Last post: The Twente-York connection

University of York: 1963-2013

This, nr. 100, will be the final post of this blog. I am home safely, after one last time being astounded by the pricing policies of British rail (for an upgrade of a 14£ second-class ticket to first-class they wanted to charge me 66£), one last irritation at Manchester airport security measures (the slowest in the world, except for Jerusalem which is in a league of its own), one last instance of fearing for my connection in Amersfoort (this time just making it). Next week I will be sucked back into the whirlpool of the everyday business at the university, involving among other things two courses that I have to teach, and numerous administrative duties that others have been good enough to take over for the duration of my sabbatical but will be glad to shed now that I no longer have that accepted excuse.

What can I conclude about the Twente-York connection? I feel I've written enough about the relation between the respective research areas of the Enterprise Systems group in York and the Formal Methods and Tools group in Twente. In the months and maybe years to come I hope to benefit from the increased insight, understanding and contacts gained through my Yorkish period, but for now I do not want to speculate. Rather, let me present a (pretty random) list of less obvious and more surprising connections that I have found.

York university waterfowl

The university

1. Age. England is home to two of the three oldest universities in the world (Oxford and Cambridge, the oldest one overall being Bologna), and many other English academic institutions have a venerable history, but York is not among them. In fact it was founded exactly one year after the university of Twente, and so celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, in 2013. I have not personally observed much of that except some banners proclaiming the fact. When the U Twente celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2012, the (then still) queen, Beatrix, was present at the Dies Natalis in December, but such a thing would be entirely out of the question in the U.K.
2. Campus. The University of Twente prides itself at being the only campus university in the Netherlands. This means that there are student facilities (housing, sports, shops, bars) on the university grounds. So is York a campus university, but in England this is the rule rather than the exception, and in fact it is carried through more thoroughly than at Twente: not only is there a lot of student housing, but it is intermingled with the lecture halls and research facilities, so that it is not always immediately clear which of these purposes a particular building serves.
3. Geese. Since its founding and possibly before that, the campus grounds of the University have hosted a gaggle of geese, who tend to make their way from pond to pond (of which there are ten or so) without any regard for traffic whatsoever. Geese traffic lights were installed at some point, but I never saw them working, might just have been an elaborate joke. At York there is a single, large pond on each of the campuses, and especially the old (west) campus has a large flock of water birds, equally certain that the grounds are theirs to go wherever they want. At night you have to be careful not to stumble over them (or slip in their excrement).
   
4. Sports. The facilities are extensive at both universities. In York there is not just the Sport Village which I have frequented (and which is actually open to the general public) but also a lot of fields where other, outside sports are practiced - football, hockey, tennis are certainly among them. I know the scope at Twente is very diverse indeed, ranging from boxing to gliding and from skating to sailing. The U Twente also is the end point of the world's largest relay run, the Batavierenrace (6500 participants), starting in Nijmegen at 24:00 at night and ending on the Twente campus in the afternoon of the day thereafter. I do not know if there is anything of the same magnitude at York, but the number of runners you see is even larger, at every hour of the day and in every type of weather, too.

These are some of the analogies, but of course there are also notable differences. The U Twente is (mainly) a technical university, and this determines the mix of students you may expect to encounter. York has some technical studies but also subjects like theatre and law. It is, furthermore, a much more international venue, student-wise, than Twente; having English as your native language surely makes this easier, but it must be said that the U Twente is not doing as well as some other Dutch universities in attracting students from abroad (espacially Asia).

The town

Twente is the name of the region; the municipality in which the University of Twente is located, and the town with which it is mostly associated, is Enschede.

Hop-on-hop-off

1. Size. Neither York nor Enschede are major cities. Exact comparisons are difficult because you need a good definition of how to count. Wikipedia has York at either 153,717 or 202,400, depending on who is counted as inhabitant; Enschede stands at 158.757, but Hengelo, equidistant from the university, boasts another 80.992. Very comparable.
2. Tourist industry. On my very first day in York I passed by the parking lot for the hop-on-hop-off-busses of York. It is a very popular tourist destination and remains crowded in the weekends all throughout the year. Tourism is both international and English: the groups of Asian tourists are easy to pick out, and on Sunday you hear a lot of foreign languages spoken, but when I was at the York Dungeons with Floris, all the other members of the group were from other parts of England. In addition, I have come to believe that every stag or hen party in a 100 mile radius is organised in York. In Twente, on the other hand, there is also a lot of tourist industry, also involving busses, but of a slightly different nature: the busses serve to bring the inhabitants of the region to far-away places in Europe.
3. Bicycling. Back on my hobby-horse! I have made plenty of critical remarks about the attitude of the English towards cycling: but at the same time it has to be said that, for an English town, the amenities in York are reasonable. All traffic lights have dedicated areas for bicycles; there are a lot of bicycle lanes painted out on the roads (even though they do tend to disappear in unpredictable places); there are parking facilities for bikes throughout the town and the university. In an overview of regularly cycling commuters in England, York comes 4th with 15%. You might expect cycling to be popular especially among the students, but it isn't: the major complaints are about shortage of car parking space, not bicycle stands.
   
4. Sports (again!). The first-ever marathon of York took place while I was there. Enschede has had its first marathon in 1947 and thus roundly beats York in this category. In the realm of more culturally determined sports, York can boast of its Knavemire horse race track, in operation since 1731; Enschede can offer it speed skating rink, slightly younger (since 2008); full points go to York. Then again, Enschede is also home to F.C. Twente, doing reasonably well in the country's premier division (its most successful trainer, Steve McLaren, having been born in York!), whereas to the best of my knowledge, York does not appear anywhere in the professional English soccer leagues.
5. Going out. Enschede has a nice center with dozens of bars and restaurants. There is a theatre, two small cinemas (a much larger cinema is actually outside town, very close to the university). Unfortunately, in this category York leaves all competition far behind: four theatres, four cinemas, hundreds of bars and restaurants, ... There are interesting differences in the age groups you find on the streets and in the cinemas (much more middle-aged in York), and the times from which they start to vomit in the streets (much earlier at night), which I have already remarked upon in several posts.

