The days are too short

No Road

Yesterday I went to watch All Is Lost, a film which someone I told this today aptly described as "Life of Pi for adults". A grim movie indeed, marred only a little bit by the ending. Unique in many respects: to start with, the size of the cast, which consists of exactly one person. As the same person said, if that one person is Robert Redford, who's going to complain?

At the beginning of the movie, where they explain why it is rated the way it is, it said: "One Instance of Strong Language" to justify the age-twelvc minimum admission age. They might as well have made that "One Instance of Language" - dialogue was obviously out of the question, but where I find myself talking to myself quite a lot during the day, Robert bears the hardships of foundering alone in silence - except, indeed, for that one instance of (strong) language.

On my way back I then almost foundered myself trying to take my usual route along the river. Yes, it has happened! While I was getting soaking wet on Wednesday evening, the same must have happened all over the watershed drained by the Ouse. Knowing that this occurs regularly is one thing, seeing the river in full flood with your own eyes is quite another. This morning I went back to witness it at daylight, and indeed: the path along the river where ordinarily runners run and dogs are taken for a walk is now a watery domain.

Today was a short day. After strange dreams and waking up in the middle of the night for no clear reason, I actually fell asleep again (which is rare) and consequently overslept. When I got into the Hub I immediately met Richard Paige in the entrance who without preamble asked me "when and where?" My answer of "ten o'clock" - this being the time at that moment - turned out not to fit the context, as the question had really been about the time to get a drink after work - a time that was then fixed at 16:30. In other words, from 10:00 to 16:30 was all the time available today - and I had so much planned!

Hey, That's My Fish!

The original plan for the evening actually involved the games club, to which I had invited Adolfo (the EngD student who also joined me to Howard's Hallowe'en two months ago). The after-work drink therefore had to be limited to just one, maybe two: games playing is a serious business. Though you might not think so from the title of "Hey, That's My Fish!", another new one we got to know tonight. (you are three penguins trying to maximise your food supply). We then  sat down for a much longer game, namely an expansion of Agricola called Farmers of the Moor. Not for the faint of heart this, in fact we did not manage to finish in time and had to call it an "honorouble draw".

Afterwards we discovered what game players do after hours: they go to a bar. The Friday evening club times of 17:00-21:00 mean that you have to get your food either too early or too late: the preference turns out to be too late. Makes perfect sense to me, but because I would like to avoid another bad night I kept myself to wraps and one beer, maybe two.

I collected some tips about cycling in the neighbourhood. If weather allows I will try one of them out on Sunday. A week from now Floris will pay a visit: no major cycling tours that weekend - it has to be either now or in two weeks, after that it will be end of story.

The water level has not declined (check it out for yourself), but it turns out the west bank is some meters higher than the east. I did not have to brave the main road.

Triumphs and setbacks

Exercising he old wrist muscle on New Year's Eve

The new year is bringing developments good and bad. To start with the bad: it seems as though I have to get back in shape all over again. After admittedly not moving much during Christmas holidays (the main exercise I got was for the old wrist muscle), my Yorkish habits demand that I run, pump and spin to my heart's content. (In fact, sometimes I wonder if my heart is content with all this workout: it is developing an unpleasant habit of changing gears at random moments of the day. But it's a lot more likely that cafein is at the heart of this phenomenon.)

On Tuesday I went to the Sweatshop Run Club, which I had tried out once (and liked) in November; afterwards, however, other activities got in the way. Now if I want to attain the shirt, which requires five stamps, I shall have to show up every week for the rest of my stay here. (If you miss a Tuesday there is an alternative run on Thursday, but the price is having to run 10km rather than 5km.) On Wednesday, despite the onset of some serious muscle ache, I picked up the weights again for a body pump session, which had me utterly exhausted as if I had never done this before. Today's spin class, under pain in various hitherto unknown parts of the body, felt as though I have never been on a bike before. This was aggravated by the fact that I had forgotten my top; rather than forgo the exercise I went in my regular shirt, which must not only have looked very odd but is much too warm, what with the collar and all.

SRC run: 5020 m, 11.5 km/h

Then the good: the paper we submitted after the Banff workshop (on benchmarks for bidirectional transformation) was accepted for presentation (and hence publication). The status of this publication is not the highest: we submitted to the Third International Workshop on Bidirectional Transformations, and in the pecking order of publications, workshops rank lowest; one step higher are conferences, the next step are journals. Within each of these categories there are a lot of further subtle differences, so that some workshops rank higher in the collective academic consciousness than some conferences, and some conferences higher than some journals. However, the nice thing about this publication is that it is on a topic that I knew very little about before I went to Banff, so it is indisputably a new direction for me, and this success can be entirely attributed to my trip to Canada.

