Bits and Pieces of History

• April 2006: My first trip to China. Shanghai and Hangzhou to be exact, to deliver a paper in the Edutainment06 conference. Found both cities to be a bit too crowded for my taste, but maybe you really have to be in a shopping mood for Shanghai.

• November 2005: IE2006 (Interactive Entertainment 2006) is a great success. Looks like IE will continu as a conference series in years to come. A brave effort in 2004 to hold a workshop which has now turned into an annual conference. Hurray!

• Sep 2004: Meryl McQueen, my better half, finishes her first novel about a young adult.

• May 2003: Article about Matt Roberts, my honours and PhD student. They wanted to do an interview with me, but I figured since I had just accepted a position at UTS, it was best that they interview Matt instead. here

• April 2003: SMH quotes me, but gets my name wrong, here

• Sep 2004: Meryl McQueen, my better half, finishes her PhD in a record 16 month time. Hmm, mine took 6 years, does that make her 4.5 times more clever than me?

• Downhill skiing is fun. Tried Thredbo thought it needed better runs. Tried Wisconsin thought the artificial hill should have been steeper. Tried a glacier in Switzerland in the summer which was fun but flat. Colorada and France (Chamenix) remain the best locations for me so far. New Zealand is on the queue.

• June 1998: Leaving Michigan Lake, Northwestern University's pretty campus, the cold Chicago weather and our Southport neighbourhood which got yuppified in the four years we were there, we moved to Sydney.

• I am an avid emacs fan. Being an emacs and lisp hacker naturally led to tweaking the "ilisp" interface. I am even in the official credits for ilisp. I have also sent many bug-reports to Richard Stallman over time. Emacs is the one true editor. Here is a tutorial I wrote on emacs.

• In 1994, I was playing with hardware and robotics. The original project was to have the robot prepare cup-of-soup. The project was then simplified to moving the mug around since we could not trust the robot with boiling water.

• I used to read usenet news at a time when there was more discussion and less noise. I am the founder of soc.culture.turkish.moderated. It was formed with the best of intentions, but does not get much traffic these days.

• I maintained a cluster of RS/6000s. AIX is a picky operating system to work with. Nothing used to compile without tinkering with it first. I remember the "running man" in SMIT; IBM's GUI for performing administrative tasks. The "running man" is most widely known for how he falls on his face when operations fail. Another "feature" of the SMIT GUI was that it blocked the mouse so you could not do anything else while the man kept running.

• I tried IRC, yahoo chat and other forms of chat online, but still fail to see the point of it. I do not care for ICQ either. What is the point of being interruptable all the time.

• Mobile phones? Yikes! Please, please turn them off. Can we not make and keep appointments like we used to? We all need our down time; mobile phones and the culture of being "always" reachable make this really hard.

• I went tandem skydiving in Chicago. The parachute opened, it was wonderful.

• I enjoy scuba diving, but have yet to dive in the reef. I am an "advanced" scuba diver which I think means I took one more course than I was supposed to.