At the start of September this year I applied for a new job at the University of Sydney. After a Zoom interview and a coding exercise, I found out at the end of the month that I'd got the job, but I didn't get a letter of offer for a …

Anniversaries: from a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl New York: NYRB Classics, 2018

Uwe Johnson (translated from the German by Damion Searls)

A novel which appeared in German in four volumes from 1970 to 1983, and which has only been fully translated into English in this NRYB Classics …

VQGAN+CLIP is a method for generating images from text phrases using a GAN image generator and the CLIP image recogition system: I tried feeding it the first few numbered paragraphs from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which I was thinking about because I recently watched Derek Jarman's excellent film about the …

We went away to the Southern Highlands for the second week of May, which is our first holiday away from Sydney since we spent three weeks in the States in September 2019. (I was going to do more personal blogging here, since I've gotten fed up with the ads on …

This week I helped run three workshops on researcher training and data management, and it was the first time I'd got up in front of a physical room to talk to people since October 2019. I was very anxious before the first session on Tuesday, and I'd forgotten that talking …

I think that things are settling down, or that I'm getting more comfortable in my role, although my mind has still felt all over the place. This week I'm helping to run two workshops for the physical launch of RESHub, a centre for researcher development in our new library building …

My anxiety and mental restlessness felt like they were getting the better of me, this week. Even though I decided not to move into a solution designer role in our team - I want to concentrate on research data management, because we need someone looking after that, and I think it …

So that writing these posts up would be less of a chore, I've started keeping a Zettelkasten document every week to make notes about what's happening every day. (I started using the Zettelkasten module for Sublime Text back in 2018 and I've been intermittent about my commitment to it and …

This felt like a long short week. Mostly I was working on what will turn into a solution design for moving one of our enterprise research admin applications to the vendor's cloud - as things have worked out, I probably won't be taking on a full-time solution design role in the …

Easy to get out of new habits when they're interrupted by Easter.

This week was taken up with meetings and handover, mostly about research data management. I'm taking over our Institutional Underpinnings project and need to spend some time catching up on it next week.

And I finally finished debugging …