It is a pity that I have grown a bit blasé about papers getting accepted. In some sense this is the single biggest peak in the life of an academic. I got my first acceptance in 1991, for the CONCUR conference, rated rather high - I got to present it in New York, which was in itself also very nice of course. At the time I celebrated by donating a crate of beer to the Friday afternoon get-together. You have submitted a paper, you know the date on which the decision on acceptance or rejection will be announced, and so you are waiting for the mail. The first line is either "We are happy to inform you" or "We regret to inform you"; in either case you might as well put off reading the rest of the mail (which will contain detailed reviews justifying the decision) since you will not take it in right then. An adrenalin boost for sure.

Come to think of it: might it be the case that in the academic context research is rated higher than teaching (do not let the official position about their equivalence deceive you) because teaching does not offer a comparable success experience? Don't get me wrong, I love lecturing and supervising students, but for different reasons: the feeling that you make them understand something that they did not grasp before, plus the interaction involved. Still, teaching is a slow process, and there is no natural moment (for the teacher) at which success becomes evident and worth celebrating.

Now, how shall we test that hypothesis? Is there a paper in it?

The rain stays mainly in the plain

After roughly a hundred days of careful scientific observation I can present a stunning conclusion:

English weather is better than Dutch weather.

That was the headline. Now let me refine my position a little bit so that it actually becomes defensible: Yorkshire weather is better than Twente weather. I claim that this is true in at least one sense: there are fewer boring, gray, continually overcast days over here.

I won't say that there is a great difference in rainfall. Inhabitants of both the Netherlands and England love to complain that they live in a very rainy country, but as a bicyling commuter I can tell you that there are maybe two or three times in a year of roughly four hundred trips back and forth where I really get soaking wet. (This evening that happened here for the first time.) On the whole rain is much overestimated, both in duration and in density. Gray days, on the other hand, can really get me down.

I am no climatologist, but it seems to me that there must be a causal relation with the wind, which I feel is much stronger here on average than I am used to. No clouds can persist for a whole day in such exuberant airs! I see a parallel with Terschelling, one of the the islands off the coast of the Netherlands, which is my favourite holiday destination: no day without sunshine, and if it happens to rain, even heavily, then this will typically not last more than half a day tops.

Wet conditions (what is it you shouldn't do?)

So there! Disagree all you like, tell me that the west of England is wetter than the east and the west of the Netherlands sunnier than the east (both true), tell me that a hundred days of observation is not enough to come to a sweeping statement like this. I know it all already, and I will let my conclusion stand.

What is not better in York is the state of the roads. They are bad even when it is dry but most definitely when it rains. There are potholes everywhere, and the drainage is simply afwul. A few hours of rain will create extensive puddles, and of course these optically egalise the roads, in other words you do not see the potholes any more. Not the best cycling conditions. I have already remarked several times on the wet condition of the land and the flexible level of the river. I wonder wat a good Dutch water engineer would make of this.

Reinstalled

Had a busy morning before going to work. As was to be expected, I woke up rather early. I took that as encouragement to put on my running shoes again, after a two-week interval. I'm glad to report they are still running well. It was dry and ridiculously warm, and on my way back I was rewarded with the view of the sky slowly lighting up over Wentworth college. Then, since I had failed to buy anything edible yesterday, this was the golden opportunity to try out the English Breakfast at the Edge. Indeed they offer the full monty, from black pudding (which resembles pudding as much as hoofdkaas resembles cheese) to beans and mushrooms. (Bacon, egg and toast go without saying.) Very tasty, but not to be repeated every day! One of the reasons I always gain weight when travelling is because ot the hotel breakfasts.

Finally, I went shopping to stock up the old refrigerator. This time I found Morrisons open, and knowing by now where the stuff I need is located I was in and out pretty quickly.

Left in York while needed in Enschede:

• Key ring with keys of my home and the university office. This actually had me worried as I did not know where I could have left these in the York apartment. To my relief I discovered them in the back of a drawer when I returned here yesterday. Come to think of it, it is questionable whether the university office key would even have been any good, as our whole building (Zilverling) was scheduled to get a new type of lock, already in use in the next bulding (Carré). The new keys are made of plastic, ugly and three times as thick as the ones we have now, work very badly and are quite inconvenient, having to be reactivated every day. There's progress for you.

