FindAtlantis

I started by trying to pull some files off an external 250GB firewire drive.

Didn’t work.

Tried upgrading some bits of Debian on the laptop in question.

Got worse.

Attempted to upgrade kernel.

Hosed X.

Decided to copy all my web stuff onto a Ubuntu box (including this blog).

Installed Apache.

Got the basic site copied across.

Got my photo gallery working (relatively easy)

Installed (the wrong version of) MySQL.

Was not easy: MySQL didn’t want to know. Installed different version. Kind of worked. Still doing more hacking.

WordPress now working (I think).

MediaWiki is next on the hit list…

Apparently, the UK spends £200m per year on space projects. And, it seems, that people are worried about a brain drain away from the UK.

Gosh, now would that be surprising?

France spends more than 10 times as much as the UK. The US, of course, some unspecified-but-huge amount, especially if you take into account military spending. Even India spends twice as much as the UK.

It’s interesting that my recent postdoc hunt indicated that I could stay in the UK if I was prepared to find the money myself. However, I was offered fully funded postdocs in France and the United States more or less immediately. Hmm…

Makes you think?

Actually, not for very long, and not actually very hard.

In other news, Achronous Analysis was invented today, or at least named anyway. Alan Mycroft thought of the name, some friendly types on LJ checked that it made sense from a Greek point of view, so what had been a concept-without-a-name that was vaguely not-quite-said in our journal paper now actually is said explicitly, making our paper an even more horrendous land grab than it was originally.

All your abstractions are belong to us. Resistance is futile, &c.

The PEPM’06 programme committee smiled favourably upon me. My paper was accepted. I now have the usual no-time-to-spare rush to get final changes made by the camera ready deadline, but such is life.

In other news, the robots are coming. I want one that does the dishes. OK, I hear you say, er, isn’t that a dishwasher? Frankly, I’d expect my personal robot servant to be quite miffed at being described as-such, and after all, since when have you seen a dishwasher that can unload itself and put the dishes away afterwards eh?

Everything is now booked for my trip to the States next week. So far, the itinerary is as follows:

Sunday: Fly from London to San Francisco. Pick up hire car, drive to Mountain View. Check in to hotel.

Monday-Tuesday: Visit people at NASA Ames

Wednesday morning: Either see people at NASA again, or do a bit of shopping or some such.

Wednesday evening: Drop off hire car. Fly to Albuquerque, NM. Pick up another hire car, drive to hotel. Check in. Collapse.

Thursday: Visit the Space Vehicles Directorate at Kirtland AFB. Give a talk on automatic FPGA permanent latch-up damage repair. Various talks about the reconfigurable wiring harness project.

Friday: Visit the University of New Mexico. Give the same talk again to people from there, most likely with people showing up from Los Alamos, Sandia and maybe Xilinx.

Saturday: Free day to look around Albuquerque

Sunday: Fly home:

Monday morning, 9.30am: Arrive back at Heathrow.

This sounds like I’d be pretty knackered by the end, but the previous weekend I have a load of other stuff I need to do (pick up my mother’s car from the shippers in Ramsgate, drive it to Manchester to pick up her and her dog from the airport, then drive to my grandmother’s in Co. Durham. On the Saturday, I need to help my mum buy a new TV, then get myself onto a flight from Newcastle to London at about 4pm, then back to Southgate to meet up with Bat and then head up to Cambridge for a party.

I = nuts.

It’s officially declared: I hate waiting for results to come back from programme committees. The PEPM’06 programme is due to be announced today, and I’m waiting to see whether my paper has been accepted.

*must not check email every 10 seconds*

*must not check email every 10 seconds*

*must not check email every 10 seconds*

I’ve finished booking everything for my trip now. Ouchy amounts of money on hotels and hire cars.

*broke*

I’m currently booking hotels, hire cars and the like for my trip to CA and NM in a couple of weeks. So far, mostly due to Expedia being iiiiiinnnnncccrrrreeeedddddiiiibbbbbllllyyyy ssssslllllooooowwww, all I’ve managed to do is book a hotel in Mountain View. The good news, however, is that it has free wifi, air conditioning, and all the rooms have jacuzzis. And that’s a 2-star hotel. In the UK, 2-star places give you complimentary cockroaches, showers about big enough for one arm at a time and TV sets the size of a mouse’s armpit showing only Big Brother and that thing about the hasbeen famous rock star with quarter of a braincell and a wife with an ego the size of Jupiter.

Oh well, it’s a tough life.

Next projects: find a hotel in Albuquerque, then book hire cars for both places. It did cross my mind, before booking the plane flights, to not actually book a flight between SFO and ABQ, and to actually take a couple of days to drive there, the driving-across-the-US-on-bits-of-what-used-to-be-Route-66 ambition still being in there somewhere from childhood and all. Luckily, sanity set in and I decided to stick with the plane, but maybe one day. The other issue was that if I did that, I’d not really have had enough time either at NASA or Kirtland to see people properly.

Planning travel always seems to take too much time, even with internet booking. I’m sure that this trip to the States will have taken longer to plan than it will to execute. I mean, you expect that kind of thing for Missions or Expeditions or other-important-sounding-trips, but this is only for a bunch of meetings and giving a few talks. Oh, and I have to write a report when I get back in order to be able to claim expenses. Whoopee. It also occurs to me that most of the time at NASA will actually be spent form filling in preparation for my next trip there.

This really isn’t me being horribly annoyed about any of this — I rather like travel, actually. But I do abhor wasted time that I could otherwise have spent reading LiveJournal working.

You may also know me as compilerbitch on LiveJournal. I tend to keep my LJ relatively low bandwidth, and use it more as a many to many email system than as a blog as-such.

FindAtlantis is going to be my first foray into ‘for-real’ blogging. Wherein, hopefully, I might write some stuff that might be interesting. Maybe. A bit. Oh well, maybe someone will read it.

For the next few months, this blog will mostly feature thesis angst, trip reports (I have a few visits and conferences coming up) and probably also some technical rants from time to time.

You might like to know that this blog is syndicated to livejournal as findatlantis.