jonny goes to england

I’m in Eindhoven for the FAST workshop for the next two days. Tomorrow I’ll give a talk on our latest research, which will hopefully go well!

I took the Eurostar because I was a bit fed up with flying. Well not really the flying part, but the security checks and other harassments you have to endure when you take an airplane these days.
The Eurostar lounge at St Pancras is great, very spacious, nice and clean. Unfortunately, the eurostar people mistake their trains for airplanes!  The wagons are very densely seated so that you have not more space than on an airplane. Legroom is for weenies. But it’s probably much better at non-peak time.

The picture above is the reengineered and recently reopened Oxford Circus pedestrian crossing. The British learned some urban design lessons from Japan and took over the crossing from Tokyo’s Shibuya station. At their famous four-way crossing, 5000 people can cross the road with one green light without any jams.

I crossed Oxford Circus yesterday and it was a bit awkward because people, including me, just walked all over, but I’m sure everybody will get properly trained on how to cross the road in the japanese-way within a few weeks

Speaking of Japan, I got lucky and can tag along with my coworker to travel to Japan in December! We will be going to an information theory security conference in Shizuoka (not too far from Tokyo). Definitely more on that in some later posts.

Watermelon carvings!

I just returned from a nice, relaxing holiday.  While travelling back and forth I realised how annoying flying has become. Too many controls, pointless procedures, security routines, and random policies. All driven by a fear of something which (probabilistically) does not really exist.

Anyway, I decided that I will take the train back to Switzerland this Christmas. I wanted to do that for a long time and I’m quite looking forward to hopping on the train in Waterloo (or so) and arriving in Basel 6-7h later (with a change in Paris).

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Something else. Today I was speaking to my Chinese coworker about why she’s getting married (next year in Bejing, maybe a good reason to go there!). She told me that in China there’s a saying (and now these are her words)

Women are like Christmas, after 25 everything’s on sale

and she meant with it that it’s important to marry quickly as woman. And if you are over 25 and still not married you just take what you get. She’s 27 and is the last (of 30 women) in her old university class to marry.

This Thursday, I’m going back to Basel for a quick Easter holiday! Looking forward to that .. even though there’s probably quite a bit of work to do.

The picture above shows some pretty cool shape I found in my office, built out of train tickets. My best guess would be that it’s a nonconvex cubicuboctahedron .. or possibly something else.

So I started going to these live poker tournaments in a nice club below (or rather inside) Southwark Bridge. The first time it went very well, I dropped out at 6t or 7th position from 90 people starting. Too bad that was only one place before they start paying out money! Last time it didn’t go too well, but still learned a lot (especially how NOT to play in such a low-stakes tournament).

In other news, March is quite packed with thing. Mid-march our group organised a workshop with title “Frontiers of Computational Reasoning” at Microsoft Research in Cambridge.

End of march, I will get notified if our paper got accepted at CSF. I’m again cautious with looking forward to it, because it’s a really prestigious place and acceptance rate is low.

End end of march our (small) group within our group has another workshop planned, PLID’09 (Programming language interference and dependence), where I will give a talk about my recent research. Perhaps I’ll upload slides of it later on.

Hey,

now is a good time to say thanks for reading my blog! (Almost) ever since its start it’s continuously (and magically) gaining readers and I appreciate that. This year I’ll try to blog a bit more regularly than last year. We’ll see if that’ll work out

Right now I’m still in Switzerland, though I fly back to London on Monday evening. To Gatwick unfortunately .. so I can’t make use of my new flat and walk home directly from Liverpoolstreet station!

Ok, so finally I moved again! From my old new place to my new new place. It’s smaller but warmer, more modern and I like it a lot. I made some pics when I packed up everything, then I realised that I don’t really have that much stuff!
Here’s pretty much everything:

Here’s the comparison picture from September 2007. I can’t believe this is only a little bit more than a year ago. Seems like a century lies in between.

