: Always a hard category, going to split this up a bit:

• Artist: Sigur Ros. I knew them for quite some time, I have no idea why I didn’t really get into it before this year.
• Album: Shpongle – Nothing Lasts… But Nothing is Lost. Diverse, energetic, really nice.
• Track: Can not choose between Breakfast – The Sunlight (melodic, euphoric) and Clint Mansell – Death Is the Road to Awe (emotional, powerful).
• Set: Three favourites here for different reasons: XiJaro – Sunset Excitement 094, Menno de Jong – A State of Trance 300 (part 2), Menno de Jong – Intuition Sessions CD Release Party.

Party: Intuition Summer Event. Absolutely awesome weather, location, people, atmosphere and music.

Series: Six Feet Under. Still my most appreciated all-round series. This year I watched most of it again.

Yesterday after dinner we spontaneously ended up having a XO play night. I liked the interface and the things it could do, the complete difference with a normal notebook, the creeping into a child’s mind a bit.

It was funny to notice that being older and experienced, things that probably are intuitive to children, are not/no longer intuitive to me anymore. This fact alone shows how “being used to” and experience are a large part of things one consider intuitive. I notice this also when people are trying to use GNOME when they are used to Windows: they find this difficult, but of course most of them are already “hard wired” to Windows. The reverse holds for me: due to not using Windows often at all, I keep losing the aptitude for it and it seems to be a hard system to use from my perspective. Fortunately for us all, “getting used to” is the specialty of the brain.

Some information in the work department is past due. It has been over four months since I started my new job and I feel quite settled in. I attended two events in the past six weeks that resulted in some material that I could use to finally finish the missing parts of my website at work which I overhauled yesterday.

SIREN 2007

On 30 October, 2007, I attended SIREN 2007 to present my poster. The event was quite nice. However, since the scope had been broadened from Computer Science to ICT in general, the audience had little prior knowledge about the research area my poster was about. Anyway, it was nice to meet some people in the field and spend a day in Delft.

IPA Fall Days 2007

I spent the last week of November in Willibrordhaeghe, the conference hotel where the IPA Fall Days were held. I enjoyed this week very much. There were some good talks which also showed me what was happening on the other side of the fence. An Open Session was held where PhD could tell something about their work. I created some slides using the SIREN poster for my talk in this session.

The hotel was slightly cold, it was one of very small number of negative points of this event. Not that the organisers can be held responsible, the hotel was just badly insulated. The food was good, especially the lunches. The dinners were a bit all of the same, but I could vary, being the flexitarian. This however really confused the waiters. (Are you vegetarian or not?!) I also enjoyed meeting more of my PhD colleagues, playing various games and our endless discussions. Of course I made some pictures, just for memory sake. I’m quite confident I will attend the Spring Days. :)