Julien's fuzzy blog

Today we went to the French Restaurant "Lou Pescadou" for lunch. It was quite good, and not so expensive. I ordered a black pudding with apples. The maitre d'hotel kindly refused to speak French with me, arguing that I was in London to learn English . A last treat before the marathon...

But now I'm free as a bird
As I walk out that door
You have my word
I won't bother you no more
Yes I'm feeling OK
As I face the brand new day
As I face the brand new day

Supertramp

Today was my first UbiSense meeting. I had to present a couple of slides about the simulator I've started to develop. It went ok.

Most interesting was to see the relationship between the companies and the universities involved in the project. Not exactly the same approach and aims ...

I just got a wonderful collection of pictures taken by Rachel. I cannot put all of them here, even though I really would like to show our "tent face" in the morning . Maybe Rachel could create an online photo album I could link ...

         

Thank you Rachel !

This week-end, Andy, Rachel and me went hiking to Lake District. Was more than great ! We just can't believe that everything went perfect ! None of the 2 trains and 4 coaches we needed for the journeys ran late ! The weather was sunny all the time ! We found 2 amazing soft and dry spots to pitch the tent ! Andy forgot the pasta ! (herr... yeah, ok)

We walked from Keswick (Friday 11pm) to Grasemere (Sunday 12 noon). First tent pich by night was fun and comfortable. Second tent pitch spot was amazing, at the end of a deep valley, nearby a small stream in a stone ring. Most of the time we walked through bogs (they're everywhere, even on top of the ridges), but we also changed a bit our route to have fun scrambling. Scenery from the ridge to Crag Helme on Sunday was great. We all got a bit tanned, especially our noses. Nights were not really cold (well, that's my opinion).

This was the first 'long' trip with my new bag (Karrimor Jaguar 55/75) quite fully loaded. It was really comfortable, even while scrambling in sloppy rocks, nothing moved left and right. My back didn't really get wet and my shoulders were not destroyed like happened a couple of times.

When is the next one ?

Belfast marathon starts next Monday at 9am. One week left ! We'll all have a 'rest' week with just a couple of short slow runs.

Idea was growing in my mind to try to run the Ultra-trail Tour du Mont-Blanc. But once again I've been too slow, as it's already full with 2000 runners ! (it is held at the end of August)
I may have a chance to get (legaly) the bib of a runner that can't eventually run it, but nothing sure.

For your information this is a 155km "race" around the Mont-Blanc in the French Alps, including 8500m of positive ascent. Takes 40h to complete for most of the runners that achieve to finish.

Anybody would be interested ?

On Saturday I went to Southend on Sea to visit Yan and Luli. It was cool ! The weather was quite nice. A bit cold on the waterfront, so Luli lent me one of her sweat shirt - I don't tell you more about how I was looking ...
It's such a long time I've not swum (since last summer in Loch Lomond, I think), so I decided to have a quick bath. The water was quite cold ! I just stayed 1 minute, the time to swim 10m and put my head underwater.

I listen quite a lot of Supertramp and Pink Floyd at the office since a couple of days. Don't know why... If you have the answer, please send me an e-mail.

How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl,
Year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found?
The same old fears.
Wish you were here.

More than 700 photos have been taken during these 3 days by Surapa (on the third picture). Pictures are now available on the UbiMon website. Many thanks to her !

   

Today was cool. A proper conference day, with coffees every 2 hours . Not much to worry about. Only informal demos of Rachel's application (to look clever) and mine at every tea break. I could attend some talks, that was quite interesting. I particularly liked a speaker that was ironically expecting a "smart condom that would remember you how to use it"

Hey ! The demo went eventually ok ! Actually somebody that I don't have the right to name here just found out that there were some network sockets available in the demonstration/poster room !
So I could run my demo without any modifications. Was not really impressive, but people were quite impressed it was done in only 1.5 months. Also lots of them laught cause of the cow...

Hope that tomorrow, I will be able to follow some talks instead of ./configure ; gmake ; gmake install ; urpmi.

Yesterday I learnt that it was impossible to create a local account on a linux machine here, because NFS is stronlgy integrated to the configuration. And this afternoon, I have to give a demo of my application in a room without network. The only solution was to configure a new machine by myself, from scratch, without network, keyboard, mouse or screen. I spent yesterday afternoon and this morning switching between these two computers, plugging in and out cables, rebooting every five minutes to install the required packages. And I finally surrendered. I will present a simple slide show I think .

In the mean time, we have to welcome and help people arriving to the conference. This is quite nice to be on the other side...

"Si nous sommes incapables d'aimer, c'est peut-être parce que nous désirons être aimés, c'est-à-dire que nous voulons quelque chose de l'autre (l'amour), au lieu de venir à lui sans revendications et ne vouloir que sa simple présence."
(Milan Kundera, L'insoutenable légèreté de l'être)

"If we are unable to love, it is maybe because we desire to be loved, ie. we want something from the other (love), instead of coming to him without revendications and only wanting his single presence."
(Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)

Since I'm in UK I like even more to listen to French music. Even better is to listen to Alsatian music (from Alsace - my home region). As Kansas enjoys speaking English and said that "if you love these songs, you have to say it around you", I let you discover his particular accent. This extract (ogg) from the intro of his album will provide you with a preview ...

As you've read my blog a couple of weeks ago, you already know that the group is organising the International Workshop on Wearable & Implantable Body Sensor Networks next week. Because of that, the lab gets quite busy at the moment. We have a couple of small jobs to do. A couple of days ago, we filled in 150 briefcases with the proceedings, tube and college maps, BSN pens, etc. Today was a bit more technical, as we prepared the "development kits", small boxes with BSN components. Cutting and pasting foam, soldering, contacts checking, label pasting...

Hey ! I'm a proprer registered student (well I hope so, I've not received the firm offer letter yet ) ! I've got a swipe card and new student pack.

void* Julien1 ;
sleep(1000*3600*24*60) ;
PhDStudent* Julien2 = dynamic_cast<PhDStudent*>(Julien1) ;

And I think we all feel quite fit now . I'm quite optimistic !

I've run a total of nearly 80km last week. I think this training made me faster at least on short distances (up to half-marathon). Yesterday I dealed with a 27km (almost 2/3 marathon) in 2h05 to complete the first stage of my training. I'm now going to (try to) take a week rest for my ankle.

A nice quotation by my favourite novel author, Milan Kundera:
"Dans le jeu on n'est pas libre, pour le joueur le jeu est un piège." (Risibles amours)

"In the game we are not free, for the player game is a trap." (Laughable Loves)

Yes that's not a legend, I saw a fox while running this morning. To be more precise it was in Kensington Gardens, between Palace and Queen's Gates. It was running full speed (and believe me, foxes are really fast) from the Kensington Road to the Flower Walk. Don't know what it was doing there at nearly 11am, whilst the park is already crowded. Maybe hunting some pigeons or squirrels...