Life goes on

Granary baps: my staple food in York

Monday

The plan was to have a proper English breakfast at the Edge on Monday morning. They do breakfasts as well as dinners; I haven't tried them yet as there is really no need and it would disrupt my hopefully ongoing process of slimming down; but as a conclusion to Elise's visit it sounded like a fun idea. However, dinner on Sunday (late!) had been so copious and Elise was dozing so lustily when it was time to execute this plan that nothing came of it. Instead we took a very leisurely time getting up and having a bap (one of those words that I am sure I never learned in school) in the apartment.

When returning from Scarborough yesterday we had already bought a ticket for Elise's journey back to Manchester airport. She was to go there in the morning, look around a few hours in Manchester itself and then catch her flight at the end of the afternoon. Buying the train ticket confirmed the outrageous pricing strategy that I had first found out, to my detriment, while coming back from Canada via London: the price for the same stretch can more than double if you take a later or earlier train. In this case we used that to our advantage since there was no great hurry.

Musilon

All went quite smoothly. I saw Elise off after we returned the rented bicycle. See you on Friday! A very short period this time. I will be home well in time for dinner, then that evening Willem-Jan is giving a concert with the choir he has joined, which fortunately I will also be in time for.

Most of Monday afternoon went into another round of selecting the papers for the FASE conference, in a skype call with my co-chair, Stefania Gnesi. Most of the Programme Committee members have been diligent in contributing to the on-line discussion of the merits and demerits of the papers they have reviewed, so that we were able to accept and reject some 20% of the outstanding submissions. Next round on Wednesday. The whole thing is taking more time than I anticipated, maybe that's an effect of having more time available on the whole. If you want something done quickly, give the job to a busy person!

What with my illness and Elise's visit, there has hardly been time for physical exercise the past week, and I was glad to be able to pick up the routine through another Body Pump session. I'm actually, finally, starting to notice some improvement. Afterwards however I was so tired that I decided trying to continue working could only be counter-productive, so I decided to leave everything to early Arend and call it a day.

Tuesday

The grind, as in back to the grind, suggests an unpleasant job or task, and is therefore a very inappropriate description of my in many respects luxurious circumstances here. Still, this short period between Elise's visit and the 2-week holiday coming up feels a bit like filling time. Furtunately there were still some things to look forward to: Christmas dinner with the Enterprise group on Tuesday night, and The Hobbit on Wednesday evening. When I mentioned my plan to go there (in fact I already booked a ticket) that actually found some response, so in a very minor sense I managed to organise a Film Night!

Class diagram (orange) decorated with OCL constraints (white)

The Enterprise Group was visited today by Ed Willink, a very Dutch-sounding name for an English guy whom I had met before several times. One of those people who seem to be able to to everything at the same time: running his own company, sucessfully too as he finances more than one of the EngD students I had occasion to mention some weeks ago; and simultaneously doing relevant academic work. He has taken over the torch in improving an industry-standard for constraint specification, called OCL (for Object Constraint Logic); this is the closest to formal (first-order) logic you can come in industrial practice, and so it is quite relevant in all ongoing efforts to transfer some of the insights from academic research. Ed gave an illuminating exposition of the newest plans and the slow, sometimes painful process involved in creating a standard that will serve all diverse interests and still be formally precise.

In the evening there was the Christmas dinner at Akhbars, the same place Elise and I celebrated the end of her visit on Sunday. Preceding that we had some drinks at the Duke of York. Not the most inspired name of all time you'll agree, but with an interesting side story. This is a new bar, serving Leeds beer, and apparently licenced without much support from the bars and shops in the neighbourhood. Louis Rose declared that he could not be seen going there as he has a good friend managing one of the other bars on the same (King's) square. (Did I mention before that York is absolutely packed with bars and/or pubs?) Evidently there is a deep rivalry of which, of course, as an outsider I happily know nothing at all. Gangs of New York was mentioned as an analogy - I hope that is not to be taken too literally.

I attempted a few more ales, then it was dinner time. Christmas crackers on the table: I gained a wafer-thin paper hat and the following world-class joke: "What do you call it when a farmer repairs his trousers? A cabbage patch". My choice this time was on the edge of my tolerance for hot food. I learn nothing from this since the names of the dishes disappear from my memory one minute after I put them there. To douse the flames we had some more after-dinner drinks with the most lively of the bunch, but all firmly within the range of decency: when I got home it was still well before midnight.