I couldn’t really make any good pictures of the new place for some reason. Here’s one. The kitchen is actually quite large, but hidden behind the walls.

Aaanyway, I hope you won’t hear any moving stories for at least 6 months!
In other news, I fly back home to Switzerland this Sunday, 21st December for 2-3 weeks. Looking forward to that.

Back from Jersey since Sunday night. We had an enjoyable trip. Jersey is really small. Also, it’s so close to France that the airplane started its descent over France just to land on time on Jersey.

Anyway .. we’ve been to the beach on one of its coasts. Jersey has many huge sand beaches with only few people on. Here’s one of them:

Beside being on the beach we had a nice BBQ, went to the Zoo and made a short walk along one of the coasts. One word on the Zoo. Apparently the Jersey Zoo, or how it’s called Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, is known for its gorilla family. Long long time ago, a kid fell into the gorilla area and instead of being mauled by the apes it was carefully protected by Jambo — a gorrilla born in Zoo Basel in 1961! — until some guards rescued the child. Swiss gorilla for the win.

We also visited (from the outside, more or less by accident) the infamous children’s home which was in the news recently for killing and abusing children!

Some more pictures on my flickr page.

On the way back from Italy (yes now I’m back, that’s why the long break!) I found the following on a gas station: An absolutely massive yacht hull which was completely empty inside. It’s hard to imagine the size .. pity it doesn’t come across on the picture as large as it really was. Mind you that was a large trucker carrying that thing.

Finally, I’m back from my trip to Tucson, Arizona. For once my flights went smoothly without any delays or anything! I went there from Friday to Monday and it felt like I’ve been away for two weeks (which is good!).

The city itself, Tucson, is not very flattering .. resembles more of a desert boot camp than a city. However, our hotel, built on a mountain (they call it canyon), was very nicely situated and was generous in all regards.

The workshop I attended was co-located at the bigger PLDI conference with a couple of hundred participants from all over the world. My talk went fine and I met some nice students from Italy, Germany and US. Here, a still empty room.

Apart from that I went to the Sonoran Desert and was lying at the pool while small, cute hummingbirds were hovering above my head attacking some flowers! Unfortunately, I didn’t make pictures of them direclty!

Oh right, and I photographed cacti. Many cacti. More specifically, most of them are of the Saguaro species which basically consists of a large phallic (!), monolithic trunk.

The whole valley and canyon is covered in large cacti, some are over 15m high and 150 years old! Here is one of them directly in front of my balcony. The flowers on top are the state flowers of Arizona:

And here a few more from the desert:

On my way back, our plane was avoiding a huge thunderstorm around New York which gave us a totally surreal and amazing view on the storm from above and the outside. Every other second lightnings lit up the huge clouds from the inside and made them look like gigantic, deformed lamps.

Also, I found a nice iPodomat in Houston! Unfortunately, it didn’t accept my credit cards for some reason .. so I couldn’t buy a nano for $140

Here is the flickr set for some more pictures.

Hello. I’m in Arizona and it’s warm. I nearly missed my connecting flight in Houston and probably made a record to run from one Terminal E, through US border patrol, scanning left and right index finger, signing documents, collecting baggage, rechecking baggage, queuing for security check, taking belt and shoes off, putting belt and shoes on, running to the terminal train, driving to terminal B, running down the hallway to my gate to just in time catch the flight to Tucson. However, my effort was rewarded by a terribly boring flight. I guess Texas or Arizona does not make a lot of money out of sight seeing. Not to forget about the baby beside me who just learned to speak and said “nana nana” to everything for 2.5 hours.
Anyway, I’m in a fantastic hotel, spent some time on the pool and today at the PLAS workshop where I gave a talk. What you see above in the picture is the view from the lobby on a canyon out of huge windows. More pics are on the way when I’m back.

One quick fact on the weather. It’s so warm here that I’m unable to eat breakfast outside at 7 (!) in the morning because it’s simply too hot.