I realise upon re-reading the above that I have pointed out differences much more than connections. Here's another one, more nationally than regionally determined: shop opening hours. The Calvinist tradition in the Netherlands still manages to keep these to 18:00 (for most shops) or 20:00 (for some larger supermarkets) and Sunday opening is a continual struggle. For me as a customer it is really extremely convenient to be able to get your groceries until 22:00 on weekdays and Saturdays, or 18:00 on Sundays.

Final words

No one who has followed this blog on a regular basis can doubt that I had a great time in York. I have to give thanks to both my colleagues at the University of Twente for granting me this chance, and those in York for being willing to host me. It's been a terrific experience.

I also thank you, my readers, for showing interest in my adventures. I feel that keeping this blog was one of the best decisions I made, but I would not have reached 100 posts if it had not been for your reactions and comments, both entered here and communicated through other media (such as the good old word-of-mouth).

Arend Rensink

Hengelo, 1 February 2014

I still have a suitcase in York

It is 117 days ago today that I left for York. Subtract 15 days for Christmas holidays and 4 for the short trip back at the end of October to play my part in the visitation of the Computer Science curriculum: tomorrow I will reach the 99th day of my stay away from home (including travel days). That sounds like a long period, but it feels like no time at all.

I gave another final presentation today, at the PLASMA group. It was a bit hard working up the energy to prepare it properly: not only was yesterday's dinner copious enough to make me skip breakfast, but also I wanted to get some packing and cleaning done. It was not entirely clear what course the evening would take, but I did not want to leave everything to the last minute.

Packing is a good deal easier than for coming here. Straightforward really: you have two suitcases and it is exactly clear what should go into them. There are some optional items like the towel I bought here, but if there is no room then I can just leave all that behind. For the rest it's just a question of cramming everything into as little space as possible.

Raw theory

When I did get around to the preparation for my talk, it was in the end just a matter of organising the theory for control automata that I have developed (and for the greater part implemented) during the past few weeks: this crowd can read operational semantics, so there is much less need to package it. The advantage of having to tell someone what you have achieved is always that you gain a better overview yourself as well, and after having presented the technical details I felt quite good about it.

Stock of fruit yorghurts, earlier this week

Afterwards I sunk into a black hole, from which I emerged only when it was time for the very last farewell drink, at 17:00 in the Glasshouse. This evolved into two pints of Grolsch, but for everyone except me it is an ordinary working day of course, so no adventures. Lots of "nice to get to know you" and "have a safe trip home"; then I was on the first stage of that trip, back to the flat. At 19:00 I had my last meal at the Edge, at 20:00 my "landlord" dropped by, at 21:00 Nikos came to collect the bike. Some final cleaning; as I write this, the room is once more in pristine condition, empty and bare. Even the fridge is pretty well emptied: I will leave behind half a bottle of tomato ketchup and half a carton of margarine. There are also some portions left of the excellent fruit yoghurt I have enriched my Yorkish diet with, but those I will still eat.

One final night. It's funny: I live in a building with almost only Asian students, and they are on the whole the quietest of people. I think the soundproofing is no better than you would expect of student housing, but except for the gate to the bike shed, which is directly below me and closes with an almighty clang, I have not heard my neighbours at all, the entire time. Tonight of all nights, however, there seems to be some party going on, requiring especially a lot of giggling. I have no doubt I will sleep well nonetheless: the vagaries of saying goodbye have taken their toll, I am now very tired. Taxi has been ordered for tomorrow, I can't think of anything I might have forgotten.

#byebyeArend

To say goodbye in style, tonight I invited both the Enterprise Systems and PLASMA groups to a dinner at Akbars. Which poses a nice cross-cultural puzzle! When you invite people for a dinner at a restaurant, what do they expect?

When we lived in Germany, even at the end of a period of five years we hadn't quite wrapped our minds around the fact that when you get invited to a German home, no matter what time of day, there will be food. 14:00, 16:00, 18:00, 20:00, 22:00 - make sure to get there hungry, because if you do not do justice to the cake, spread, meal or whatever is put in front of you, you will be insulting your host. It is not a question of being hungry: you are there, you are served food, period. We made some (with hindsight) amusing mistakes.

What I have in mind when I invite people to a dinner at a restaurant is that I am their host, they my guests, and the bill is taken care of. But is that what people will understand on the receiving end of the invitation? How can you know? The anwer is: you can't.

To liven up the occasion I had prepared a little quiz, somewhat late in the day if the purpose had been truly missionary; but it was just in good fun. As rewards for correct answers I handed out some things that I bought here but will not bring home: bike maps, my Cityscreen membership card, a spray can of Mr. Muscle oven cleaner, a coffee mug, that style of thing.

All day I long I was scatter-brained. The knowledge that it's almost end-ot-time here, that wall looming up, was enough to make it impossible to concentrate. I got very little done and was almost glad to find it was time to go home. For preprandial drinks I got Richard and James to join me at the Blue Bell, one of the pubs on my list that I had not yet ticked off. Then it was Akbars, home of the family nan bread. They were as good as ever, and the quiz + prizes were received very well, I think. All in all, just what I had in mind when planning this.

There were a few drinks afterwards with some of the guys & partners: Dimitris, Nikos, Thanos, James. (If some of the names are Greek to you, that is how it should be.) I tried to clear up some remaining questions I have: for instance, why do the English say "cheers" when they mean "thank you"? Not much progress there. Rather than another ale I tried a cocktail, but one was enough. Also this is a cultural thing: even after a night out, you are home before twelve.

On the way back, I found the Ouse up again above bike path level, which was a nice gesture. During yesterday's preparation for the quiz, the level wat 6,50m: now it is at 7,40m. No matter, I will own the bike for less than 24 hours from now anyway - sold it to Nikos.

