Hopscotch New York: Pantheon Books, 1966

Julio Cortázar (translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa)

I bought a copy of this a few years ago, and I'm not sure what made me start reading it this year. It's a self-consciously labyrinthine and ludic novel, following the anti-hero Oliveira's affairs and …

My current coding project is developing a utility to help medical researchers upload batches of imagery, mostly CT scans, to our instance of a piece of repository software called XNAT. The team who maintain it already have some Python command-line utilities to inspect, upload and download things one at a …

This isn't a very auspicious start to a month of blogging - I decided to join in on #blogjune, which I found out about via Mastodon, and thought it would be a good spur to start writing more here. But I ended up getting home late for the very modern reason …

This week I finished off a quick project to upgrade the University's instance of CQPweb, a web app for doing corpus linguistics - the analysis of language based on large corpora of texts from sources such as journalism, legal proceedings, TV scripts and the like. (One of the first things you …

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 …