I had a hard time concentrating in Data Management. My head was throbbing and I found it hard to focus on this, but I seemed to shake it off around the middle of the discussion. It was all about fault tolerance in stream systems. Interesting stuff actually.

After that I had Ubiquitous Computing, in which I managed spill Sprite all over myself. Nice. Anyway, that class was all about teenagers and their use of mobile devices, primarily in reference to their text message usage and how that affected or was influenced by their Instant Messaging usage, things like that. Really quite an interesting discussion, based off of two ethnographic studies for which the papers weren’t particularly good but nevertheless raised some interesting issues.

After that I went and had some lunch, promptly getting my bank account shafted by Westpac for not using the Bank of America ATM (which was out of order, as you may recall)… the food places apparently only take cash, cheque or Husky Card… this is something I don’t understand about here. There are a lot of places that seem to take cheques but not credit cards. Very weird. Then again, I’m of the New Zealand generation that barely uses cheques, so I’m bound to think it’s weird.

Anyway, the next thing was the Colloquium Seminar. This was given by Feng Zhang from Microsoft Research, and it was on the challenges faced with large sensor networks and how to globally assemble and aggregate all the information from various sensory devices. Interesting topic, but for some reason my brain kept shutting on and off… was very surreal, felt like I only got about half of the talk. Towards the end my brain said it was ok to go back to “on” mode though, and out I went. On the way out I talked to my Data Management lecturer, Magda about how the semiar related to what we were talking about in class as well as some potential ideas for research options in that area. I’ll be discussing that in more detail with her when she presents some research project option on Thursday in class.

Afterwards I went and did some email for a little while and started my blog entry before hooking up with Rob and heading to Zoka’s. At Zoka’s Rob was just doing some reading for Graphics as I dove into my general list of things to do on my computer: blog, email, work, etc. Also talked with Rob about some things as well as talking to some friends of his and, of course, having coffee.

After I got back I had some dinner and settle in to keep working. Turns out I didn’t stop until 5am… security debugging can be very engrossing, I tell you!