Halt Condition

How I spent 2005 …

This may be the funniest (and spot-on) thing I’ve seen a while:

The scene: A room. Two men sit across a table from each other. One is a representative of the GRID. The other is a member of a funding council.

GRID: Condor Grid eScience jihad. Accessgrid! Lustre! 3d animation! Inter-disciplinary research! derka derka middleware layer!
Research council: Grid! Grid! Grid!

(MONEY falls from the sky. Its origins are never adequately explained)

In a previous life I was the “AccessGrid Project Manager” at the University of Sydney, and ended up engineering an alternative to the AccessGrid protocols based on open standards rather than the grid infrastructure (which really has nothing to do with the AccessGrid at all). This was ultimately fruitless and the above pretty-much sums-up why I was always on a hiding to nothing with that idea.

The ethics of your first pay cheque

Former Vislab hacker and all-round interesting person Nick is pondering first-paycheque ethics, which isn’t something I’ve really considered before. But I’ll have to now as I’m in a similar position.

In my case it’s slightly simpler as the Atlassian guys are really into their ethical-capitalism and have a work-place giving scheme (among other things that I can’t talk about yet). Funny really given that when I saw their company name and logo my first thought was of Atlas Shrugged and objectivists aren’t generally the charitable type. Not that they’d turn charity down.

New desk

So after three weeks at my new job things have finally settled down enough to actually be able to think. But it’s a cool place to work, as witnessed by my desk and the office: