Had a very long day yesterday. Started a bit confused, although I slept in a was really tired. So I decided to take my time, have breakfast, do some weights and accept the fact that I would be in office late. But around 9.48am it hit me that I had signed up for a seminar on intellectual property that would start at - nah, who can guess that - 10am. I stuffed all my things (including tennis gear and lunch) into the backpack, flew threw the the rest of my morning routine and headed off. Well, I was pretty confident that I would make it in time for I live quite close to the ATP, but then again I didn't wanna sweat too much for I would have to sit there for two hours immediately! Everything went fine and I even wasn't the last one to pop in.
The seminar itself was more or less interesting, although I can only shake my head about all these patent atourneys, unwilling to give in to their point of view. That's not about research anymore. But on the other hand it might be useful to keep in mind what their important aspects of innovation are, just so I know what I do publishing things or leaving a copyright message somewhere.
Anyway, there wasn't a lot of time left till lunch and so work didn't really get under way. But I was keen on solving some problems I had experienced before and therefore really didn't spend too much time in the cafeteria. Back on my desk and on the terminals I started checking out some more of the memory leak detectors I had downloaded the day before. Acutally there seem to be some very useful tools, hopefully I get to write about that experience later.
The next bottleneck was the time between 4pm and 6pm. I had said that I would play tennis with Damian and Kathryn, but I felt it would be pretty uncomfortable leaving my desk again without having figured out why my datastructure eats memory in gigabyte portions. And in addition to that I had told Thomas that I would join him for the computational geometry lecture he would give at exactly that time slot at Sydney Uni. I'm not against cloning.
At about 3.29pm I found the nasty little line messing up the fun. Damn, that felt good for I had been hunting it for quite a while (with a lot of distraction in between). Having my head focused on doing a good job since I won't be working for too much longer I went with Thomas (leaving Damian to be tormented by his wife on the court). The lecture was interesting and fun, for me it was nice going to the campus and seeing some students. I gotta say that I miss that athmosphere quite a bit and that I am looking forward to having a student's life again. Since the semester here now started again there will be some more of that the next weeks.
As the course took a bit longer than expected/planned we arrived back at NICTA around 6.30pm. I checked on the experiments I had started before we left and was quite satisfied with what I could see already. We talked about some more or less work related things and so spend enough time to see the computer finishing its taks. But after seeing that I would have some nice results to look at the next day, I decided to go home at last. That was at about 7.30pm.
Coming home there was loud music and a little guy running around in our house. That's Jack, Susi's (Adrian's girlfriend) 2-year-old son. He's great fun and wouldn't stop following me wherever I went. The others were having a BBQ in the backyard by that time, invited me to join. But my conscience kicked in and forced me to put on my running equipment and leave the house. I gotta say that it's getting dark very early again, in fact noticeably earlier each day. So I didn't see a lot, but the air was somewhat fresher/cooler than normally and I had a very nice and fast run down to Sydney Park and back. Damn, that made me tired. So there wasn't much time or energy for more than a long shower, a quick check on my email some improvised dinner and a more or less early night. Can't have been more than five minutes before I fell asleep, I am talking about going to bed before midnight here.
By the way: The original plan was to spend the time I had in front of my laptop yesterday blogging this, but unfortunately the database server of my provider had broken down - and I was disconnected.