Tenpin

Tonight I took part in a historic event: the first-ever social outing of the Enterprise Group. The kick-off was a bout of tenpin bowling, which in the Netherlands we just call bowling. (Ninepin bowling does exist but is called "kegelen", which is a proper Dutch word and thereby shows it is the older variant.)

To be fair, it might not be absolutely true that this was the first event. Certainly there are Christmas dinners and participation at the Computer Science Quiz. But now there is a fresh initiative by James Williams and Adolfo Sanchez-Barbudo Herrera to have a bit more activity. I felt honour-bound to join in, but would have done so in any case.

Got the T-shirt

Joining in actually required a bit of juggling as tonight was also the last opportunity to acquire my T-shirt for the 5th Sweatshop Run Club attendance. Which in turn was thrown into doubt by the physical protest my body was organising, through what by lack of a more expert opinion I will continue to call bursitis. However, Dic Lofenac is a wonderful guy and had me feeling well enough to risk another sleepless night in return for another tangible memory of my time here. So I went there at 18:30, planning to finish my run at 19:00, get back to the apartment, shower and eat, leave again at 19:30 and be at the bowling alley at 20:00. Sounds impossible? Read on...

Tonight the SRC organisers turned out to have planned another interval speed test, just like the very first time I attended. That was a lot more stressful than I had bargained for, and in fact I was planning to take it very easy. Taking it easy caused me to run up together with a girl whose asthma was playing up and who was thinking of doing only a single lap instead of the suggested two or three. That suited me very well in turn. so morally strengthened by the fact that I was not the only one, I cheated a bit and turned back early.

The bowling Gang of Four: Xavier, Jim, Seyyed, Adolfo

As you can imagine, that did not only reduce the effort involved from "totally irresponsible" to merely "ridiculous" but also did wonders for my schedule. I am proud to say, moreover, that my by now at least reasonable knowledge of York's byways allowed me to make it to the bowling alley in very good time. So at 19:58 I latched my bike to a tree in the absence of alternative parking spots, well in time to join the other guys.

What do you know: the bowling alley was the spitting image of the Go Planet Bowling in Enschede! Same controls, same silly clips shown on the screen after every throw. We had proper good fun, possible Jim was a bit miffed that I beat him, but hey I'll be gone in two days!

Over the limit

Gary limit

Tonight I learned about the Gary limit: past three pints there is no going back, only forward. I appreciate the message but I do not like generalisms of this kind, so I plan to defy that. A strong coffee should do it.

Why should I even approach the Gary limit on a Monday night? Well, we were sending Chris Poskitt off back to Zürich, using a cheeky beer as the means. And to quote a pretty meaningless Dutch saying: one egg is no egg, two eggs is half an egg, three eggs is an Easter egg.

In the ordinary course of events I would not be susceptible to the lure of a beer today, not even a pint or three of Grolsch at the Glasshouse, but fate, or is it destiny, would have it so: the limit I do seem to have overstepped is what my body will endure in the name of health. Playing horse on Saturday appears to have revived a chronic bursitis in my hip. This started to play up yesterday: at first I assumed I had been sitting too cramped behind the keyboard, but when I couldn't sleep half the night I remembered having had exactly the same symptoms some years ago. Diagnosis: bursitis; cure: diclofenac. So the first thing I did this morning was to google for "prescription diclofenac", and then "pharmacy york": to my relief they do sell this stuff without prescription here, and there is a pharmacy very close by. The word is stressed differently: rather than the Dutch "díclofenác" it is "diclofénac", but after stern looks and severe warnings I was allowed to buy a small cure.

So there you have it: although our body pump instructress, Emma, practically invited me to gatecrash today's session when I told her on Saturday that that would be my last time, because today's class was fully booked, I could not take advantage of that offer and had to make do with the Glasshouse instead. Starting the celebration of my own goodbye in style, as it were. In that regard it looks to be a very interesting week anyway: tomorrow night for the first time in the history of the Enterprise Group there will be communal bowling, and on Wednesday night I've invited everyone to my own farewell dinner. There were even some rumours of a pub crawl on Thursday. In one week I will undo all the hard work of four months running, spinning and pumping.

Also in the spirit of saying goodbye, I gave a final presentation in the Enterprise Group seminar today, under the header "The adventures of a Dutchman in York". It was partially serious - for the first time I tried to explain wat I've been doing this month, I hope it came over - and partially some random thoughts and observations based on my 4-month stay here: the sort of thing I have also been posting about in this blog. More ominously, I received a mail from Jaco van de Pol, head of the Formal Methods and Tools group at Twente, setting up a skype call for tomorrow to discuss the tasks and duties I'll have to pick up again from next week on. During my absence he has become head of the Computer Science department as well as interim director of the allied research institute: it is not to be wondered at if some of his past responsibilities now glide down upon my shouders. Which does nothing to increase my already pretty low level of lookingforwardnesstogoingback; but let's face it, I've had a fair run, all good things come to an end, and all that.

Eating your own dog food

I have no idea how generally known this saying is, but "eating your own dog food" in software development means to use your own products in your daily work. It is a good principle, because this way you will discover for yourself what does and what does not work well. Imagine that you found out that the majority of Apple employees prefer to work on a Windows PC - that would be very embarassing, wouldn't it?

The principle also applies to computer science. In the course of the years we try to teach our students some good practices: document your code, structure it well, use version control, and do a lot of testing. All of these are very unpopular because they take away time from the actual coding, which is the fun part. It all starts to make sense only when you start working on larger projects, especially in collaboration with others (always bad programmers who cannot be trusted with your code), and most especially when the project lasts for more than a few months and keeps getting modified and expanded. For a small code base, say a few thousand lines of code, it is at least possible to keep a mental record of the structure and design choices, but all that goes away when it grows beyond 100,000 lines or so.

