For three days last week, I attended HPCAsia (remotely, of course) which, true to most conferences of this ilk, concentrated on the application of some of the world's most powerful computing systems (the world's number #1 in Tokyo) to the sort of mathematical and scientific problems that require it. It is pleasing that the ACM has published ( Read more... )

With my thesis completed and undergoing revision, I have given my mind a bit of a break, in a manner of speaking. As is my wont, I have turned my attention to my hobby of roleplaying games, and have spent some hours in actual play and writing. Four scenes have been written in quick succession for my HeroQuest Glorantha game, with each of the ( Read more... )

In an act of pure self-indulgence, I went to visit Louisa G., at Lu La Belle Studio next to Toorak Station (dahling). A haircut is not what would normally constitute an item for a journal entry, but yours truly has not been a professional hairdresser since 2002. Since then it's been a case of either having a ponytail, snipping off the tail, or ( Read more... )

I'm at Sydney airport about to return home (aka Plague City, Melbourne, etc), with a few hours to spare which provides an opportunity to pen a few notes of the brief, yet full trip. I checked in at the Great Southern Hotel in Haymarket which, apparently, was a bit of a dive once-upon-a-time, but now makes good use of its various deco features, ( Read more... )

I must confess, I am a little overwhelmed by the wishes for a speedy recovery that I have received from many people, especially on Facebook. Now a week after I was under the knife, recovery from the operation is going really well with no complications and with a gradual removal of dressings. There are of course limitations on what I am allowed to ( Read more... )

Another week has somehow managed to go by and when I look back it there has been quite a lot going on. Today I am very pleased to announce that author and anthologist Sarena Ulibarri will be speaking at the Cyberpunk 2020 conference, specifically on the technology panel and with an emphasis on solarpunk; "the future is so bright, you'll have to ( Read more... )

I have pretty much finished the Introduction to Psychology MOOC from the University of Toronto. A couple of days prior I did the end-of-semester exam (93%, I think the exam may have a question wrong) and today I handed in the essay for peer review, which I've also posted on the Isocracy Network site for relevance; "Post-Truth Politics and ( Read more... )

Late last week held two days of workshops, Regular Expressions with Linux and From Spartan to Gadi, the latter teaching researchers how to get on and use NCI's main system, Gadi, the most powerful supercomputer in Australia (and number 24 in the world). Like all the workshops I give they can be quite content-heavy, so a process of adding extra ( Read more... )

It is not that often that RPG activities take top rank on my semi-regular journal entries, but this week one of my regular groups has started to put together a mashup of two old ICE products, Tod Foley's Cyberspace and Monte Cook's Dark Space, with the sort of thematic content that one finds in Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker. People are pretty ( Read more... )

Humans are fascinating creatures; as regular readers would know I repost my public Livejournal/Dreamwidth posts to Facebook, where most people live in the social media space. Which included (a) a photo and small reference to my new haircut and (b) a reference to the fact that I had raised close to $6K for Medicines sans Frontiers. There was a ( Read more... )