en route to Australia

Despite the very long flights and the two transfers in Singapore and Brisbane, I found the trip to Australia only moderately tiring! Maybe because I managed to sleep for close to 8 hours on the first leg. Maybe because of the (great) facility of my new and cheap Compaq to keep running for a whole leg of seven hours without exhausting the battery (that I reloaded in Singapore). Maybe because I am finally getting used to twelve hour flights after my round trip to Kyoto last week. Maybe because having five breakfasts (my favourite meal!) in two days is a good enough reward. I even watched a movie, The Hunger Games, in two parts: one half before landing in Singapore and the other half over Bali. It is a terrible movie, with poor acting and even worse scenario. Plus, it has a rather lame ending, since the structure of the Orwellian society where those games take place is not at all perturbed by the actions of the characters since they were manipulated till the very end. However. the lame plot had some interesting game theory implications: in a game where all adversaries have to be eliminated, does it make sense to make temporary alliances? And then I suddenly remembered having read a blog about this, a few months ago!

The only painful part of the trip actually was to travel with two laptops, as I am not trusting the Compaq to stand the whole visit to Australia, nor the newly installed Macbook to be sufficiently stable. (I even took an external hard-drive to make daily security backups and to keep both laptops attuned…) I also wish my daughter had not “borrowed” my Canon point-and-shoot camera as there were particularly nice views when we landed both in Singapore and in Brisbane. Travelling with my (wife’s) Nikon J1 is not exactly as easy (more about this later!). And I do not think I can take it running, although I will obviously give it a try.

I now hope it won’t take me too long to get on Australian time(s) and look very much forward the interactions being an AMSI Lecturer can induce!