There are also gruesome statistics about defect density, or average number of bugs per number of lines, which no-one will admit could possibly apply to their own code. Something like one bug per 100 lines of code (LOC) is not at all out of the ordinary. (Here I should say some appropriate words about how poorly defined this measure is and how careful one should be in interpreting the results: to name just one idiotic consequence, a good way to improve your defect density is to insert thousands of empty lines. Exact figures should be taken with buckets of salt, but the message I want to convey here is that software bugs abound.)

I am afraid that, as computer scientists, we ourselves seldom practice what we preach. As should be expected, a lot of research in computer science is supported by experiments that are supposed to demonstrate the value of the newly developed ideas. These experiments are almost always carried out using special tools written especially for that purpose. Alas, it would be naive to claim that we do any better here than our students. Documentation? No time, there's a paper to be written! Rigorous testing? Why, it's just a small tool, I'm a crack programmer, and anyway no-one besides myself is supposed to use it.

My own research concerns techniques for reducing errors in software. Admittedly there is a huge gap between the level on which I investigate this and the level on which my results would be directly helpful in industry, but nevertheless that is the context for my work, and also the context for a tool like GROOVE. Like everyone else, I'd like to claim that my dog food is mouthwatering, wonrderful stuff: once you've tasted it you will want nothing else. But in the meanwhile I am very much struggling with the same old problems. Code documentation: yes, a fair bit. Testing? Our standard test suite achieves less than 60% of line coverage. A PhD graduate of mine, Eduardo Zambon, recently ran some statistics on the GROOVE code base: we have close to 160,000 lines of code, which according to industry-standard practice should have required more than 40 man-years of development time. Not bad for an academic tool that has taken me and co-workers 10 years devoting only a small part of our time, but it also shows the magnitude of the maintenance problem we have been creating as we went along.

All of the above will give you some idea what I mean when I say that this programming stuff takes more time than I can afford. Fortunately the weather today was as bad as predicted, so I did not have to regret choosing to stay indoors and getting on with it. Only after 14:00 there were a few hours of daylight, a watery sun even. To escape from my apartment I did the Orbital Route again, a 15 km trip around York which was also the very first thing I tried after I had bought my bike. The circularity is appealing. Then it was back to the grind, with a frozen pizza in the way of dog food. At the time of writing, however, the simulteaneous need to also finish my last bottle of wine has probably made it wiser to stop coding, so as not to increase the defect density unnecessarily.

Local rituals

This morning was Graduation Day at the University of York. They have two of them every year, one in winter and one in summer. It is the occasion at which everyone who has earned a diploma in the half-year before can have it ceremonially handed out, in rented robes and with Mom and Dad present.

At the U Twente we have almost done away with massive central award ceremonies. Up until last year there used to be one for the Propedeuse, meaning the first year of the Bachelors (which is not even a proper diploma), but that is abandoned as of this year. Then there is the Bachelor diploma award ceremony: that's really the only collective one left, but even there it is organised per subject, the psychologists are not mixed up with the physicists (God forbid!). For the Masters you typically get your diplioma at the final presentation of your thesis: family is present, ready to be amazed at the stuff their kids now know, but it is a small, individual affair. Well, not so small if you have a lot of friends, but it never goes above fifty - except in the case of Mark Timmer, who has a lot of friends. At the top of the ladder there is the PhD defense, which I had occasion to blog about before (Viva la Viva): for this, in the Netherlands at least, the ceremonial function has all but taken over.

Anyway, two (ex-)PhD students I got to know here have graduated in the past half year: Chris Poskitt (whom I am trying to set up a collaboration with right now, and in fact turns out to be one of Mark Timmer's friends!) and Simon Pould (who helped organise the Computer Science Quiz in November last year). They were due to receive their diplomas today. I seriously considered going to the ceremony just to see how this is done here and to be able to compare, but it turned out you had to have tickets, which of course I didn't. There is a second location with a live stream on a big screen, but even for that you had to have tickers, which I also didn't. In the end I wasn't even very sorry, as they decided to have the ceremony at the to me very odd hour of 9:30 on a Saturday morning: attending would have meant giving up my last chance at another parkrun as well as my last body pump session.

In training

So I went to those instead. I can say very proudly that I achieved an average of 12 km/h over 5 km of horse race track! For me this is very fast. At high school we had something called the Cooper test, which consisted of 12 minutes of running and trying to cover as much distance as you could. Then, at the age of 16 or so, I was glad to get to 2400 m, which is also 12 km/h but over a much shorter stretch. The sporty types got as far as 3000 m, and indeed among the hundreds of parkrunners there are also some who finish in way under 20 minutes. Just consider: professional marathon runners cover 5 km in something like 15 minutes, but then they do this 8 times in a row... ouch! (To make the picture complete, the world record stands at slightly over 12,5 minutes, which is twice as fast as I can do it.)

I can also report that running followed by pumping is actually too much of a good thing. When I did this two weeks ago I had to take a nap in the afternoon, and today I very nearly did the same thing. I was kept awake only by the need to take care of some urgent work-related things that I had neglected during the week, as well as the last batch of washing I will do here.

The plan for the evening consisted of seeing Inside Llewyn Davis, the newest movie by the Coen Brothers, with dinner at the cinema first. I chose to go for the 19:15 screening as I expected that to be relatively quiet, but nothing could be further from the truth: I got about the very last seat, way up in a corner.

The Coen Brothers (Joel and Ethan) are directors of incredible diversity and usually very high quality, and this particular movie has about the best reviews you will ever see. Had I known what a bleak picture it paints, however, I probably would have given it a miss. The main character, the folk singer Llewyn Davis, is really going nowhere but down. How many bridges can you burn? It felt a lot like The Wrestler, another much-praised movie about an end-of-career performer who makes nothing but bad choices. I heartily dislike this kind of story, both in movies and in books: I'm looking for edification not despair. I think I wrote it before: I am an escapist at heart.

Tomorrow I will not go for a bike tour, last chance though it is. The weather is too changeable, like today's as well: sunny but windy one moment, pouring heavily and even more windy the next. The Yorkshire Dales will have to wait for another time and a more clement season.

