bounce

After about a month's hiatus, I managed to get myself back to the gym today after work, and back into what had become my standard pattern - twenty minutes on the stepping machine, ten minutes on the rowing machine since it's so boring a movement that I can stand it no longer, a few dozen sit-ups, and a while spent waving fairly light weights around (traditional up-to-shoulder, ears-to-above-head, and, with straight arms, in the three possible permutations waist-to-in-front-of-eyes, in-front-of-eyes to parallel-with-shoulders, and parallel-with-shoulders to waist).

I've no idea if these are sensible exercises to do if my goal is to be able to hold onto hand-holds on the climbing wall, but I'm sure some of my readers know better.

Then to the pub, to counteract this mild virtue with a hot Thai curry; met up with uisgebeatha, cartesiandaemon and others, and followed them to Emmanuel for a ceilidh. Apparently there are ceilidhs weekly in Cambridge during term-time, which I would have loved to have known earlier, and which atreic would happily have told me several years ago had only I thought to ask; this was the last one of them this term, next is 7th October.

In the afternoon I wandered out of work for an hour and cycled up to Comlab for the Intel Research open day; http://www.intel-research.net/cambridge/research_areas.asp gives some idea of what was presented. The posters had the normal problem of targetting an audience already sure that all its problems would be solved by efficient attachment of InGaAlAs ring oscillators to an epitaxial GaAs base, or adaptive tuning of packet characterisation trees, or the ability to express network specifications in a formal logic denser with extra fonts and multi-directional arrows even than the usual; but I hadn't realised how much I missed talking to enthusiastic grad students, and the multi-disciplinary overload that that kind of cluster of presentations provides.