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I've written a few paragraphs on Multicore World, essentially giving an overview of what was a small, specialist, but high quality conference. The most disappointing aspect was, due to being quite new to my current job that I simply couldn't take the necessary leave to travel around the country and catch up with NZ-located friends as I am want to do. Whilst the conference location, right on Wellington harbour, was great, I simply had only sufficient time to travel to and from the hotel room to the venue (the conference also tended to run from 0800 to 2000 hours each day). One significant positive to the conference was catching up with John Gustafson who took the time to write a frankly overwhelming praise singer's foreward to my book on Sequential and Parallel Programming with C and Fortran (actually, there's some good history and humour there, but the conclusion just floored me).
On the return trip squeezed in two in-flight movies, The Martian and The Peanuts Movie. The former was a little too much on heroic side and included one major scientific error (the dust storm), but was otherwise an exciting feel-good film. The latter was full of nostalgic charm with all the favourite characters and situations. Apropos entertainments, on my return to Melbourne have enjoyed two games (one as player and one as GM) of Eclipse Phase. In the second game the story arc has moved from being introduced to firewall in the main belt, acquiring some alien technology, and making their way to the Jovian orbit. An issue concerning VR time dilation in the game has also been resolved. This, and a number of rule elaborations and clarifications will be included in the Eclipse Phase Companion which I'll put in the RPG Review github in the next day or so.
Today I managed to meet up with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
certifiedwaif whom I've know for some twenty years online but never had a face-to-face encounter (despite the fact we're relatively nearby on the global scale of things. We had lunch with members of the team, chatted about various programming and numerical calculation issues (his PhD and work interests) and generally had a pleasant time. With NinjaDan discussed how Internet culture can be very much like the belles-lettres of yesteryear, but without the latency (which allows for higher levels of literary intimacy). Internet culture does mean that it is not uncommon to have friends and associates that one doesn't meet face-to-face for several years, and yet still share close and continuing communication. With the possible exception of short-wave radio aficionados, who are in many way the culture's precursors, this is a significant change to the way we live.
On the return trip squeezed in two in-flight movies, The Martian and The Peanuts Movie. The former was a little too much on heroic side and included one major scientific error (the dust storm), but was otherwise an exciting feel-good film. The latter was full of nostalgic charm with all the favourite characters and situations. Apropos entertainments, on my return to Melbourne have enjoyed two games (one as player and one as GM) of Eclipse Phase. In the second game the story arc has moved from being introduced to firewall in the main belt, acquiring some alien technology, and making their way to the Jovian orbit. An issue concerning VR time dilation in the game has also been resolved. This, and a number of rule elaborations and clarifications will be included in the Eclipse Phase Companion which I'll put in the RPG Review github in the next day or so.
Today I managed to meet up with
certifiedwaif whom I've know for some twenty years online but never had a face-to-face encounter (despite the fact we're relatively nearby on the global scale of things. We had lunch with members of the team, chatted about various programming and numerical calculation issues (his PhD and work interests) and generally had a pleasant time. With NinjaDan discussed how Internet culture can be very much like the belles-lettres of yesteryear, but without the latency (which allows for higher levels of literary intimacy). Internet culture does mean that it is not uncommon to have friends and associates that one doesn't meet face-to-face for several years, and yet still share close and continuing communication. With the possible exception of short-wave radio aficionados, who are in many way the culture's precursors, this is a significant change to the way we live.