Come rain come shine

Below freezing

I've decided that I shall pick up the pace of this blog again. I want to reach 100 posts; due to the magic of the decimal system we can all agree that this is a nice number to strive for. Come rain or come shine, news or no news, from now on you will be forced to read about my adventures every single day until the Twente-York connection is finally broken.

Looking back, I also see that I have been complaining about lack of time and other shortcomings in at least three out of the last ten posts, so there'll be no more of that, thank you very much! Or at least I'll try to keep it to a minimum: the theme is running through my mind a lot, and with my having to finish up here, the topic of time is pretty much unavoidable.

In training

Today both shine and rain came, in the typical way of the climate here. In the morning, because I fancied another portion of fried eggs, I had to take a run first (still trying to get to that Pavlovian stage where thinking of fried eggs will set my legs in motion). It was sunny and cold, probably still a bit freezing I think.  I've gotten in the habit of running in short sleeves, which is a bit chilly when you start but fine after 5 minutes or so. As a concession to the temperature I put on gloves: the hands are suffering most. A lot of the runners here actually do it barelegged, but I am not that brave; after a calf injury half a year ago I try to be careful of my legs. The English lasses get their training early on, going out at night in the fashion of the country with very little in the way of leg covering. Blokes are allowed trousers at such times (and probably suffer a lot fewer bladder infections).

At times I catch myself thinking that I am getting old. Not a thought I should linger upon, or I might start believing it.

When I was 20 I had eternal youth, but then I changed.

In the evening, after another fruitscarce day of programming and a few pints of Grolsch at the Glasshouse in good company (venting my frustration at my slow progress by being unusally outgoing and talkative) I went for my last games night through a veritable downpoor. I dropped off my stuff at the appartment and took the opportunity to put on my rain gear for the very first time I am here. Too late obviously, as I was already wet, but now I can claim that I could not have done without.

Through the desert once more

Not surprisingly given the weather, it was very quiet at the Bar Convent - the quietest of all the times I have been, I think. Nevertheless I had fun playing Through the Desert (not the same game as Timbuktu last week, but involving camels all the same) and Heckmeck, a rather silly game where you have to collect as many worms as you can, preferably by stealing them off your fellow chickens (pardon, players).

Like two weeks before, I joined a small group afterwards to the Punchbowl across the street for some food and drinks. These are the main group of non-university people I've gotten to meet, though a lot of them have come to study at the U of York from other parts of the country and then sought jobs here. The converation degraded a bit into grumbling about work and wages (a lot of bitterness, I've not been here long enough to fathom that); when it degraded even further into complaints about Microsoft word I decided to rather go home, do some typing, make sure the wine is finished before I leave, and give Early Arend a chance tomorrow to beat the Arend of two weeks ago at parkrun tomorrow.

Time's a-wasting

The end is almost upon me. It really feels that way. Exactly one week left, so in a sense everything I do here from now on is the last time. Today: last spin class (probably). Tomorrow: last Beyond Monopoly! evening. Saturday: last parkrun and body pump, last laundromat visit. Sunday: last chance to go for a bike tour. And so on, and so forth; I can see the whole week full of last things laid out in front of me. Frightening and saddening.

On the professional front I am trying on the one hand to initiate some things that I omitted to do in the months before, on the other to finish up some of the things I did start. (Still trying to have it all...) Neither has been very successful. On the initiating front, I am certainly expected to come home with new research contacts useful in acquiring new project funding. The European Union is putting a lot of money into research-like projects, and since the Dutch government has about the worst record in Europe in spending money on university-level expenditure we are increasingly dependent on such sources. (I say research-like because there is a different jargon in project land, with magic words like "applied research" and "validation" which are not really the investigation of new ideas but the application of existing ideas to practical problems.)

Richard Paige is very good at project acquisition, and so I went to have a little chat with him on Tuesday. Lesson learned: he started his road to success by partnering up with other research groups within the department. That is certainly something I could try at Twente more than I have so far. To name just one example: I learned that at our Human-Media-Interaction group in Twente there is a researcher that actually contributes to the development of the Epsilon tool maintained in York. This means that he is actually doing stuff that is right up my street, or at least the street I want to be. I'll talk to him!

A major challenge for me in this context (and I am using challenge here in the newspeak sense to refer to a problem) is that I have never been good at selling myself, in the sense of claiming to be able to solve other people's problems with the stuff I know, if I am not sure that I can actually do so. In any potential project there are many "but-if"s and "maybe"s that you have to ignore or sweep under the rug to get off the ground (how's that for a metaphor), and that feels like a dishonesty (euphemism for lie) that I am simply very bad at committing.

As regards finishing things that I started: there are actually many loose threads, but one that I particularly want to tie up is the programming job that I have set myself to, which I already spent a post on last week in deep under. This is still far from finished, unfortunately, and it is starting to feel a bit like throwing good time after bad, with the same type of arguments. If I stop this now, it will be about three weeks wasted. Yes, but if you continue it will be even more time wasted. Yes, but I've come so far, I don't want to give up now. What, you want to give up a week from now instead?

I'm also still trying to get a collaboration off the ground with Chris Poskitt and Mike Dodds, together again with Richard. Marrying bidirectional transformation (Richard) to graph transformation (me) and graph-based assertional reasoning (Mike and Chris). We were supposed to have a meeting about that today for which I should have prepared something, but instead I was programming all Wednesday, with a knot in my stomach because I knew I was probably spending my time unwisely. Then the meeting was cancelled, or rather delayed until next week, instantly unknotting me. Not to fall into the same trap again, I intend to start my preparations for this tonight; and look at me, I am writing a blog post! The first one in three days, high time, but a clearer case of procrastination you will not easily find. After this I urgently need to go shopping.

