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Another three days of training completed at the University of Sydney for the researchers on their new cluster. Some of the in-class feedback has been quite inspiring. One person started laughing in the middle of the class and when asked what was wrong, he mentioned how he was just remembering how boring lectures were and how he'd fall asleep in them; "I am learning so much today!" he countered, which just goes to show the advantage of smaller workgroups with proximal development and connectivist approaches. Another came up to me and mentioned how the class had increased his desire to become a computer science educator. A third went home and spent two hours hacking on a bash script which iterates over an array of R files and uses sed to change the parameters within those files; it will save him many hours of work in the future and has offered the script as an example in the intermediate course (which deals with all three). So all in all, it's fair to say it went really well.
After the classes took the Manly ferry (it really is quite an impressive trip) to catch up with the good Rev. Dr. Ian Ellis-Jones who shouted me a lovely dinner at Havana Beach. The meal itself was very tasty with generous portions, however the real highlight was the wide-ranging conversation which covered many matters religious, political, and philosophical. Ian is widely read and thoroughly rational thinker and my only regret from the night was that it had to come to a close. Next month when I return I shall ensure additional time in his company.
The following day trundled to the airport under some heavy load; I had excess baggage with some 35kg of roleplaying books I'd picked up on a bargain. Tomorrow![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
caseopaya and I will be taking the silver bird to New Zealand, partially for the eResearchNZ conference in Queenstown, partially to check on our property in Dunedin, partially to meet with supervisors etc for my Master of Education course at Otago Univeristy, and partially for a trip to Milford Sound. In the meantime, I am giving a presentation to the Linux Users Victoria beginners workshop today, on "An Introduction to Supercomputers" (very much a repeat of a talk I gave in 2013) and have completed my presentation to eReseachNZ on "Skill Improvements versus Interface Designs for eResearchers" - in both cases DW/LJ readers get to see them first.
After the classes took the Manly ferry (it really is quite an impressive trip) to catch up with the good Rev. Dr. Ian Ellis-Jones who shouted me a lovely dinner at Havana Beach. The meal itself was very tasty with generous portions, however the real highlight was the wide-ranging conversation which covered many matters religious, political, and philosophical. Ian is widely read and thoroughly rational thinker and my only regret from the night was that it had to come to a close. Next month when I return I shall ensure additional time in his company.
The following day trundled to the airport under some heavy load; I had excess baggage with some 35kg of roleplaying books I'd picked up on a bargain. Tomorrow
caseopaya and I will be taking the silver bird to New Zealand, partially for the eResearchNZ conference in Queenstown, partially to check on our property in Dunedin, partially to meet with supervisors etc for my Master of Education course at Otago Univeristy, and partially for a trip to Milford Sound. In the meantime, I am giving a presentation to the Linux Users Victoria beginners workshop today, on "An Introduction to Supercomputers" (very much a repeat of a talk I gave in 2013) and have completed my presentation to eReseachNZ on "Skill Improvements versus Interface Designs for eResearchers" - in both cases DW/LJ readers get to see them first.
