The madness of the holidays is about to hit us. Where did the year go?
Sure, there was a lot of travelling this year. In May we went to Oslo, in June we went to New Orleans for NAACL, in July we were in Oxford for WiL/NLCS/Linearity as part of FLoC, in August I was in Brazil for the associated ICM meeting and in September I was in Luxembourg for the Logic AI Summit. phew! Nuance only gives me one paid conference a year, but I managed to ask them to pay for the most expensive plane ticket (Oxford), and the most expensive registration fees (NAACL), and all was good.
So lots of talking, not so much writing. Thus when Lyn and Steve were visiting last Sunday and Steve was asking about my theory that writing papers should be just like shipping code (you just do it, no matter how bad the code is, the next week you correct it), I had to confess that the theory wasn't working very well, recently. You see, the theory requires collaborators also happy to take a dive in their reputations, in a bid to get readers... oh well, we do what we can.
But life intervenes and many of the so-called small stuff can take a lot of time and disposition. Like totalling the car on the way to the airport. It was the best accident that someone could have had: the car was completely destroyed and I will confess that I thought this was it, the end of the film for me. Maybe this is what everyone who has an airbag explode on them thinks. Anyways two days later I was again in the same spot, in an uber to the airport, going to Luxembourg. And Dick even managed to make his original flight to Nebraska, yay! but it did leave a bitter taste in my mouth. Am I living my life right? Have I got all my papers in order? What should I be doing instead? Hence this post with the picture of the car, so that I don't forget...
