purplecat

15.5 miles today - most through yet more rolling chalky farmland.





( More under the cut )

At the start of March I spent 2 Days in Washington at a slightly odd workshop on Incorporating Ethics into Artificial Intelligence. I knew, from following gregmce on Strava, that there was a nice looking run around the National Mall and so most of the photos below are from that - often early in the morning because Jet-Lag.

( Picspam Under the Cut )

A final few miscellaneous images of Delft. Including some of medical instruments, just to warn those who may not like such things.

( Under the Cut )

I've been in Delft for the past two weeks for work reasons but I was able to spend the weekend doing touristy things. I've got quite a few photos, but I need to pack this evening so I'm only posting a handful now. Maybe more later. I also had to take selfies for Corporate Communications, so I may be posting a link to that at some point.

( Pictures under the Cut )

I went to Prague for the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. I did not get ripped off by any taxi drivers - the websites I consulted about an hour before I left for the airport warned strenuously against trusting taxi drivers in Prague but it was too late, by that point, to order the hotel shuttle service to pick me up. As it was I ordered a taxi from a booth at the airport for a firm the Internet grudgingly allowed to be usually OK and was ferried to my hotel for a third of the price the shuttle service would have charged.

My schedule was pretty packed but, having established that the conference dinner was on the opposite side of Prague to the hotel, I decided there was probably time between the final conference session of the day and the dinner for about an hour's wander, particularly if I took the metro to the city centre. As it was I got a bit confused about timings, missed the final session of the day and found myself in the centre of Prague with about three hours to kill - just as most tourist attractions shut for the evening. However I was armed with the Lonely Planet guide book that my boss had thrust into my hands as I was leaving Liverpool.

You are spared most of my photos because my iPhone really wasn't up to the light conditions.

( Clock )

( Prague Castle )

( Hrad čany )

I think the Museo di Storia Naturale deserves a post all of its own since it was the most unexpected treasure we visited in Venice. I picked it out of the guide book because it was listed as "good for children" and had some dinosaurs in it so I felt that it had pretty much something for all the family.

It took a bit of finding, once again much aided by Google maps and despite being in the guidebook it was obviously not part of the regular tourist trail. We mostly had the place to ourselves while the rest of Venice was not quite packed with people but well on the way to being so. All the labels were in Italian. However I'd been teaching myself Italian using the Duolingo app in my mobile phone* and B. knows a lot of natural history so between us we managed.

It is not a huge natural history collection but it has been presented spectacularly. Someone involved had, in particular, a real flair for lighting. Several of the rooms were also organised by collector rather than subject matter which was quite fun, giving you a sense of one man's interests. It also allowed them to play with having very traditional style display cases (though I strongly suspect even these were of modern design) in some rooms, with more modern presentations based around themes like flight or underwater in other rooms.

We embarrassed the little one by taking loads and loads of photos.

( Loads and Loads of Photos )

*interestingly the level of Italian I'd acquired proved to be well up to reading descriptions in museums, but less good for interacting with waiters. About halfway through our stay it suddenly gave me the word for the bill (il conto) which did makes things a lot easier.

I've been volunteering, on and off, as a DreamWidth developer for about eighteen months - ever since I saw a post saying how easy DW was to volunteer for compared to other Open Source projects. I had the advantage, of course, of having programmed in Perl before, and some experience finding my way around other people's code bases. On the other hand, I've never worked on a project with a large team, let alone one that expected to put comparatively polished pieces of code out into an actual live production environment (academia, with a few notable exceptions, very much takes the view that code development ends at the point where you upload a prototype and say "feel free to use it if you're interested" or even, "it worked once, on my machine, which totally means it counts as a scientific result". User support generally ends somewhere around that point as well.)

Since DreamWidth takes its volunteers very seriously, they offered to pay (at least in part) for any volunteer who had submitted a patch in the last year, to go to a Perl Programming tech conference in Texas. YAPC::NA, to be precise. In a piece of classic programmer humour, that stands for "Yet Another Perl Conference: North America" - which is not a joke that is worth explaining.

( Git for Ages 4 and Up )

( YAPC Itself )

( Bats )

( Visiting the Servers )

Over the summer I attended another Dagstuhl Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems.

( More under the Cut including a lot of photos of Bernkastel-Kues )

I was really just in Taiwan for the conference, arriving the evening before it started and going directly to the airport from the venue when it ended so I didn't have any time for sight-seeing. However I did take a couple of photos.

( Under the Cut )

My hotel was very western and charged accordingly. But elsewhere we were all amazed how cheap things were. In the "expensive" food court below the Taipei 101 where I had lunch every day, I could get a four course meal for the equivalent of £2.50. Similarly the bus I caught to take me to the airport (roughly a 40 minute drive along motoways) also cost £2.50. The conference banquet was a nine course meal with no rice or noodle dishes. We were told that this was because it was an expensive dinner and to have served rice or noodles would have suggested they couldn't afford to feed us properly.

Most of my other impessions are very fragmentary; glimpses of other people's lives as we were ferried to and from conference events and too brief to really draw conclusions from. Early in the morning you could see the staff in the little workshops the bus drove past, all lined up and standing to attention as their manager gave them their instructions for the day. Everywhere there was evidence of cheap labour, from the fact that all the bus seats had clean antimacassars on them which were presumably replaced and washed regularly. All the hoardings surrounding building works were decorated with hanging baskets of plants which were watered every morning. Every road crossing (at least in the posh business area where the conference was) was accompanied by a traffic policeman who would blow his whistle and direct commuters and traffic. The traffic itself, reminded me most of Italian traffic with hundreds of apparently suicidal moped riders of every kind from businessmen in suits, to teenage boys with their girlfriends riding pillion, through little old ladies going shopping. Almost ubiquitous piped Western classical music seemed to follow us wherever we went. At first I thought this was a particular obsession with Vivaldi's Four Seasons but it turned out to be a little more wide-ranging than that, but I've no idea what this signified beyond that places like westernised hotels, airports, conference centres and prestige shopping malls considered it appropriate muzak.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/43307.html.