Last week I had my Monday lunch meeting presentation and then the rest of the week off. I traveled (again) to Austria. Rob got it almost right when he said that I travel back and forth almost every week. Well, this time I really enjoyed being at home with Marion, since I was/am ill. Its one of these diseases that are too bad to go out, but too harmless to stay in bed all day. So, I spent some time coding and finalised the tagging and archive facilities to this blog - now everything is prepared for the research prototype. While being at home I got my books and CD's from the latest Amazon delivery and this means that I can read Henry Jenkins' latest book. On the back-cover the publisher quotes Howard Rheingold who calls Jenkins the 21. century McLuhan. After reading the first two chapters of the book I am not sure if I agree with Rheingold.

I did not have a fluent start at OTEC when it comes to publications. Now, after more than a year working in the Netherlands, I managed to get it started. My paper for EC-TEL has been accepted as a full paper. How cool is this?! As a logical consequence, I will be in Crete in September, to which I look forward to.

Already two weeks ago I cleaned my desk at home and sometimes it is useful to clean the desk seriously. In this case it was not the usual move-the-piles-around exercise but serious revisiting the information that has piled up. Getting through all the notes, business cards, bills and papers on my desk was almost archaeological work - after only three months of ignoring my IN tray ... well, at least I stumbled upon an article from Elzer, Green, Carberry and Hoffmann which has been published last year in UMUAI. The article has the wonderful title "a model of perceptual task effort for bar charts and its role in recognizing intention". I already read this article some time ago and I remembered that it was somewhat related to my research. However, that title of the article is already somewhat mind-puzzling and I forgot what it was all about and thus I read it again.

Last week I wrote a little setup script for easing the maintenance of our Linux machines run in a VMWare infrastructure environment. Today, I sat a bit in order to find out if I could furter optimise this script. I came across a little program called vmware-guestd that comes with the VMWare Tools for the virtual environments. The official documentation mentions that this tool allows to read and set information from the host system by using the --cmd parameter of vmware-guestd. However, it is not documented what the commands are. This is not entirely true, since it is mentioned that one can set a machine.id to the configuration and read it with vmware-guestd.

Janine pointed me to the call for papers Berlin XML Days. Although e-learning is one of the topics of the conference I am not sure if my smart indicators fall into the category semantic web.