‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.

I felt like a million dollars last night. That would be R7.76 million or 703 482 EUR. I have now lived in Somerset West longer than anywhere else since I left school. (Well, any apartment. Perhaps I have lived in Tampere longer…) No matter how long I have lived where or when, after a couple of months it takes on the “home” feeling.

The conference was wonderful and inspiring and it was great seeing J again, but Friday was a big stress. Didn’t know which flight I was on, if any. Had to phone kulula myself and, they were very friendly. At least, their phone queue was very friendly. We are dating now and thinking about getting married. TWENTY MINUTES! Well, that was the second time. The first call only lasted 6 minutes because my airtime ran out, so I had to buy some more. They only accepted cash, so I had to go to the ATM. It was out of cash (!!), so I had to walk across the campus to find another machine. I didn’t mind the effort, but the stress was killing me. It is more complicated than that, because I made preparations for a late flight. But if that was not to be, I had to inconvenience a lot of people. As it turns out, I got my flight postponed and everything worked out. Except that we had to wait 40 extra minutes to board. That midnight drive from the airport sure felt good. It might have been even better with someone waiting at home…damn [name retracted] for making me think of that!

I met a lot of great people in Pretoria. I’m sorry now I left my camera at home, because many are not coming down to Cape Town next week. My memories are usually quite vivid, so they will hopefully last for a while. Of course, there is always the chance that we might meet up at some future conference. That happens a lot. The community is often smaller than one might think.

As I have mentioned several times now, these gatherings are a great source of inspiration. While I sit there listening to the talks I try to concentrate, but some are more exciting than others, or rather, more interesting. The mind wanders and wonders. Sometimes I try to connect the ideas to old work, other times I try to think of how it might lead to new work. Sometimes it leads in entirely new directions, mostly dead ends, but once in a while there is a spark somewhere among the old synapses and something wonderful is born. It could even be that I am seldom able to try the ideas out immediately, and that that adds to their attractiveness.

For example, I have returned home with ideas for creating Xhosa word lists. These are extremely scarce and difficult to obtain. Creating such lists is not easy, mostly because they need to be verified, usually by hand. They would, however, be immensely useful for other people working in the field, trying to build Xhosa language tools. Plus, I might get to cooperate with some old acquantainces at the local department of African Languages and with people elsewhere. So today was all about making small-scale experiments to see how feasible my ideas are and getting a first look at the complexity involved. Ideally, one would like to eliminate or reduce hand-checking: it is time-consuming and expensive. But that raises the problem of bootstrapping: programs that recognize text off the internet, for example, use existing language data to recognize new data. So, I have a secret plan. Am I being a little too secretive? I hope so! These are still early days, but I hope that my approach will result in a useful word list, an honours project or two, collaboration, and a paper or two. Well, it is easy to dream about these things, and they are not all that difficult compared to other problems. Finding the time to do it right is the real problem.