It may seem that I have not been posting recently, but that is not true.  For a while I considered converting this whole site to a wiki, but the idea has passed.  I’ll add the postings from that experiment here soon.  But I have been busy the last two weeks.

For one thing, I have been teaching.  I could arguably spend even more time on that, but I did devote a large portion of my week to it during the first six weeks of my time in Finland, and hopefully things are now pretty much on a roll.  Three most weeks and that it done!  (Except for the exams and the projects.)

Another thing I’ve been doing is research.  It sounds so pretentious, but that is exactly what has taken the largest portion of my time.  Writing software to run experiments the results of which are then analysed and — hopefully — converted to a paper.  Together with Henri I’ve been looking at heuristic model checking, but that has now been put on hold while we investigate minimal counterexamples.  All the while we are discussing new ideas for the short, medium and long term.  This freedom is a large part of what I like about academia in general, and research in particular.  Another part is the puzzle-solving aspect.  I crave the constant stimulation;  not because I’m so brilliant, but simply because I’m so easily bored.  Am I part of the TV generation, too?

Then, the next item on my list of activities is the new laptop.  I’m now a Mac owner and user.  It is a wonderful experience, everything from paying the enormous price tag to agreeing to all the restrictive licenses.  Apple Inc. is somewhat like a apparently benevolent foreign power that invades your country and overthrows your government.  They say that their intentions are good and conditions seem to improve, but you have a sneaky feeling that they have an ulterior motive.  This is not, of course, a reference to the Iraq invasion.  Their conditions did not improve.

Seriously, the Mac is brilliant.  I had to install Xcode off the install CD, gawk, LaTeX, and gvim.  All without any hassles whatsoever.  I transfered my research and starting working.  Very impressed.  Yesterday I checked to see how to activate apache, if at all possible.  Turns out you click a check box, and it’s running.  These Apple people have obviously listened to their customers.  Or as I read yesterday (I forget where…no I remember:  it was a paper about open source software): “Microsoft listens to its dumbest customers, while Linux listens to its smartest customers.”  Apple must be listening to all its customers.  Almost nothing is difficult about using this system.  Once again, I’m very impressed.

One thing that I have neglected, is photography.  The weather has been strange, and on Tuesday I missed a great opportunity to photograph the iced trees.  (It happens just about every winter, so if I come back here…).  I’m kinda sorry about that, but for the most part the skies have been cloudy — the bad kind of cloudy, unsuited to taken photo’s.  I plan to fix that in the next couple of week though and, if we’re lucky, I’ll report about it here.