As I have mentioned before, from Wednesday to Friday all of NICTA's phd and visiting students went on a retreat in Gosford, north of Sydney. We had chosen Joachim and Seokhee to come with us, the schedule was arranged to have quite an amount of group sessions as well as some time to relax and enjoy the resort we were staying in (or the beach next to it). I also had to give a talk on my current projects and my background, and as everybody's timeslot was only twenty mins, I really had to struggle with getting my slides ready. As always it was hard getting started and after a while really hard to stop, having in mind that I would have to cut out some of my material. On the whole I am quite satisfied with how it went, although I would have liked to get more feedback.
Of course I checked out another beach (maybe I'll come up with a really cool picture later) and did some sports. Playing table tennis was great fun though not a real challenge (except for my colleague Lanbo, she's quite good). Unfortunately the karaoke machine was broken, but we found an alternative: Joachim, Marc, Sander, Damian and I went to my room and had a bottle of wine when we finally decided to involve the guitars Damian had brought. That was brilliant for he is a really good player and doesn't mind singing as well. The video is way to big, but you can check out
a picture!