Fun, Fear and Fandom

Day 2 (Sunday)

The day began slowly. With Floris still snoozing heavily at 9:30 I decided to go for a run first; only outside did I discover that it was actually raining steadily out of a very grey and overcast sky - quite unYorkish in my own analysis. I felt I was playing Atlantis again: paths that were turning into water as I ran along them. No urgency in getting going, in other words. Fortunately it did clear up soon afterwards, so at 12:00 I started Floris' day as well, with another ham-and-eggs.

8 out of 70 different tastes

It was still hard to raise any enthousiasm for activities involving much physical exercise, but in the end we did make a small bike trip out to my office building on Heslington East, then over my favourite bicycle paths - the ones that allow you to pretend you're a train - to the supermarket and the old abandoned Rowntree chocolate factory. One of the BM players we talked to on Saturday (Theo, the same guy who told us that the Theatre Royal panto was the best in the world) had said that there was still activity at the factory - Oompa Loompas maybe? When we were there we could see one corner of the enormous grounds where something might be happening on a week day, but for the larger part it still looked, and no doubt is, truly abandoned.

Why the supermarket, you ask? It turned out Floris had been given a shopping order by his friends back home: get some jelly beans, preferable Jelly Bellies. I had never heard of those but it seemed reasonable to start the quest at the supermarket. When they turned out to have jelly beans but not of the right denomination, we finally had a true purpose for our visit to Medieval York. After a very brief glimpse into the Minster for form's sake, we proceeded to the York Sweet Shop, from which we were directed to its American competitor, the Candy Hero. This turned out to stock eveything one could ever want to try out in the domain of garishly coloured sweets, jelly bellies featuring prominently among them.

That done, out of the options: (i) a walk on the walls, (ii) a ride to the railway museum, or (iii) down into the York Dungeons, without much delay the choice fell on (iii). It is an establishment that I had seen in passing and thought to be some kind of museum also, like the Tower in London, with mock-up cells and ancient instruments of torture. Well, the last two items were there in abundance, but a museum it is most definitely not. At the camping on Terschelling which we have frequented in the past, there is always one night of full moon dedicated to what they call the "vampire parade", in which groups of campers dress up and play out preferably frightening scenes of any kind in a very dark piece of forest, for the benefit of the other vacationers who get to walk around there for an hour or so. Great fun. Well, this is the style of things at the York Dungeon, except that it is done very professionally and inspired by past events that really took place (or are really rumoured to have taken place) in the city during the last twelve centuries: Viking invasions, the plague, wars, witch burning, and much more. So, we were in for a very different treat than we thought, but in its kind it was high-quality stuff, going under the title "Fear is a Funny Thing".

The 1331 Beef Burger

In the second half of the afternoon we went to a movie: American Hustle, well worth a visit. In fact there were enough twists so that I want to see it again, preferably with subtitles in fact. But it is also a very long movie: well over two hours. This meant that it was now dinner time. I tried to get Floris to an Indian restaurant, which he likes in principle; maybe I should have insisted so he could experience the difference between the Netherlands and England when it comes to Indian cuisine. However, since it was really his weekend, I didn't insist. After wandering along several wine bars and the like we ended up in 1331, showing once more that I am neither very imaginative nor very adventurous when it comes down to taking people out for dinner. On the other hand, it's a really nice place and the food is good.

Not wanting to make it too late a night (given the plans for Monday) we agreed to go back to the appartment after this. The real monuments of Medieval York will have to wait until Floris is at an age where he decides to take an interest. No matter, we had a very entertaining day as it was. Topped off, inevitably, by two more Dr. Who episodes.

Day 3 (Monday)

Change of plan! Renting a car was voted down. Rather, Floris' new-found interest combined with an old interest of myself brought us to Liverpool today. Not a place I thought to visit during my stay in England, but go with the flow has been my motto this weekend, and so: why not?

The old interest of mine will be guessed immediately by anyone who has every shared it. The picture on the right should be sufficient but not necessary. To me, the name Liverpool means one thing only: home of the Beatles. Time was when I typed out song texts on a mechanical type writer, marked every occurrence of the work love in red and gave this to a girl in my school class that I fancied. This did not have the desired effect; but for a time I think I knew every song by heart.

So, when Floris declared that if there was a Dr. Who fan shop anywhere near he would really like to throw away some money there, and a brief search on the web revealed that for this we had to go either to Newcastle or to Liverpool, realisation dawned upon me that this might actually be an unlooked-for chance to revive this almost forgotten piece of personal history. Not to mention that the fan shop itself was the Forbidden Planet, about which I also have a story to tell.

Top two: GBP 59,30 for Floris. Bottom two: GBP 49,40 for myself.

Liverpool is said to lie close to Manchester, close enough to engender football-related rivalry that makes Ajax-Feijenoord pale in comparison; but it is not really close in terms of travelling. To get there with time to do anything at all before catching the scheduled 17:25 flight out of Manchester required a much faster morning ritual than the previous days. However, need is the mother of speed and without mishap we got to York station and dropped the rented bike off. Making the man at the counter understand our complex train ticket requirements was no mean job. At the end we came away with the tickets we needed; but closer inspection revealed that I had paid more for Floris, to get to Liverpool and then the airport, than for myself, who would in addition return to York. The mysteries of British rail ticket pricing are not intended for mere humans to understand.

The Forbidden Planet! In my first days as a research assistant, I worked in a project with partners in Reading, England; and this allowed me to fly to London a number of times. I was much more of an inexhaustable reader than I am now, and so every time I was there, I would go to this little bookstore near Tottenham Court Road where they had this simply amazing collection of Science Fiction books. Equally amazing was that these books were to be had for prices that, after conversion to guilders, amounted to less than half or even a third of what you would have to pay in the Netherlands if you could find them in the first place. At one occasion, when returning home my suitcase was so heavy that I could hardly carry it. Fortunately, weight restrictions for luggage were also still a thing of the future...

Albert Dock

Since then they have grown enormously and branched out not just geographically but also into other materials than just books. In particular, they are now apparently Britain's No. 1 store for fan merchandise of any kind - including Dr. Who. Floris and I spent the better part of a mouth-watering hour wandering around the shelves, though in different parts of the store.

