From: Keith Wansbrough To: KeithNet List Date: Wed, 15 Nov 2000 18:30:55 GMT Subject: KeithNet: Nine days and counting... :-) 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] Dear KeithNet people, Dear everyone, Hi there! Once again, it’s been ages since the last KeithNet, but for once I have a *really* good excuse. It’s now just nine days until we get married, and things are all go! Only a few items left on our to-do lists, and a few more flights up and down the country, and it will finally be happening! Life is pretty exciting. As usual, I’d like to take this opportunity to tell you that if you want to be removed from this email list, or you know someone who would like to be added, please contact me on kw217@cl.cam.ac.uk. All back issues (over three years’ worth now!) may be accessed from my web page, at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/kw217/news/ A *lot* has been happening , but I’m afraid this KeithNet will only be brief. Let’s see now... I have a job, Carolyn has finished writing her thesis, Carolyn has a job, I’ve been to Montréal to present a paper, Carolyn has moved down to Cambridge, I’ve moved out of my flat, we have a house, I’ve moved office, there’s been a fuel `crisis’, England has had severe flooding, my thesis is progressing but not complete, we’ve booked our tickets to New Zealand, and ... probably lots of other things I am too busy to think about right now! I guess the most important thing to mention right now is our new address. Neither my Clare Hall nor my Eltisley Avenue address (nor my Palmerston Place one if you remember that far) are valid any more, and I don’t trust them to be reliably forwarded. I’ve also changed telephone companies (from BT to NTL) so I have a new number. The details: Keith and Carolyn 30 Fishers Lane Cherry Hinton Cambridge CB1 9HR England Telephone: +44 (0)1223 704 822 (H) Cherry Hinton is a really nice area; if you want to see a map (including an aerial photo), click on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/kw217/newhome.html Hopefully there will be some scanned photos appearing on the web site at some stage. If you’re planning to drop in (sorry if you’re on the other side of the world!), you should be informed that entrance is via the back door. It’s a lovely semi-detached house, with a kitchen, lounge, dining room, two bedrooms and a bathroom, *and a garden*, with herbs and flowers and spinach and a grapevine and an as-yet-unidentified fruit tree (still waiting for Matthew 7:16a). For the moment we’re renting, although we may consider buying next year. (If you want a genuine permanent address for either of us, the McEwans live at 39 Riccarton Road, Linlithgow, West Lothian, EH49 6HX, Scotland, +44 (0)1506 844 383.) We are really enjoying setting ourselves up in the house - it’s so lovely having an entire house, rather than one tiny room to live in as I have for the last three years. My work address has also changed; I’ve moved up two floors to T71, Computer Lab, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 3QG, phone +44 (0)1223 334 608. Email and web addresses remain the same. There’s actually a photo of my office and building on my web page, thanks to my officemate Andrei. Oh yes - I’m now in an office with two other people, which I am enjoying very much - for the last six months or so I was on my own, and it gets pretty antisocial. I like having people to talk to while I’m working, and to discuss ideas with and so on. Carolyn’s job is great. She’s been there a month now, working for Pfizer in a small lab on the Addenbrookes Hospital site here in Cambridge. The work involves using some pretty hi-tech devices to rapidly test new drugs on cells (especially nerve cells) in vitro, in very large numbers. Her PhD experience has turned out to be extremely relevant, somewhat to her surprise, and she is enjoying making a useful contribution to the project. The people have also been very friendly. I have a job with the Computer Laboratory, working with Peter Sewell on a grant entitled (rather grandly) _Wide Area Programming: Language, Semantics and Infrastructure Design_. I am employed as a Research Associate (post-doctoral Research Assistant), and we will be working on designing new programming languages for writing `distributed programs’ - programs that run on multiple computers, across the Internet, and need to communicate with each other and possibly even move from one computer to another. We will be particularly focussing on issues of failure (what happens when a computer or network `goes down’) and security (how can we prevent attackers altering information or stopping our programs from working). I started work just two weeks ago, so there’s not very much to say about it all yet, but it will be fun and I am already enjoying the experience of doing something different - the PhD, while challenging and interesting, remains a single thing that I’ve been working on continuously for three years. The PhD hasn’t been forgotten, of course. I’m working on that too, in spare moments and (hopefully, when my life settles down) in regular slots each day. I should complete early in 2001. At the moment I am re-implementing the program I developed, adding a few features and "doing it all the right way this time" now I have the experience of having written it once. In this way I hope the results will be of use to people other than myself. About half of the thesis is written, and I feel fairly happy about the state of affairs. Anyway, that's about all I have time for right now, apart from a brief mention of our wedding web site, at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/kw217/wedding/ We've put (hopefully) everything you need to know about the wedding on here, and we will be adding photos to it after the big day! Looking forward to seeing many of you in Linlithgow on November 24, and many more in Auckland on March 3 (details to follow). Love, --KW 8-) -- Keith Wansbrough http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/kw217/ Cambridge University Computer Laboratory.