Key ring: Proof of recovery

Left in Enschede while needed in York:

• Tablet computer. I noticed this at Schiphol, when I suddenly had one less computer to take out of my bag at security. I don't actually need it so much: the only thing I used it for was to read the newspaper and to play WordFeud. Even so it was a regular source of irritation, as for reasons unfathomable it was at war with the wireless on campus here, with only brief moments of truce when the two made up and I actually had a connection for a while.

• Yellow cyclist's vest. You will remember that after dithering for well over a month, I finally decided that it was not beneath my dignity to look stupid in order to be more visible. Well, yesterday I was back to being smartly invisible, as the vest is still at home, on the shelf above the garderobe where I distinctly remember putting it while reminding myself not to forget to take it back here. I bought a new one this morning.

• Lunch box. Missed this one only after stocking up this morning, while preparing my lunch, so replacing it will have to wait until Wednesday when the next bout of shopping is due. In the meanwhile I will have to make to with plastic bags, the small ones that they plan to ban in the future.

Home ergonomics

At work I found my new office, one floor up from where I used to be. I have it to myself for now, it doesn't look much used so maybe it will stay that way. I installed myself at one of the screens + keyboards available: working all day long at a laptop is not ergonomically responsible, and after a slipped disk nine years ago, probably due to persistent attitude problems while seated behind my computer, I try to take that stuff seriously. In my apartment I have also created an acceptable setting. Lucky I brought two pairs of shoes...

So you see, I'm all set for the next four weeks. The only disappointment was when I found out that both the Body Pump and the Spinning classes were booked full for today. New Year's resolutions are still fresh everywhere!

Playtime is over

It was bound to happen: the year is dead; long live the year! (I don't give it much more than twelve months). Today was back-to-York day, and being back it is high time to restart some other things, such as this blog.

The weather keeps trying to hit me with storms on my travelling days, but so far it's been one strike and two misses. You might recall my adventures in crossing the Netherlands from east to west on 29 October (see Gone with the Wind). Well, two days after I flew to the Netherlands before Christmas (which was 20 December), England was hit by a major rainstorm, causing rivers to flood and trains to stop running; and these days the same is happening again, but only in the south, the west and the north of the British Isles. Guess where York is to be found?

Flooding in the southwest (Tewkesbury Abbey, today)

I had a very smooth trip; though the plane was delayed both at the start (by the very slow security check at Schiphol) and at the end (by the fact that a bird flew into a predecessor plane, causing the Manchester runway to be shut down for about 15 minutes), I then got onto a train that left after one minute, making good all those precious lost minutes by a single happy accident of timing. In any case I was at my laptop all the while, I hardly noticed time passing.

I did announce that I would not be writing much over the holidays. That has turned out to be an overstatement: not even a last post summarising the lessons learned in 2013 has materialised. I found that I could not motivate myself to take the time for this blog. Too much to do! Or putting it more bluntly: too many ruts to get stuck in again. Add to this the end-of-year rituals, and two weeks have just disappeared into thin air. At least that's what it feels like. Looking back with a bit more charity to myself, I spent several days in getting a submission for Graphite 2014 up to shape (that should get met to Grenoble in April), and a lot more days in programming extensions and improvement to GROOVE. In fact that is what I was doing on the way here. It's just that all this takes so effing much time... I am sure that days used to last longer when I was younger.

Also home
(Ground floor: bike shed; first floor: me)

From this side of the dateline, time suddenly seems awfully short. Barely four weeks left to make a mark! Subtract from that the unavoidable overhead of packing and leaving, not to mention preparing my lectures which will pretty much start the day I get back. It's really scary!

In the meanwhile, I'm back home. My bike was waiting faithfully at the station. To get something to eat for tomorrow I went by Morrisons, which however was closed for the first time I got there. I've finally discovered one of the boundaries of their opening times: 19:30 on Sunday is too much too ask! I am sorry I even tried, now I missed the chance to take a look at the level of the Ouse. I'll just have to go running tomorrow - another of those things that have to be restarted after Christmas holidays. The smell of the hallway welcomed me in, and a Mulligatawny soup went down just fine. Tomorrow morning I might just try out the breakfast at the Edge. Yes, this is also home!

Losing the Edge

I've packed, I'm ready to go. Just have to finish this bottle of wine and not forget to set the alarm clock. Not as hideously early as for the Canada trip to be sure: the train leaves at 7:25, quite a decent time really.

