hannah dee

Internet’s been a bit intermittent. I have two choices

1. An internet caff in town, with good music, coffee, friendly staff, two and a half euros per hour, and q bloody french keyboqrd zhich i reqlly hqve to think auite hqrd zhen using.
2. The library, which has free wifi, but blocks port 22 (so no access to ssh or filestore) and blocks Facebook and Twitter.

The library is where I’ve mostly been going though. The view is better.

Some things I’m going to find it hard to adapt to, #1 in a series of N:

• The prevalence of bank holidays – and the way that people forget they’re happening. It’s all wonderfully laid back. (Actually, people tell me that I’ve turned up at the worst time for bank holidays and it’s much more normal the rest of the year, but hey, by Monday, I’ll have been here 2 weeks and everything will have been shut for 3 weekdays out of 10).
• Cheques being effectively money: my new landlord is happy to accept a cheque for deposit & rent the day I move in. This is because bouncing a cheque is totally forbidden here, and you can get into all sorts of trouble (i.e., lose your bank account!) if you bounce one.
• Everyone talking French, really fast.
• The way things have totally random opening hours (I heard a tale of someone who’d joined a gym called “24 hour gym!” which opened at 10.30am and shut for lunch).
• The speed (slow) and intricacy (high) of the bureacracy.
• Being able to see the alps, most of the time. Like, wow.
• Having to avoid lizards when cycling to the supermarket.
• Being about 900 miles from Rog

In the month and a half since I opened this blog, I’ve had 258 spam comments and 5 real ones… so I’ve installed anti-spam measures (specifically Akismet). It’s caught 100 new spams since last week, and no real comments, so I’ve decided that life’s too short to check the spam queue. If you post a comment and it doesn’t appear within a day or so, it’s probably just that it got stuck in the spam queue so drop me an email and I’ll sort it out. You can mail me on blogstuff at hannahdee.eu.

I went to the London Hopper Colloquium on Tuesday. It’s a one-day event for women PhD students organised by QMUL & Women@CL, sponsored by IBM and with a lot of BCS support. I’m probably an unbiased reporter as I was an invited speaker this time (my first ever invited talk, whoo!) but I thought it’d be good to post about it so here goes.

There were 60-70 women there, mostly PhD students, doing research in computing. Many of these had entered the poster contest, which as a judge I found awesome. It was so hard to judge. There were posters on such a wide range of topics (Logic programming, networking, medical imaging for cancer, interface design, business systems, cognitive models of language, understanding equations, computational modelling of the vision of the honeybee, project management, the conflict between telecoms and internet industries, … ). The standard was brilliant. It was such a positive experience to see so many clever women doing great computing research, all at the cutting edge of their fields.

The speakers were me talking about behaviour modelling and CCTV, Nobuko Yoshida from Imperial talking about modelling interactions in computer networks, and Holly Cummins of IBM talking about garbage collection (in java – and nobody made any jokes about tidying up being women’s work). The panel session at the end of the day had some fascinating discussions on how to handle difficult questions when you’re giving a talk, and how to balance children with an academic career, and imposter syndrome (I bought that one up after the recent BCSWomen discussion).

And the lunch had some reeaally great cakes.

All round, a fine day out, (and I think my talk went OK! :-)