Back from my trip

Well it's been awhile. I promised to blog from overseas, but of course I was too busy. I had a very good trip taking in two conferences, AAAI in Atlanta and ICCBR in Alessandria Italy. You can see photos from the Italian part of the trip some of which are really beautiful. We went on a conference day-trip to Stresa on one of the northern lakes and took a ferry ride to visit several islands - really lovely.

Once I returned I obviously had to clear a backlog of tasks from my desk and then yesterday my iPad arrived. They are finally on sale in NZ. Of course that wiped out any chance of working yesterday. I have to say I'm loving the iPad. More comments and thoughts on it will follow I'm sure.

Overseas for 2 weeks

I'm away to some conferences for 2 weeks but may still blog occasionally via email.

It was the most beautiful day in Auckland yesterday (photo attached).

Busy Times

Not much action on the book recently. My excuses are:

• had to mark exams and process results (for 4 courses) for the semester end
• been reviewing conference papers and 2 chapters of a new AI text book
• been reading a PhD thesis for an oral exam tomorrow, and
• finally generally clearing my desk for a 2 week trip to Atlanta and Italy

See, that doesn't sound so bad when I write it all down. The conference in Atlanta is AAAI-2010, this is the main AI conference this year. At the conference we'll learn the results of my PhD student's poker bot that is competing in the 2010 international computer poker competition. The conference in Italy is much smaller and just about case-based reasoning, my main research speciality (ICCBR 2010).
This trip I'm going to be totally reliant on my iPhone as I'm not taking a laptop. I'll have access to many of my files via Apple's MobileMe and will be able of course to get my email and follow Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook and LinkedIn all from the phone. Fortunately the conferences will have free WiFi access and hopefully my hotels will as well so I wont be needing to use any/much 3G data - the roaming charges are very expensive.
I'm planning to use Ping! to txt message with my wife and Skype to talk via WiFi.
I can also post to this blog via email and send photos from my iPhone so there will be some activity whilst I'm away.

Getting Published - Catch 22

It's a bit of a Catch 22 situation. Most publishers will not accept "unsolicited manuscripts" and only accept manuscripts recommended by literary agents. Most agents agents don't seem to accept authors who haven't been published before. See the catch?
Now fortunately I have been published before, but if you haven't getting your first publication must be really daunting. I'm lucky that my editor from my previous publisher (who is not the right publisher for this project) is going to point me in the direction of some contacts she has. I'm also doing some footwork myself.
Interestingly all the publishers and agents' websites say (often in bold) "we do not accept unsolicited children's fiction". I guess that's the Harry Potter effect, they must be buried under mountains of paper for the next wizard franchise.

John Cleese, a dead fish & a Compaq computer

I stumbled across this video on YouTube of an advert from the 1980s featuring John Cleese comparing a Compaq 2 computer to a dead fish. It appears that he did a whole series of TV adverts for Compaq in the mid 1980's.

World Cup & RoboCup

There's been almost a viral posting about RoboCup doing the rounds since obviously the World Cup is under way and the slightly lesser know RoboCup 2010 competition is under way in Singapore.
The article, which originated in the Guardian,  refers to Prof. Manuela Veloso as "he". Manuela who has been very influential in Robocup for years though is a lady. The cynical may of course think "oh of course, the reporter assumes all computer science Professors must be male". Hopefully not from a liberal newspaper like the Guardian.
Unfortunately all the reposts, blogs reports and tweets of this continue to spread the error.

Writer's block

And I thought that the gap between lectures and exams would give me some time to get back to the book. Boy was I wrong, even less done than usual, thanks to spending some time programming the Nao robot & taking it on school visits.
So I'll have some exam marking to do for the next few days and then semester break.