How I spent my day

[nmg]

I was in Cheltenham today, where I was giving a presentation to a four-lettered entity regarding some work that I've done for them on scalable knowledge extraction and integration, typically from online textual sources. To say that the events of this morning put this work into better context would be an understatement, and I'm unlikely to forget where I was when I heard the news. It all felt rather surreal to be standing in the lobby of the doughnut and listening to a tannoy announcement by the director to inform the staff that no agency personnel had been caught in the blasts.

Two niggles to the day, though. First, the entrance atrium had a really cool crypto-geek glass sculpture which I was unable to take a photograph of because cameras weren't allowed.

Secondly, I'm quite irritated that a group of fanatics chose to blow up bits of London's public transport infrastructure today because of the date: referring to today as 7/7/2005 means that our North American cousins are never going to realise that they're writing dates with the month and day in the wrong order (I've harvested enough blogs in the last month for this work that I now take the mm/dd/YYYY format quite personally).

Comments

[malachan.livejournal.com]

O_O I live in Cheltenham! And my Dad used to work for GCHQ (though he retired before the doughnut was completed).

[jorune.livejournal.com]

I agree emphatically the mm/dd/yyyy format is loathsome, an outrage that rarely fails to annoy. The ISO 8601 version of yyyy/mm/dd is the date equivalent of esperanto, universally despised and ignored.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Please, YYYY-mm-dd...
(I quite like it)