From: Keith Wansbrough To: KeithNet List Date: Mon, 12 Oct 1998 14:43:41 BST Subject: KeithNet: Good news MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Mailer: Keith's own hand-crafted bulk mailer v1.2 [1998-10-12] Welcome back to KeithNet (and welcome to those who have just joined us). Once again, I've been so busy that I haven't had the energy to put together a message... hence the 2.5 month delay. As you can imagine, lots has happened. As always, the administrivia corner. If you want to be deleted or added to the list, just email me (I've added a few names to the list this month, some unsolicited; feel free to ask to be removed). If your email address repeatedly bounces I will put it on hold until you tell me otherwise; if you know in advance that your email will be going away though please tell me. You can always read these messages and all back issues at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/kw217/news/ On with the show. I thought about doing my usual full update on everything I've been doing, but there's so much that I'm just going to have to be selective (why do I hear 120 sighs of relief? ;-) ). I'll focus on major and recent events. The most major news, of course, is also pretty recent: I've moved to Cambridge. Simon, my supervisor, moved to Microsoft Research here in September, and I followed him on Monday 5 October. Microsoft Research (MSR) is just across the road from the Computing Laboratory (CL) (Cambridgese for Computer Science Department), and they have close links with each other. Hence I am continuing my PhD at Cambridge, co-supervised by Simon (MSR) and Dr. Andy Pitts (CL). Cambridge have agreed to credit my year at Glasgow, so I have two years to go (as before). My new contact details are as follows: Office: T51 (in the Tower) Computing Laboratory New Museums Site Pembroke Street Cambridge CB2 3QG England Phone: +44-1223-334-622 (direct line) Fax: +44-1223-334-678 College: Clare Hall Herschel Road Cambridge CB3 9AL Flat: 24 Eltisley Avenue Newnham Croft Cambridge CB3 9JG England Phone: +44-1223-356-479 Pager: 0839-453-673 (from within UK only) Email: kw217@cl.cam.ac.uk (or Keith.Wansbrough@cl.cam.ac.uk for those who can spell my surname correctly) Web: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/kw217/ Please send any snail mail to my flat. You can send snail mail to my office or to my college instead, but I don't check it as often. Email to my old Glasgow address should still work, but it's not recommended... my Auckland one didn't last all that long, and I have no way of knowing how long I will keep my Glasgow one. Thanks, by the way, to all who responded to my `European Character Test' email in July. It's good to know I can use the proper characters for most of you (for those who had problems, I guess you'll survive). Some of you spotted that it was also a check to see how many of you were still listening, and I'm pleased to be able to say that a good number of you were! In fact, I now have the problem that my inbox has over 100 messages in it that I haven't dealt with. Apologies if your email is one of them... I *do* intend to reply, and I *do* appreciate very much the personal emails I get. Please keep them coming, but forgive me if I take a little while to respond. Cambridge. Where to start? I'll tell you a bit about where I'm living, and work from there. When I arrived on Monday 5th, my accomodation hadn't quite been sorted out (since everything had been rushed through at the last minute: Clare Hall only accepted me on Tuesday 22 September, less than two weeks before I arrived!). So I spent the night in one of the guest rooms of the college. The next afternoon they had organised it, and I was wonderfully pleased to find that I had been allocated a *flat*, rather than a room in normal college accomodation. The thought of going from a nice flat of five people into student hall-style accomodation had been one dampener on my excitement at moving to Cambridge. But they read my letter, and chose the perfect place. Clare Hall owns a number of flats outside the college; my flat is one of these. It's got five rooms, although only four are occupied at this instant and one of those people is moving out shortly. It's on two levels; the rooms are reasonably large (mine is about 3.5 x 3m); and there's even a back lawn and *garden*!! I'm upstairs, looking out over the garden and into the neighbouring gardens. It's very nice, although Cambridge has waited until today (Sunday) to put on some proper sunlight to see it by. My permanent flatmates are Katherine (English, doing materials science), Frederic (from Alsace, doing organic chemistry: drug synthesis), and Debbie (from Glasgow(!), doing astronomy). Katherine is very nice and friendly; she's also the house rep. Frederic is cool too, although I haven't seen as much of him. I only just met Debbie on Sunday evening. It will be interesting to see who comes into the remaining room. I got my first rent bill a couple of days ago, and was amazed to see that despite gas and power being *included* (unlike Glasgow), it's almost exactly what I was paying last year! This will no doubt help my finances a bit. The downside is that although we have a washing machine, there's no dryer (at Glasgow there was a laundry with washing machines and tumble dryers, for which we didn't have to pay at all). I'm having to learn to dry things by other means (although with central heating that's not too hard). My office is in a block that looks very much like the rear of the Chemistry / Maths / Physics complex at Auckland, called the New Museums Site. It was obviously built in the 1960s or thereabouts, and it's pretty ugly but functional. I spent five years at Auckland, so I'm used to it and don't mind too much! I'm on the fifth floor of `The Tower', which overlooks Corn Exchange Street, a side-street between the New Museums Site and Lion Yard, the local shopping centre. It's right in the middle of town, which is very handy (but dangerous: on my first full day there I caught myself buying three second-hand books from the market ... if I do that every time I walk through the market I'll soon be broke). There's