The "Beatles Story" exhibition at Albert Dock is also a treat, though of a different kind. It is actually a rather traditional setup: lots of things shown behind glass, John Lennon's first banjo, Brian Epstein's contracts, original album covers and suchlike. I would have said you'd have to be interested aleady to find this really interesting, but somewhat to my surprise (and relief), Floris, who had not even known the connection between the Beatles and Liverpool in advance, drank up the audio tour. And so, needless to say, did I. But let's face it, it is a story of epic proportions.

We had less than 3 hours altogether in Liverpool, but it was enough. Where Floris had almost fallen asleep on the way to Liverpool, I very much felt like doing so on the trip to the airport. I didn't quite, not even on the home stretch after dropping him off, but I will do so immediately after finishing this post. I hope I have not equally exhausted you, dear reader, with this overlong report.

Floris at games and play

Floris winning at Atlantis

Day 1/2 (Friday)

After stocking up and then going back deep under on Friday, followed by a couple of Grolsch pints at the Glasshouse, it was a matter of getting the train to Manchester in time to pick up Floris. On Thursday I had already checked him in, and a call home confirmed that he left there early enough to get to the airport with plenty of time to spare. When I made ready to go to the station, I started receiving messages from the man himself, asking where he should go at the airport; so I knew he was about to get into the plane while I was boarding the train, to meet up at a different point on the map, a hundred kilometers west from me and about five times that distance for him. Funny idea, though when I tried to communicate that feeling to Floris he didn't get it.

As I wrote before, the planned arrival time of the plane conspired with the scheduled train times to get us to York very late, so I had decided against renting a bike straight from the start - cycling on the wrong side of the road for the first time in your life well after midnight through the dark streets of a foreign town did not sound like the best way to start off. However, lady Fortuna does smile from time to time, for instance by making planes early. We comfortably made one train earlier than I had feared, which shaved almost an hour and a half off the travel time. There was even ample time to buy a bap at the station - no luxury since the arrangements at Schiphol had confused Floris sufficiently to prevent him from having anything to eat there.

On the way to York I, was filled in on Dr. Who. It turns out that Floris has developed a new enthousiasm and is now working his way through the episodes of the newest revival of that ancient television series (turned 50 just a few months ago). I knew next to nothing about this phenomenon, having just the vaguest idea of Startrek- or Battlestar Galactica-like space operas - and even those are pretty much a closed book to me. But no, Dr. Who is just this one guy travelling around through space and time in what I would call a telephone booth, though it's much bigger on the inside. There is a very confusing background story which I gather should not be taken too seriously.

Well, there was nothing for it but to watch an episode when we got to the apartment (having taken a taxi to get there from the station). I have to say that it was quite humourous and reasonably intelligent. Sustained by a portion of microwave popcorn we made it quite a late night after all.

Day 1 (Saturday)

Plans for this day had been drawn up and were followed almost to the letter, delayed by an hour or so because of my initiation the night before into the world of Time Lords and Daleks. Since Floris was not immediately ready to concede it was daytime, I went for a run first, then used the hob for the only thing I ever have used or will use if for: ham and eggs. After we devoured those, it was a matter of dropping Floris off at the bus stop, picking him up again at the station, renting a bike and taking it 200m down the road to the Bar Convent.

Camels on their way to Timbuktu

There had been an inverview last week with the games club founder on BBC radio, reason to think it might potentially be much more crowded today. I do not know the profile of the typical BBC radio listener, but at least +Mike Dodds, a colleague from the PLASMA group, turned out to have heard this (of have heard of it, not quite sure). Indeed there were some new faces when we arrived, and many more got in during the afternoon. Attendance records must have shattered, there were more people than chairs or room at the available tables. It certainly made for a very lively atmosphere.

Floris was on a roll, and successively won games of

1. Atlantis (not the game with the same name that I used to play at Fanaat 30 years ago but was never commercialised). This has a lot in common with Cartahena and indeed was developed by the same games designer: try to get your men from A to B, in this case over a path that was turning into water as we ran along it.
2. Timbuktu, which had us lead our camels through a robber-filled desert and keep hold of as much of our trade goods as possible.
3. 7 Wonders, which is one of the current favourites (ranked 15 on boardgamegeek) and has the advantage of allowing up to 7 players while remaining very playable.
4. Lancaster, set in medieval England, requiring us to gain power points through judicious placement of knights and squires in the various counties of England or the perpetual conflicts with France.

A varied set of games once more, three of them new to me, and I still haven't made a dent in the collection. You can see that geography and history are the main sources of inspiration for games designers.

We ended up by playtesting a short game designed by one of the guys at the club, a variation of Citadels (which in Dutch is for some strange reason marketed as Machiavelli). Fortunately Floris couldn't quite keep up his winning streak this far. After that it was panto time!

Aladdin's mom (also main producer of the show)

Over lunch we had been told that the Theatre Royal pantomime is the best one in England, by some objective measure - I think there was a BBC award. That set our expectations quite high, and it was certainly a great show. I think you have to have grown up into this tradition of extravagant silliness to really make judgement calls like "good, better, best" though. Having talked to some people about it and read some reviews it's become clear to me that there are not only local references that are hard to catch as an outsider, and commonly known protocols, for instance in the interaction with the audience, but also local traditions that reach from one pantomime to next year's and serve as a big wink to the many spectators for whom this is an annual event. In any case, even while missing out on most of that stuff, we had a great time, Floris as well as me.

Afterwards I had a bit of a fright as I couldn't find my bicycle key. To my relief it turned out to be still stuck in the lock... To celebrate and to show Floris a little bit of York's night life we went for one drink in the House of the Trembling Madness (which Elise will remember). He did a good job of being completely unimpressed and indifferent. Indeed, his only admitted current passion is Dr. Who. Fine, back in the flat we followed the good doctor through a couple more episodes.

