Palfrey's life

Congratulations - your paper #1569016569 ('Foxtrot: phase-space data representation for correlation-aware aggregation') submitted to the Fourth Annual IEEE Communications Society Conference on Sensor, Mesh, and Ad Hoc Communications and Networks has been accepted. With approximately 300 submitted papers and 60 accepted, the acceptance rate was roughly 20%

Seems not too long ago I was posting one of these (and this time I've got a better icon!). After not publishing anything last year, this one is looking up. And I've got at least one more to submit this year, with possibilties on another two.

Also, this means I'll be in San Diego from June 18-21 this year. Knowing the whole fun and games with trying to get reasonably priced transatlantic flights for incoming/outbound durations of less than a week, this means I've got at least 4 days to play with. Given that a) I've seen San Diego before 2 years ago and b) I tend to be able to get effectively "free" transfers with these trips to more-or-less anywhere in the USA (last trip to San Diego got me some time in NY), can anyone recommend anywhere I should get myself to around that time?

Update: Oh yeah. Now, thesis... (as today's PhD is reminding me...). Ontologies, Bundle Theory, Substance Theory, apples, etc...

Thank you for uploading your paper 1569001142 ('The ? MAC framework: redefining MAC protocols') to 4th European conference on Wireless Sensor Networks.

Damned blasted fricking non-unicode accepting webforms.... I now finally get to properly sleep after a week of long days + working this whole damn weekend.

They lie like Pinocchio. If a device is advertised (it's in the bloody product name) as being an 802.15.4/ZigBee radio, then it should at least be *one* of those. It has no ZigBee support, and as I've just found out from one of their support engineers (confirming what I already mostly knew from detailed experiments), it's not 802.15.4 conformant *either*. Fuckers.

/me readies the heavy-duty LART (we've actually got several!) with extra spiky bits for transatlantic flight....

In other news, a policeman asked to sniff my hand on the way back from work .... There was a good reason - some idiot had lit a nearby wet leafpile, he was trying to find out if I had any sort of fuel smells on my hand, and me walking at my usual stormtrooper pace looked suspicious.

I wouldn't quite describe myself as addicted to caffeine (as I can currently get up in the morning without immediately requiring a cup of coffee), but it's getting there. Therefore, I occasionally start to consider alternatives to my current regime of fucking around with my neurochemistry. Now, I made a decision fairly on in my life regarding not taking any the various illegal recreational drugs (ironically, I'm the only one in my group of friends from back then who didn't smoke cannabis *ever*, and yet I'm the one who moves to the Netherlands....), which was initially for various "moral" reasons, and after I later got over those, mainly because I'd said I wouldn't. I'm now noting that there's another factor in there - the legal drugs get tested better. Hell, caffeine or alcohol aren't good for me by any long shot, but they've at least been fairly extensively tested in various experimental situations (as well as a considerable block of ad-hoc testing outside the lab), and so the side effects are reasonably well documented, and if I don't abuse the damn things too much I know I'm only at what I would regard as a level of acceptable risk. Now, if you start wandering into the illegal drugs, then we've not only got a whole world of not nice people (which I've seen enough of to know I want to stay the hell away from) but we've also got a wide variation in the product, and that's a problem. My daily cups of coffee are *reliably* evil....

Salon today had an article called "Life: The disorder", talking about people taking drugs for ADD and other "quasi-societal conditions" (their words). Mostly importantly, it started asking the question - Is it time to retire our moralistic distinction between "recreational" and "medical" drugs? The major drug they were focusing on is Ritalin, which is used mostly to stop ADD/ADHD kids from bouncing off the walls and let them keep focus on things for a bit. However, some enterprising folk (university students, medical residents, that sort of thing) have noted that the drug also has some good effects on "normal" people - they can sit and do work for long periods with less mental wandering about. So here's something interesting - it's a drug with good effects, available commercially (prescription-only at the moment) in a stable product, and it's been medically tested and so therefore there's a reasonable body of data regarding probable side-effects and chances of it killing you the first time you take it. Suddenly, they have my attention. Here's a drug that in the event I managed to get hold of some (unlikely, given I'm not planning on searching for it actively), I might actually be interested in taking a low dose (heck I can find out data on that from the manufacturer's website probably...) and finding out what it does to me.

I'm still waiting for a drug advertising "increased neuronal density!", but we're getting there.