a lift, but I try to be good and use the stairs. The tower goes several floors higher, but the lift only goes up to floor 5. Luckily, there is a printer on the same floor as my office! I share the office with one other, Søren Lassen, and I'm in a cluster of five offices, one of which is my supervisor's, Andy Pitts. It seems quite a good arrangement. So far I haven't got much work done: I've unpacked all my stuff, and started reconfiguring my terminal. Things are *very* different here from Glasgow, so this is taking a while---I spend all of Friday working on it, and I suspect it will take another couple of days until I have it right. Ah well, I guess two days in two years is not too much. Clare Hall, my college, is a small graduates-only college established in the 1960s. You can find out more at www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/, www.cam.ac.uk/CambUniv/GUHandbook/C11/ClareH.html, and www.cam.ac.uk/CambUniv/GSProspectus/C5/Colls/ClareH.html. The college essentially provides food, accomodation, some funding, and a social network for its students (for undergrads it also is responsible for a lot of teaching, but not for postgrads). I love Clare Hall because of its lack of formality, and because of its international character. Most of the colleges in Cambridge have centuries of tradition, and a rigid hierarchy: Fellows eat at the high table, and never mix with the students, formal dress has to be worn often, and so on. Clare Hall has none of this---free intermingling of all categories of members is explicitly encouraged, and gowns are never worn. Also, it has a hugely international population: on my first night I met people from Israel, Portugal, South Africa, the States, China, Bangladesh, Germany, and Norway - later I met people from Australia, Zambia, Canada, and even another NZer! (Nicholas, who did Stats at Auckland and knows Jeremy). So, unlike Glasgow which felt very monocultural, here I'm back in a real cosmopolitan society. In fact, it's not just the college---all of Cambridge is like this. It's great wandering the streets and seeing Asian faces and hearing Mandarin or Cantonese like I was used to in Auckland, not to mention all the other nationalities. I called this KeithNet `Good news'. Why? Well, there are lots of reasons. Firstly, my POPL paper (with Simon) got accepted! This means I will be going to San Antonio, Texas in January to present it, en route home to New Zealand (dates to be advised shortly). I'm very excited about this! POPL is quite a major conference, and to have a paper in it after only my first year of the PhD is wonderful. Secondly, as I've already mentioned, I got accepted into Cambridge and into a college, *just* in time to start in the Michaelmas Term (October, the beginning of the year here). I was not worried about getting in since it had all been okayed in principle by the relevant people, but when I called up at the beginning of September to check on how things were going (six weeks after putting in my application) and discovered they'd basically been sitting on it doing nothing, I was rather worried about where I was going to live and what I was going to do for three months if I didn't get in in time for the start of term: I had told Glasgow I was leaving already! When I still hadn't heard anything by mid-September I realised I needed some certainty in my life and so decided that whatever happened I would just go down, and hopefully stay with someone down there (I knew a friend of a friend) until things were worked out. But just in the nick of time everything came through, and so here I am with everything organised totally by the book! Thirdly, as I have also already mentioned, I'm in a flat rather than a student hall. I'm really pleased about this---my flat last year was absolutely wonderful; we got on so well together that it was really like a family. Although I realise this is probably the exception, it still feels nicer living with five people than with fifteen or more, and allows for much better relationships. Things seem to be going reasonably well so far. Oh yes: it's a mixed flat, too. I dreaded the thought of a flat full of guys (most of the Glasgow Uni flats were single-sex). The dynamics of a mixed flat are quite different. Fourthly, transporting my stuff. Some of you may have noticed how much stuff I brought over from New Zealand. My basic philosophy was that since I was going for three years, I was essentially moving my life over here and I should therefore bring just about everything. I still believe this was definitely the right thing to do, and it has been wonderful to have all my books, all my electronics stuff, etc etc, here. But it was all predicated on being in Glasgow for three years, not on moving after just one year! Obviously I had to ship it down (here seems a good point to echo a point made in _Grapevine_'s margin once: why is it that if we transport stuff by road we call it shipping, and if we transport stuff by sea we call it cargo?). So I called up one company, and they told me that since it was only a part load it would take four to six *weeks* to get it down to Cambridge (a distance of only around 500km). They also wanted to charge rather a lot. So I called up another company, and they said one to two weeks. I gritted my teeth and agreed, and spent days packing all my stuff into boxes (it was a *major* exercise; the boxes were smaller than last time but it ended up being 15 boxes, one 2-drawer filing cabinet, and one bookcase!). They took it away on the Thursday before I left. I was amazed to get a call on Monday checking if it was OK to deliver it on Thursday! So I got settled into the flat on Tuesday, and my stuff arrived on Thursday---the timing could hardly have been more perfect. I had to wait six weeks after I arrived in Glasgow before my stuff made it, and that was after it had had a good head-start on me. This was much nicer---already my room is pretty much sorted out how I want it to be, except for the books (which seem to have multiplied or something). Fifthly, my Masters thesis and the paper I got from it have been cited in a recent paper by Peter Mosses, the Action