A bit hesitant to blog about web3 because, like cryptocurrency, it seems to be a topic which drives people to a kind of monomania even if they're opposed to it. But I've poked fun at bitcoin on this website in the past so here goes.

I have been trying to …

I still feel like I don't quite have the hang of blogging regularly again, and do things like leave it until too late in the day, when I'm too tired to write anything useful. I've got a list of posts lined up but need to set aside the time to …

On Friday mornings I run up Talavera Road and along a footbridge under the M2, down the bike track through the Lane Cove National Park to Brown's Waterhole, back up again and then back across Macquarie University, where I studied in the late 80s and early 90s.

This Friday I …

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 …