Thursday triptych

[nmg]

Today was Industry Day here at IAM, in which hapless postgrads and postdocs are inveigled into demonstrating their work. Got a mail this morning from the departmental minuscule canadian, asking whether I or my erstwhile officemate Steve was giving a particular demo (which we had believed that the minuscule canadian was presenting). He's demoing it tomorrow, so I demoed today, which involved missing lunch (lunch was provided for delegates, but not for peons).

Demos are so much better when you can prepare for them.

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Finally got a phonecall from Korea this morning, so I'm off to Seoul in early November to give an invited talk at PRIMA2003, all expenses paid. Need to get a photo taken and write a CV blurb for their brochure (will probably reuse the HT2003 blurb for the latter).

It seems that they'd mailed me a couple of times, but I suspect I missed the mail because it was in a Korean character set that my mailer couldn't display. Given the large amounts of non-European character set spam that I get (predominatly Chinese), it may even have been caught in my spam trap and deleted. Oops. Yet another reason to migrate my mail to something like Mozilla.

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Found out that the (exceeding scatty goth) girlfriend of one of my Southampton friends has a LiveJournal. Reading her LiveJournal is somewhere between watching a car crash, and lifting the top off someone's head only to discover a scene from a Hieronymous Bosch painting inside. Long-suffering officemate Steve has maintained for many years that she's evil, a claim which I've countered by insisting that she's just misunderstood. I'm now coming round to his point of view that she's actually malign.

It used to be the case that I just didn't understand the relationship she has with her partner. I now realise that I really don't understand the relationship she has with her partner.