Lev Lafayette's journal

Whilst in New Zealand I received the rather sad news that devilgirly had passed away. This rather amazing woman had been a good friend for the better part of twenty years or so. She attended our civil union, and a few years ago we spent Christmas lunch together. Back in the day she'd been a model of some note (alternative and retro), worked in the fashion industry and had some pretty fine music connections as well. Yet she also had an infectious good spirit, a genuine concern for others, and a very strong sense of social justice and fairness. Whilst often not always in the best health, it is still quite a shock to have a friend a good decade and younger than one's self suddenly pass on. Her funeral yesterday was dignified, often sad, and often joyous, and also an opportunity to meet up with some old friends. The chapel was full to standing room only (rather like a rock concert, I mused), and the wake was truly celebratory. I feel very deeply for her partner Dave who has spent a happy eleven years in her company, and of course her parents. I spent some time with her mother at the wake, and I could certainly see where she got her sparkling intellect and passion from. In the several days prior I had slowly worked my way through her old livejournal entries, reliving some memories old, good, and true.

I have completed and submitted the draft for my dissertation, the final piece of assessment for a Master of Science in Information Systems. There are still a few tables to fill in, some minor edits to complete, several hundred words to take out (unsurprisingly, I wrote over the limit), but I have until Saturday to finish all that, and it's not particularly onerous. Even most of the fiddly bits of formatting are in place, which always strikes me as the most useless part of any formal study. Almost on cue, today I also received a formal offer for casual work as a tutor in the computer science department at the very place where I work on a full-time basis. Bureaucracies can be downright weird like that; I must follow up on whether this is additional virtual paperwork is actually necessary. Also as time has a sense of humour, I am also giving HPC classes for the next three days; thirty researchers per day, five hours per workshop, ranging from the basics of the Linux command-line, to HPC job submission, and then the hairy, but the super-powerful world of regular expressions.

On the flight over from New Zealand, I watched most of the Good Omens TV series, which was only released in May last year, which is remarkably up-to-date for me. Last night I finished off the rest of the series, and I must say I rather liked it. Obviously, David Tennant makes for a fine demon as Crowley, but Michael Sheen's performance of as the angel Aziraphale is increasingly charming. Overall, the series remained quite true to the novel's plot and was visually quite briliant. The plot rolled along at a perfect pace, and the characterisation but all actors (even the dog) was quite delightful. I can't help but think the mistaken petition to cancel the show only enhanced its reputation. Anyway, I have a side history with this story - I purchased and read the paperback in the early 1990s, and have it signed by Terry Pratchett. Despite a couple of near opportunities, I don't yet have Neil Gaiman's signature to complement it. Hopefully, I should resolve that someday soon - before The Apocalypse.

I've spent a good portion of my free time in the past week doing an extensive literature review for my MSc dissertation in information systems. As literature reviews should do, it addresses a core concern of my inquiry: a major conflict between business and economics, as both academic disciplines and professional practice; in former, there is an attempt to reduce competition to gain a monopolistic advantage (even if theorists like Porter call "competitive advantage"), whereas the latter argues that such behaviour harmful to productivity and economic welfare as a whole. Even after reviewing various business models for free-and-open-source software, the solution is not yet clear. Capitalist investors are less interested in innovation or even a general increase in economic welfare than they are in the acquisition of economic rents, "information landlordism" if I may coin a phrase. Schumpeterian rents might be an alternative theoretical model in non-general software products (e.g., proprietary bespoke extensions) but any sort of copyright regime does set up an institutional perverse incentive for extensions. In any case, it provided for some appropriate background thoughts as I smashed by way through the GNU Octave dependency tree, before getting tripped up at the end with an MPI build of Gnuplot; a little annoying.

Making use of a generous gift voucher from Damien and Jack B for my birthday last year, caseopaya and I went to Whiskey and Alement. I have to be in a particular mood for whiskey, and this was not the time (it rarely is, I have litres of the stuff at home). The bar was crowded and noisy, just what I don't want in such an establishment, but they did have a good variety of whiskeys and non-whiskeys and quite reasonably priced, as long as one doesn't account for the somewhat bland and pricey wines that we started with. I ended up having delved into Delord Armagnac ('83, if that makes much of a difference) and a Grout Calvados, both of which were absolutely superb, whilst caseopaya stuck to her favourite gin. It certainly did remind me that I need to get some Calvados into my otherwise pretty well-stocked home bar. Delicious stuff, and only further strengthens my affection towards the Breton people.