The pride of parenthood

Floris and Willem-Jan, 2000

So, tomorrow Floris will come and visit me. He is sixteen now, and in the meanwhile taller than me - something I never imagined could happen. He's been travelling independently through the Netherlands for a bit, for Magic-the-Gathering tournaments to be precise, though usually in company. Still, to find your way on your own at an airport for the first time and get into the right plane is not trivial even for an adult, let alone for a sixteen-year-old, eight foot four or not.

I will pick him up at Manchester of course. He's arriving quite late when the trains do not go very frequently any more, so unless we get lucky and he arrives early (which does happen from time to time) we will be in York only after 1:00 on Saturday morning - 2:00 for him, coming from an earlier time zone. We'll have to see how that works out.

Floris and Willem-Jan, 2011

Originally the plan was that Willem-Jan would visit here also, in November, but it turned out the most likely period, at the end of the first quarter (he's studying at the good old U of Twente), was not feasible. For Floris it looked more questionable at first if he could come at all, but he's in his final high school year and has exams this week and the next, with no lessons in between. There will be only one exam left next week, on Wednesday; but as that is an English listening test, spending the weekend in England is surely the best preparation one could imagine. His English is quite good anyway, better than mine at that age I am pretty sure. Spending many hours playing massive multiplayer games, not to mention Magic, does have its advantages.

It is quite possible you never heard of Magic the Gathering. It's a trading card game. That is a type of game in which you play with your own deck of cards against an opponent who has also built his own deck, which typically contains different cards. Cards interact in very intricate ways; the purpose is to defeat the cards your opponent plays. There are tens of thousands of cards to choose from - but they cost money, and we're talking serious sums here. The better cards are more expensive. There is also a huge second-hand market. It boils down to the fact that the more money you spend, the better your deck is - and so the more likely you are to win, although luck and skill also come in. Other games of this type which used to be popular are Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon, but Magic is way larger and very much alive. In the cafe where I play bridge every week, on another evening there is a weekly Magic tournament, and whereas the average bridge player age is increaing by almost a year every year, the Magic community is young and vibrant. I do not like this type of game myself, but I will be the last one to deny that there is a lot of creativity and dynamics in the community, and that does make it attractive.

Willem-Jan, Floris, and the man in the middle, 2013

In any case, Floris is an avid and fairly good Magic player. It is his main and at times only interest, occluding minor matters such as school. Certainly walking, bicycling or sports of any kind are not on his radar. It will be an interesting challenge to come up with a reasonable programme for the weekend. At least Saturday is Beyond Monopoly! day so that's taken care of, and in the evening I have booked the other pantomime I mentioned before (Aladdin and the Twankeys). For the rest we'll see. Showing him the Yorkish night life might be an option, but they are quite strict on age control here.

Yes, I am proud of my sons! It is a never-ending wonder to see them grow up. The point where I had much influence on that process is long past; I can only hope that I helped instill some lasting values. They make their own choices now, and though I do not always think they are wise choices, they seem to work out at least reasonably well for them. The world would be a boring place et cetera.

Deep under

As the end of my sabbatical is coming closer, the frequency and regularity of this blog are suffering. The reason is not that I have lost interest in keeping it up, but partly that it is becoming harder to find something new to write about, and partly that I have had very little time to spare. I have been quite monomaniacally working on an extension of GROOVE that I have mentioned in some previous post, namely recipes for rule scheduling.

At the time I was figuring out how this should be formulated theoretically, now I thought it would be a nice idea to actually code everything up, as a proof of concept. I started with this last week, but since Sunday I have really dived in, and I've hardly come up for air, food or sleep since. Time has passed in the outside world, but I've been breathing code and living on a different timescale - or so it seems. A little bit like the story levels in Inception (brilliant film!), although unfortunately the analogy is off in one very important aspect: in the world of coding, time does not pass 20 times as slowly. I do have trouble remembering what day it is.

It is very rare to have the occasion to spend days in succession on coding, but the feeling is like no other. It's very addictive: things are coming together, you certainly don't want to stop! It is a matter of keeping the appropriate patterns in your head, a mental image of the problem and its solution, which needs to be translated through your fingers, through the keyboard, through the programming language into the bits and bytes that constitute an executable version. Those patterns can grow so strong that everything you see or do is reinterpreted by them. Biking to the store becomes a matter of finding the right conditions, moments of choice, set of actions, path of execution. After a five minutes you notice it must be raining, since you are getting wet. Why is it so quiet on the streets? Oh, it's 21:00 - no wonder you feel hungry. Very strange dreams at night.

One of the reasons I've been able to keep this up is because I feel wonderfully fit these days. I am maintaining my various sports routines (the only non-essential I'm taking time for), and I have no doubt my current feeling of physical well-being is for a large part due to this. Did I say non-essential? Might have to rethink that.

So, let's hope that this will turn out to have been time well-spent, apart from enjoyable! I do know that this tool I keep going on about is one of the main pillars of my scientific reputation, such as it is. This has its disadvantages, as it creates an obligation for upkeep which makes it harder to move on to new pastures. Tool maintenance is generally acknowledged to be one of the most time-consuming and unproductive of activities. What I am currently doing is not maintenance, but in a sense even worse: I am creating functionality that will have to be maintained, so increasing the obligation. Such are the ways we kill ourselves.

On a different note: after receiving a small dent, this evening my faith in humanity was confirmed and restored! What happened? I accidentally left my new, glowing yellow bicycle vest in the locker at the Sports Village on Monday. The next morning I went to inquire, but it hadn't been found, and locker 144 which I thought I had used was empty. That was the dent.

Today I used locker 142 next to it, and who will picture my amazement: there it was, shining yellow as ever! For 2 times 24 hours it has hung there in an open locker. Whereas it would have needed only one dishonest person to take it, there must have been at least 50 honest humans who refrained from doing so! (None of whom found it necessary to hand it in at reception, but that's another issue.)