Last Day at VPAC, A Busy Weekend

Today was my last official working day at VPAC/V3 Alliance, a place where I have worked for since September 2007. I will be still working on various publications mentioned in previous entries, to leave some lasting legacy. I cannot pretend that I am happy with the circumstances of finishing work at VPAC, but I am also very pleased with the new position at the University of Melbourne. I'm trying to the numbers, operating at a level of at least 3,000 tickets resolved (VPAC and ARCS primarily) and probably a similar number of training days conducted (around 30 student-days per month in the past year, somewhat less in previous years). So maybe 4,000 researchers all up from RMIT, La Trobe University, the University of Melbourne, Deakin University, Swinburne University, Victoria University of Technology, the University of Sydney, Macquarie University, the University of New South Wales, the University of Western Australia, the Australian Institute of Health Innovation, the Westmead Millennium Institute, and the Australian Institution of Marine Science. It even possible that some good has come from it all.

The preceeding weekend was fairly busy; on Saturday went to visit uke and family, whom we'd hadn't seen since last November. A great afternoon of wide-ranging conversation (which reminds us that we must catch up more often). Finished the fascinating book The Discovery of France, which they had loaned to me on the previous visit. The following day was the Unitarian service on permaculture, followed by The Philosophy Forum with a presentation by Pat Sunter, on "Phronesis, Pragmatism and Practical Wisdom:- re-grounding the social sciences". He made a good elaboration on the classical theory, but updated with some recent work by Bent Flyvbjerg. After that (yes, three events per day) was a session of GURPS Middle Earth, which included a mash-in of the classic Call of Cthulhu adventure, Paper Chase.