Semantics guy himself. Søren told me last time I visited Cambridge that Mosses had been inspired by my work to work on properly modularising action semantics, and this paper is about that work. Cool! Well, this has essentially been an update about Cambridge. I have omitted *heaps*. Obviously there'll be more about Cambridge to come in future KeithNets, but I should also summarise some of what's been happening in Glasgow (and elsewhere in the last couple of months). I had a fantastic farewell party (theme ``Purple Chocolate'') at Morag, Sharon, and Joy's flat on Saturday 3 October. Lots of people were there, all wearing purple (I felt very honoured), and there was lots of great food and no less than *two* farewell cakes! Even Lance came to my party, from Edinburgh. I spent my last few days in Glasgow staying with a friend and ex-flatmate, Lisa: my flat lease expired on the 30th, so I was homeless for five nights. She fed me and provided me with a warm place to sleep, and we stayed up far too late each night talking. I spent two afternoons out at the airport in Glasgow in late September welcoming international students to the city---putting my bit back in, I guess. It was good fun, although I wish I could have done more. The Glasgow Functional Programming Workshop was held a couple of hours north of Glasgow, in Pitlochry, Sep 21-23. I presented my work to the workshop, and we all had a great time with both interesting talks and discussions, and the wonderful surroundings (and a trip to a distillery!). Jeremy Tantrum spent a week staying on my floor (yes, he had a mattress). It was cool to see him again, and we managed to go and climb a mountain one day as well as visiting a number of Glasgow attractions. While he was here I showed _Wings of Desire_ (_Der Himmel Über Berlin_) to a group of friends. It's my favourite movie, so after realising that there was no video store in Glasgow that had it for hire, I wasn't too unhappy about actually buying it. I now own my own copy! People's reactions were varied---Hollywood seems to be the rule in Glasgow, and a German art film is rather difficult to appreciate if that is all one has experienced. But there were some who succeeded. I showed it again a couple of weeks later to some more friends. In the second week of September I went to University College, London for a conference, Implementation of Functional Languages. August 27--September 1, the English Bank Holiday weekend, was Greenbelt. It was the 25th Greenbelt. This is a Christian arts festival, the one on which things like Parachute in NZ are based. It was a totally awesomely wonderful experience that I want to repeat as soon as I possibly can (despite the fact that I was very sick at the time and so couldn't stay up to enjoy the late-night activities), but there's not room here to tell you about it all. Suffice it to say that this was what the Church is supposed to be about. 10000 people, mainly 20s to 40s agewise; everyone from (genuine) Franciscan monks in habits to full-on Goths hanging out together in a wonderfully friendly, open, and welcoming atmosphere; loads of great speakers, loads of great music; plenty of time and space to be yourself; plenty of challenge for those who needed challenging, support for those who needed support; intellectual stimulation but grounded in reality. Wow. *BE THERE* if you ever have the slightest opportunity. Next year it will be a bit different, but it will still be Greenbelt. I wrote down some more details but I don't have room for them here; ask me. August 15--21 I was in Saarbrücken, Germany, for ESSLLI, another conference. This was cool: I met a few interesting people, including one or two from Cambridge, and I presented my work at a workshop there (although unfortunately not very well---I did a better job at GFPW). It was nice to get a proper summer---Glasgow has had a horrible summer, with about one week of sunshine the whole season. I guess it's because of the warm winter. I'm hoping Cambridge will have a decent summer next year, but looking out the window I've definitely missed out on this year's one. But hey, I'll be in NZ in February! In early August, my cousin Karlene visited me, which was very nice; Lance visited too (up for the Edinburgh festival), and also Nicole, touring around the UK with her mum and returning back to Ireland. It was nice to have all these visitors, but it left me feeling a bit strange---they showed up the difference between friends who've known you for years and years, and people who, no matter how deep the friendship, have only known you for a year. Nothing really compares with someone who genuinely understands you. August 1 I finally got to visit the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition---yes, the Dead Sea Scrolls came to only one place in the UK on the Israel 50 tour, and the place they chose was 5mins walk from my flat! The scrolls themselves were rather unimpressive (obviously they only had a few fragments, and they had to use very dim light), but the exhibition was good and the `hey, I've actually seen the Dead Sea Scrolls' factor was pretty good too :-) . Quite a privilege. I had my birthday party on Friday 24 July, a few days early, and we all had a great time. Thanks for the cards and presents, people! And I think that brings us back to Tuesday, July 21, when I sent out my last KeithNet! I hope this KeithNet has been of more manageable length. It's hard to compress my very full life down into just 5000 words or so! Hope you're all surviving OK back in NZ, despite the craziness of the government. Love and hugs, --KW 8-) ---- PS: Please do print this out and show it to anyone you know who would like to see it and doesn't have email. -- : Keith Wansbrough, MSc, BSc(Hons) (Auckland) -------------------------: : PhD Student, Computing Laboratory, University of Cambridge, England. : : (and recently of the University of Glasgow, Scotland. [><] ) : : Native of Antipodean Auckland, New Zealand: 174d47' E, 36d55' S. : : http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/kw217/ mailto:kw217@cl.cam.ac.uk : :----------------------------------------------------------------------: