Don's Diary, Professor Jon Crowcroft February in 2009 A few weeks ago, some folks from the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) in the University contacted me about participating in a survey of how academics communicate. To this end, I kept a diary for three days, logging every encounter, real, virtual or alcoholic. To get variety, I started on a Friday (6th) , skipped the weekend (it was quiet and I didn't have any Saturday classes, supervisions or other things on), and continued Monday and Tuesday. Friday 8.30am slalom-biked thru the slushy snow to CL to meet Eiko Yoneki (post doc RA) to talk about a paper about geographic cascades in online social network behaviour - ironically, one of our examples was a hash tag system on uksnow, where people mapped out where the impact of weather had been worst over the country in the last few days,. Bill Thompson (technical journalist and ex-diploma alumnus of the lab) had suggested this as a nice source of data, and he was right (as usual). 10. Receive a final draft of a PhD from my last student extant from UCL (where I left 8 years back). Scanned and okay-ed it modulo putting in some better latex magic so that the bibliography points back to the pages where citations were called out! (If you are wondering how he lasted so long, UCL has part time PhDs, and the drop-dead deadline is 10 years!). 11. Andrew Moore came to get me to agree better wording for some part II exam questions I'd set in too much of a hurry! 11.30 My PhD student Nishanth and I had a brief meeting Mateja Jamnik about possible 800th anniversary Wednesday seminars. Some exciting possibilities ahead in the spring/summer. 12. A contingent of Mexicans came to my office to talk about what they should fund in Internet research. I'd had a conversation with my colleague Tim Griffin, where we agree that University work should be long term (10-20 year time frame, not just fixing this years BGP or VOIP bugs). I advised the Mexicans so. 2-4 I listened to 8 part II project students give talks about their progress, midpoint in their work. Some very good project indeed - some less so. 6. Off to the pub to talk with colleagues about the future of systems research with the usual important catalytic ingredients. Monday A very cold start to the day - arrived a bit later to avoid random lateral bus/car movements on the road. 10am Talk to a colleague about whether to agree IBM's Haifa lab to join an EU project consortium. I did a SWOT analysis: strength: great lab, very good Web 2.0 and speech processing skills, and excellent management; weakness: terrible place for meetings; opportunity: possible military exploitation; threat: possible military exploitation. 12. Lunch with Dr Hand in the cafe West. We discussed the Next Big Thing to do in the systems work in the lab, post-Xen (post-Internet from my perspective). All afternoon subsequently spent working on Cascades paper and on another paper on declarative delay tolerant networking idea with Dr Yoneki. 6. To the castle, and a bunch of Citrix folks there excited about their next phase of development VM. Late that night, update all (3 of) my blogs. Tuesday 10. Briefly see our accounts officer regarding a project that we've just been awarded an ESRC grant to study epidemics, using blue tooth radios on cell phones to track the contacts between large numbers (thousands) of people to gain a more accurate (empirical) understanding of how diseases spread. 12. Off to the Mexican to get Burritos for lunch, and have a discussion about the Politics Philosophy, and Economics (yes, I know that that is an Oxford degree awarded to future politicians) behind my research agenda. Actually, I have two agendas - one is getting content from the "long tail" distributed better; the other is designing a provider-less replacement for the 3G radio systems. Both of these typically are met with incredulity or obstructiveness by the incumbents. Immediately after Burritos, we had the Netos research group weekly meeting, and one of the PhDs gave a nice talk about his current work on virtualisation for replicated systems for fault tolerance. 5. Off to Wolfson College to go to one of the Arcadia project talks on the future of publishing, run by John Naughton. Alas, have to leave for childcare reasons, so no College dinner! Late that evening, have an e-mail exchange with Professor Robin Dunbar, a Social Anthropologist in Oxford, with whom I am working on online social nets- I've read his excellent book (Gossip, Grooming and the Evolution of Language) and have just been reading Julian Jayne's bizarre book on the Bicameral Mind and wanted Robin's opinion (more socially than work-related). He points out that the core idea in the book, that consciousness suddenly emerged somewhere in between Homer writing the Iliad, and writing the Odyssey, seems a tad implausible . I blog this and point out that it could just be a misinterpretation of a literary convention - the fact that there is no "I" in the Iliad is no more significant to how society and individuals actually "think about themselves, than the fact that there is no "You" in Ulysses (that is, James Joyce's Ulysses, which is a first person stream of consciousness). Last thoughts that night are that I have a talk at the British Library conference on Digital Lives the next day, and I better make sure they have my slides so I don't haev to bring a laptop (Mac) and fight another battle in the tedious VGA projector war. One day, someone will put VNC and WiFi in every projector, and we can stop this nonsense.