Like many others, I prefer using my baby
picture as a personal blog/site identity

HEM….

This will be my last blog post for a while, the reason being absence. I am leaving for Easter later tonight (yes, well ahead of the holiday itself). Frankly, I am filled with anticipation. I am off to America where I shall present our medical imaging research in an international scenery for the first time. I will be back within a couple of weeks and I expect little or no ‘on-line time’ in the interim.

I dread the impact of spam whenever I’m oblivious to cyberspace and am almost aloof. Nevertheless, experience shows this to be beyond manageable. I suppose could, as a matter of principle, post some blogs items whilst I’m away. It would be slow and cumbersome though, so it beats the purpose.

I would like to wish a joyous holiday to all the regular and errand readers!

have this sick habit, which is my tendency to keep track of bug reports I have submitted to projects. As uninteresting as it may be, here is my latest report to WordPress:

Leak’ Outside Bounding Border

[Latest nightly in use]

The appearance of the dashboard is inarguably impressive, so call it a pet peeve perhaps: I find the following box spillover somewhat of an eye sore, which should be trivial to fix. The “Write post” box is extended when the items on the left are expanded, but what about those the reside on the right-hand-side?

Local Screenshots

I sometimes feel like a bug report which is not recognised or awarded for (if not financially, then at least on a personal level), there is little or no incentive to intervene and assist further.

I must admit that I lost a fair bit of passion for WordPress development. I have been less willing to help once it began to drift onto a commercial agenda (Automattic). But as I digress, I may continue to contribute to a project whose code is GPL‘d; a project that has impact on many sites and enriches people’s on-line experience. I still feel discouraged to do more debugging when somebody else out there gets paid for it. The forum mavens have expressed similar sentiments before.

T has been a good day at the gym today. A team of dozens of production staff took over the health club for the filming of models. Good-looking women ‘infested’ the place. [smile /]

Previous ‘special guests’ were
Jeff ‘Left hook’ Lacy, a boxing world champion (a fortnight ago), and Justin Timberlake a couple of years. It was just me and him at the gym, but I didn’t recognise him at first. He is unimpressive when faced in person.

The Maths Tower (right), which is adjacent to Computer Science (left) and was recently demolished

ATER this evening I shall attend a lecture, which will be delivered by an honourable guest: Irving Wladawsky-Berger. It takes place immediately after my meeting with the Supervisor, who happens to head the Department.

I don’t go to public talks as regularly as I used, but it’s probably because it no longer is a must. Attendance is not mandatory and absence is rarely frowned upon. I sometimes look back at them days when I attended lectures and exams. I have no yearnings whatsoever. My bad and sporadic sleeping habits had me fall asleep in virtually any early lecture. Examination has proven to be no-one’s favourite either.

The last exam I took dates back to June 2003. I remember this date rather vividly because, rather than celebrating this milstones, I prepared for an job interview that I had scheduled for the following day. At that stage, I was not at all nervous about exam. A quick ‘session’ involving Seinfeld episodes (I had all episodes on my hard-drive) become almost a must right before any exam, as a deliverer of light entertainment.

Either way, today I shall return to the Department of Computer Science to be part of what should be a fascinating presentation. As I slept 3 times today already, there is little or no chance of me falling asleep. Fingers crossed.

Photo which goes back to circa 1984

N hindsight, I believe that resigning from my job was an excellent choice, from a career ‘s perspective. I think I made the right choice by reducing a workload which provided income. For those readers who are lost, my last day at work was yesterday.

My life remains divided between voluntary contributions to Open Source and some jobs and duties, which help make ends meet. I recently mentioned my departure in terms of hardware depletion, which is of course irrelevant in any respect. What I care far more about is that gap and distance that will prevent me from seeing old colleagues and friends. This proves, as a matter of fact, that social aspects in a workplace can help in attracting and keeping valuable and talented staff. Luring people in is another matter altogether. It is no longer surprising to me that certain people work for one single company throughout their entire life.

I have held this particular job for 3.5 years. No doubt it will be remembered as quite a nice occupation. My other job I have held since 2001 and I will probably finish my contract this September, which will leave me far more independent. I guess it is simply a matter of moving on, probably to bigger and better things. Maybe even freelancing!

During my service at Manchester Computing I got to know many people, which made it hard for me to ever decide to leave. I once thought I would leave after a year, but here I am several years later, saying farewall rather late. This was probably long overdue, yet I remain rather saddened. Behind me I leave a place that had served me well in many ways.

Looking back at the E-mail archives from work, it is evident that I helped many people. Above all, I helped keep a variety of things running. It is a very important matter to me, as I once wrote about in “my creed of life” or “why I do what I do”. Many of the people involved were academic staff, who are nothing to sneeze at. My memories and experiences (more latterly at the Visualsation Center) will be tattooed in my memory forever, I am sure. If not, perhaps the blog will have me remained one day. Being an on-line diary, it is a avaliable tool for reminiscing.

To mark the occasions, I had a blast last night. A bunch of us went out to Rockworld and got wasted. Fortunately, no hangovers like the last time! For the first time, however, I spotted a case of complete memory loss. I cannot recall how I got from napping position on my dining table onto the bed. I guess the combination of heavy drinking and sleep made this reminiscent of insomnia.

VER the past few years I have accumulated new workstations, which joined what would become ‘legacy hardware’. The neat thing is that modern workstations can collaborate with the older ones and greatly benefit from their existence, e.g. for backup purposes or the use as a remote terminal. The key step is that which involved delegating tasks to each workstation, depending on its available capacity.

Currently, I have three machines at work. Ubuntu Linux is my pride with an admirable uptime (09:57:27 up 148 days, 1:47, 5 users, load average: 0.04, 0.05, 0.01), but there is also a Windows box and a Mac, none of which I bother to switch on anymore. There is one more computer at the University (SuSE), one at home (SuSE), and a laptop that I recently handed over to my sister. If it counts, I still have a Pentium at home, but it runs Windows 98 and it is not even connected to a source of power. It simply lies in storage and occasionally brings back memories from my mid-teens.

Giving up on one of my jobs is something I decided to do last week. I will still be left with another job, as well as the full-time Ph.D., on which I must concentrate. Thesis composition should probably start within weeks.

This departure from the job will leave me with 3 machines less. A post on my resignation should come up soon, once all is confirmed. I am obliged to come in for my last afternoon of duty tomorrow. I am saddened to think that the better choice was to resign. But not doubt it was.

O anyone who is interested: I have put together a page that enables content spam to be reported to several search engines in tandem. The purpose of this little ‘utility’ is to centralise various pages of interest, which motivates spam reports that reach more than just a single company. The ‘meat’ of the report can be conveniently copied and pasted from one frame to another. Report spammy sites that violate ethics.