It has been a strange past few days as I've experienced quite a range of emotional states, each quelled by the other and high levels of activity. The most notable was on Monday for _fustian's funeral. Appropriately held at Lonegran and Raven the event was both respectful, combining a genuine sense of grief at the loss of our dear friend yet interspersed ( Read more... )

Last Friday night I attended two farewells of a very differing nature. One was at The Prince Alfred as an unofficial goodbye organised by Greg S., to a few work colleagues who had found greener pastures. It was a good opportunity not only to catch up with said individuals but also everyone else nearly all of whom I hadn't seen in the previous ( Read more... )

It is easy to forget that it's been a few days since I've posted anything, especially given that the first three of those days were delivering high performance computing training workshops. Whilst I am sure newcomers get a lot out of the first two, the third (Regular Expressions) was perhaps the most interesting to me, especially as I've reviewed ( Read more... )

A good portion of this weekend has been spent updating my article for the Polish Journal of Aesthetics on "Bullshit Art", where I target my pet loathing of "Abstract Expressionism". Funded by the CIA as a successful weapon against Socialist Realism (bullshit is more powerful than lies), it attracted a movement of immature and individualistic ( Read more... )

A common element of the counter-culture that I share is a perplexing disdain for mainstream retail therapy, the act of conspicuous consumption, and commodity fetishism. For myself, I have much more in common with Bohemian quest in the opportunity shop, which is always an adventure in itself. I remember many decades ago now my adopted mother ( Read more... )

There has been a couple of slightly beneficial moments in the past week. On Tuesday I saw comedian Daniel Sloss perform at Hamer Hall and reviewed it on Rocknerd the following day. It was a nice bit of temporal synchronicity that I realised that it was exactly a year prior that he had been recommended to me. Further, because life likes to do things ( Read more... )

"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven", wrote John Milton hundreds of years ago in Paradise Lost. For reasons of my own wish to understand, I've recently delved into a few texts relating to Borderline Personality Disorder, a place in which the changes from Heaven to Hell are certainly far too extreme ( Read more... )

I have been continuing with my daily updates on COVID-19 on Facebook with some summaries on Twitter, rhetorically asking whether the now-infected British PM will properly fund the NHS (wasn't that an election promise?). I drew what is comparison between per capita tests and confirmed cases, some comments on the debate over masks, and the stunning ( Read more... )

With an hour to go before being collected by shuttle to Dunedin airport and then en route to Wellington and Melbourne, it is opportune to review the past few days which have been dominated by the subject title. On the sightseeing side of the journey I took the opportunity to visit the Dunedin Chinese Garden which, despite several prior trips here, ( Read more... )

It's been a busy week on the academic front, with a paper submitted for the International Conference on High Performance Computing & Simulation on the issues around "cloud bursting" in HPC, followed by another for the International Conference on Advanced Computing. In addition, I was invited for my annual guest lecture in the master's level course ( Read more... )