I have a little logistical puzzle to solve, having to do with transporting suitcases back and forth. It's almost one of those standard combinatorial problems in computational complexity: bin packing or some suchlike. Right now I have three suitcases here, and I am travelling back to the Netherlands twice: tomorrow, and then again at the end of January. Fine, I hear you say: take one suitcase now and two then. Yep, but consider: this means that when coming back to York I can only bring hand luggage, and that in turn means that I should not take too much stuff with me now that I might still need in January. Laptop, yes, that goes without saying; pyjamas unless I want to buy a new pair. Toiletries: be careful, before you know it it's confiscated at the airport. But what about my running shoes, what about my winter coat (which is way too warm to put on right now)?

I'm sure I have your sympathy.

At work there is still plenty to do. The paper selection for FASE is as good as done, we feel we did a great job under the circumstances. (Sometimes you just have to congratulate yourself, as hardly anyone else will do it.) Had a nice discussion with +Richard Paige, +Mike Dodds and +Chris Poskitt on correctness proofs for (bidirectional) model transformations. Might be a good place to show off the wonderful features of GROOVE. Also made some headway with two other papers. I especially regret missing the pub crawl planned for tomorrow night under the expert guidance of Richard. Well, instead I get to go to Willem-Jan's concert, which of course as a proud parent I prefer.

The Edge at dinner time

The next two weeks this place will be completely deserted. As I wrote before, it is pretty deserted even now: after asking around I got confirmed that lecturing stopped the week before last, we are now between terms. There are many Asian students here for whom Christmas means nothing and New Year occurs at another date altogether, and who do not get the chance to go home. They must have a pretty lonely time of it. There are some things organised on campus for the poor left-behind souls, a leaflet was shoved under my door the other week; still, not so interesting times.

I think I will write one more post when I'm home, probably this weekend, where I will present an overview of the analogies and differences between Twente and York. After that this blog will also shut down for the holiday; after all, it was never meant to be merely a diary (though it may have worked out that way from time to time), rather a log book of discovery and wonder. At home I am not a great discoverer, in fact I plan to sink back into wonderful, dull routine for the next two weeks.

The Year of the Dragon

I was a bit miffed that my children got to see the Desolation of Smaug before I did, but today I resolved that issue.

Before I could go there, however, the day first had to pass. It started in the middle of the night, when I woke up with a very sore throat and for a while was afraid that I was going to go through the whole fever thing again. An aspirin took care of the symptoms however, and fortunately, when day broke all nightly fears were reduced to false alarms.

The Ouse will be up again

Weather is changable these days. Yesterday morning during my run it was cold and sunny, there had been frost in the night. Today it was back to cloudy, rainy and warm - around 10 degrees. During the day the wind got worse and worse. In the evening the rain radar showed an impressive front moving up from southwest; to escape it I went to the cinema a bit early and got over dry, flying on the wings of the wind which I think was the strongest I have experienced here yet.

In the end the only other group member who joined was Konstantinos Barmpis, one of the several Greek PhD students. Well, since there are no breaks during a movie in England, not even for a movie of 150 minutes + commercials, it is not as if there is much opportunity to converse or exchange opinions even if you are with a crowd. Indeed, of all the shows and performances I have been to in York, the cinema is the one for which going alone should cause the least hesitation. I often wonder why there aren't many more solitary visitors, but there is some aspect of human nature (lacking or atrophied in my case) which causes people to not go to see a movie if they cannot find anyone else to go with them. Weird.

Did I see movie history in the making? I think not, but I had a very good time all the same. In the end, the source material simply doesn't have the scope ever to give rise to a trilogy of Lord of the Rings greatness. There might be another special effects Oscar in it, for Smaug the Golden. I agree with those who say that this episode was an improvement over part 1, but I was a bit disappointed at the chosen ending. Talk about cliffhangers! At least Radagast was less prominent: every shot of his egg-strewn head is one too many. And oh yes, I won't be betraying a secret by telling you that there's a she-elf in it (sorry, not my terminology) conjured out of nowhere to keep the story going - not to mention Legolas of course (filled out visibly) but at least he is plausible since he is, after all, Thranduil's son. Despite all the embellishments I think the film fails to pass the Bechdel test which requires that it have two named female characters talking to each other about something other than a man.

The Cityscreen has a crappy 3D projection. Remind me to avoid 3D for the rest of my stay.

The length of the film had the pleasant side-effect that the rain was over and the full moon was lighting my path when I made my way back. Even the wind was down to very gusty and failed to blow me into the river.