Off to Tokyo

I’m off to SoMeT 2005 in Tokyo tomorrow morning. I will be presenting a paper on a representation-theoretical analysis of OMG’s modelling suite of technologies (UML, MOF, etc.), which is part of my recent research with a dash of the work on representational systems that I did for my PhD in the late 1990s. It’s nice rescueing old ideas and putting them back to work.

It is also my first time in Japan, and although I don’t usually enjoy travelling very much, I am curious about this country. I will not have much time to do sightseeing, but I hope I will be able to try some nice food and get a feeling of the city.

I’d better not misuse the painfully obtained travel funds that UTS has gracefully given me for this trip, so I am going to bed now. More from Tokyo.

Leaving Australia

It is official now. Isabel and I will be leaving Australia at the end of the year. We are going back to Spain after three and a half years in Sydney.

I got a very interesting offer from the European Software Institute near Bilbao. I believe it is a nice step forward in my career, and fits pretty well with our intention of leaving Australia. Bilbao is not Galicia, but it is part of the atlantic Spain, so the weather, food, landscape, culture and overall lifestyle are not that different.

Now I need to start organising the move, getting plane tickets, cancelling millions of things here and joining others over there. I hate this, but I am really excited about starting this new stage of our lives.

We will miss some things from Australia, Asian food, professionalism and friends being the hardest to live without. We will try to overcome this by cooking Asian at home, turning a blind eye to others’ inefficiency, and finding a large home so all our Australian friends can come and visit us over there.

A pile of pancakes

This morning I got up with a bad headache, and when this happens I know that I need to eat. So I decided to cook me some pancakes. I put three egg whites with a pinch of salt in the Thermomix, whipped them until very stiff, and then added the yolks, 140 ml of milk, 1 heaped teaspoon of baking powder and 120 g of flour. Mixed well and started pouring straight into the pan.

Five thick pancakes came out, and I stacked them on a heated up plate. I generously poured some maple syrup on top, and grabbed a fork and a knife.

I stared at the pancakes for a while. They were big, thick, and five of them, and the plate wasn’t too large. I started by cutting little bits around the perimeter of one of them. When I levelled this one I tried to pull it from underneath the pile, but the moisture and the maple syrup makes them very sticky, so when I pulled with the fork, the whole pile moved on the plate as a block, threatening with landing on my lap or the floor. I thought of unpiling the pancakes one at a time, transferring them to another plate so I could eat them. Too much work, now that I was sitting comfortably away from the kitchen. I tried the alternative of attacking the topmost one, cutting just through it with my knife and trying not to score the second topmost pancake. I failed miserably. Some times I didn’t cut deep enough, so I had to tear the poor thing and rip it into unelegant pieces. Even worse, some other times I cut too deep, and the pancake underneath suffered horrible mutilations. At this point I started considering surrender as an option.

Yes, I finally did. I came to grips with the situation and, since I was alone and therefore unobserved by potential witnesses, I decided to eat my pile of pancakes as a block. With a sigh, I plunged my knife in the golden spongy flesh, 5 layers deep, and cut down to the plate. I contemplated the multilayered cross-section for a moment, and I couldn’t help but think that there is something inherently unrighteous in eating pancakes like that, showing no respect whatsoever for their delicate individualities.