Today was a long day that started at 5:00. I had to enter the essay marks for the SE course and it took a while to figure out how to do that. Our university seems to be moving more and more strongly in the direction of placing all of our course information onto the WebCT [...]
Yesterday I had to pay a visit to the French consulate to apply for a visa for my upcoming trip. It was not a too-unpleasant experience, which is not to say that it was pleasant in any way. I had the first appointment of the day and had to tackle the traffic. This was semi-intense, [...]
I went to a talk today by Illah Nourbakhsh about the Gigapan project. It was very good: entertaining, informative, and also somewhat thought-provoking. I won’t go into the details of gigapan, except to say that it is a cheap camera mount used to generate large resolution panoramas with billions of pixels. There are essentially two [...]
The metaphor of a mountain of work is sometimes apt, but there are other times when it feels more appropriate to think of a team of mountaineers trying to conquer several peaks at once. This weekend is one of those times. There are about 30 Software Engineering essays waiting to be read and graded. The [...]
For some strange reason I have thought and told my SE class that next week is the last week of the term. This must have confused them a lot, and I realize now that I got it all wrong. There are two more weeks to go before the break. It is odd to have made [...]
This evening I went to Willem Visser’s inaugral professorial speech. In fact, there were two inaugrals: Ingrid Rewitzky was first, and she was followed by Willem. I found both presentations interesting. Perhaps I was more intrigued Ingrid’s more because I had already proofread Willem’s official lecture and had seen most of the slides beforehand. Everybody [...]
The notion of biorhythms has been discredited, but since there are naturally high points and low points in one’s emotional, physical, and intellectual life. It is natural to interpolate the idea of a cycle. Don’t want to gripe, but at the moment I think I’m at some sort of triple dip. I feel exhausted from [...]
Last week was a busy one. I hope to have a little more “free” time this week to deal with (at least) my enormous email backlog. I don’t mind working hard because I plan to go away for the long weekend. One highlight of last week was GeekDinner. This is a gathering held every two [...]