Apart from that, I am continuing my new year's objective in publication writing, which was not an easy target. As the days progress, I am increasingly aware that any sort of reasonably staggered publication schedule requires temporal concentration on particular works, which is not something that I am particularly fond of, and I suspect most other people on the planet are the same. When one's brain is overflowing on one subject, it is a release to concentrate on something else for a while (or eat, or do housecleaning, etc). Worse still, one gets into their head crazy ideas about additional publications, which may have aesthetic value, but would be require something else being delayed in its stead. On that note, I am considering a contemporary-cum-cyberpunk supplement for Papers & Paychecks, based on my own tangental pub, Emails & Direct Deposits. This is, after all, the most appropriate year for such things to come out.

Just returned from seeing the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra perform Blue Planet II which was filled to its 5,500 capacity seating and presented by Joanna Lumley. There can be no criticism of the extraordinary footage nor its interaction with the musical score. It was also a little bit of a reward for finishing my end-of-semester assignment for Information Sytems which basically developing a scenario for UK technology businesses wanting to expand into continental Europe with technical and organizational integration issues and also, of course, with Brexit looming. I presume others have noticed that the first workday of Brexit is April Fool's Day.

In other studies, my intensive for economics rolls on. I've made an appeal of sorts on the fact that I've missed out almost a trimester's worth of study time due to delays in my enrolment and receiving materials, but I am pessimistic of anything coming from that. The University of London is far too élite for anything quite so student-centric. On the other hand, it turns out I was a little mistaken about the University of Otago in my last post. It was not them, but their bank which had applied an additional transaction fee (that is, my bank charged one going out, their bank applied one going in). One day, there will be a revolution and a very special wall set aside for the banks. Still, Otago lifted my block as soon as they realized what was going on, although they should get into the habit of not attempting to charge others for their bank fees. In future I'll probably be using something like Transferwise.

Another big event of the week was receiving an offer on Rick B's flat. I had barely put the apartment up on Facebook to advertise an upcoming auction when the offer came in, so that's very good news. The money from the sale of the apartment will go to paying his nursing home fees. It's quite a relief given how long it has taken not just to get the place cleaned up and so forth, but also to receive approval from VCAT to be even allowed to sell the place in the first place. Now the only issue to sort out is the means-tested fees as determined by the Federal government which inexplicably rocketed at the end of last year with no change in his financial circumstances. For anyone who has had administer another person's financial and medical affairs under the Guardianship and Administration Act you have enormous sympathy; the bureaucratic overhead is quite a nightmare.

The past few days I've been in New Zealand for Multicore World, a small but quality conferences which has a great schedule. I was been particularly impressed by James Ang's presentation on heterogenous hardware design for lead researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, taking a cue from Eric von Hippel's "Democratizing Innovation". Sean Blanchard from the Los Alamos Ultrascale Systems Research Centre gave a fascinating talk on the dangers of cosmic rays on memory (who knew?), whereas Ruud van der Pas gave a great presentation on NUMA and a satirical take on a new language, OpenWOUND. Finally, John Gustafson of National University of Singapore, gave an update on the UNUM/posit project, inconsistencies in math libraries, and especially how its cost-efficiency can seriously help the Square Kilometre Array.

The conference has been held in Shed 22 on the Wellington waterfront, which had just beautiful warm and clear summer days. Which is just as well, because I've had bugger-all opportunity to explore, with a conference timetable that runs from around 8:30 to 20:00, my day's journey has been from the "hotel" to the conference hall and back again. This said, I did get the opportunity to have dinner with Janet E., and Doug on the Monday night which was absolutely delightful. I do have Saturday off before heading to Dunedin and am hoping to catch up with the handful of Wellington people I know for lunch. The "hotel" I am staying at is actually Victoria University student accommodation before the new semester, which is clean, modern, with nice views and an absolute steal at a mere $30/night (no, that is not an error).

In between the conference and working through the enormous list of R extensions that I'm installing, I've also been finishing various assessment components for the MSc in Information Systems that I'm doing. This includes a video review of a webinar on social media strategy; the assignment required that it be a video, but apparently, assessment will be based on content, which is just as well with my non-existent video skills. In addition, I also finished a review of two White Papers on Enterprise Resource Planning software, which you would think would be a prime candidate for an information systems perspective. In both cases, I am somewhat surprised by the lack of quantitative evaluation and a systems perspective in subjects that are really screaming for it. Despite (or perhaps) my background in social inquiry and my existing degrees in business, the absence of objective facts and systemic logic in such areas is really quite ridiculous.