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 months where a group of self-confessed geeks come together to have dinner. Pretty simple. Part of the story is that there are two or three talks in between the courses.

The first talk was about open hardware hacking (similar to open source software; I like the way that the OHH acronym is similar to OSS). I happened to have recently reviewed a paper in this field, so I was somewhat interested. And it was fascinating. I don’t think I’ll get into this in any way. In fact, I was planning a little hardware repair this weekend, but that is how far I’m prepared to go. Still, it is good to know that someone is working on this. The paradigm is not exactly the same, and I get the sense that the “spirit” of these projects is closer to old-time hobbyists than open source contributors.

The other important event of last week was our university’s open day. I’m not sure why, but I got involved in making the banner and pamphlet and stickers. (We distributed 90×90 mm stickers, some of which were widely popular.) Shortly all these material on our department’s website.

The point of these open days is to make school students aware of the choices at university. We cannot really say that we are actively recruiting students, or, if we are, we are doing quite a poor job. I think the stalls are a little boring; the popular stalls have one thing in common: they present some form of interaction. We have a lot of potential for interaction with Computer Science, but it takes a lot of effort to produce something impressive.  A lot of effort.  Oh well, perhaps next year.  At least we can pack up the posters for now.