Long time no blogging

Long time no blogging! I've been way too busy (again) and just went through two rough, stressful, hellish weeks here at work. Altogether, it has been an arduous year for me. I cannot wait for it to be over. I'm so glad it is weekend!

Anyway, I've got a few things to mention:

• Pauline, one of Adele's sisters, returned from a working trip to England and Italy last week. She took some nice photos of the volcanic islands around Panarea (off the tip of Italy), Frome (a town in England) and London. She also brought us some nice (and delicious) presents.
  
• Charl Botha received his PhD last month. He was so nice to send me a paper copy of his thesis ("Techniques and Software Architecture for Medical Visualisation and Image Processing"). As can be expected from him, it is very professional. It even has an ISBN number! I don't think you can order a copy from Amazon yet, but you can get an electronic version from his website.
  
• While we are on the subject of academia. I'm now officially an external examinator for a master's candidate of the Digital Signal Processing department, Electric & Electronic Engineering at the University of Stellenbosch. I feel quite clever. If only it was true, I'm actually just sneaky.
  
• I've go a link to NumberSpiral today. If you like math, you will love this page. It offers some cool relations between a specifically numbered spiral and some specially numbers (perfect squares, primes, pronic, etc.). It is quite fascinating how the universe comes together!
  
• My Cybot robot is coming on well. I still have quite a bit of construction to do though. The latest additions allow one to upload sound files, such as your own voice, to the robot. You can then get it to play the sound back at the proper moment. When someone is in your way, you can get it to say something like: "Get out of my way vile human scum!". Furthermore, one can now add sub routines to your programs. So now you can write a proper avoidance (which is quite hard to get right with the current set of programming blocks!) and call it from your main program. As promised before, I would upload some pictures one day.
• I've also finished the second book (Confusion) of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. I've enjoyed it even more than the first book. The story and characters are really well thought out. I just love how the plots are intertwined and how everything seems to be connected in some way. The series has so far kindled my interests in history, chemistry, politics and human nature in general. However,some of my friends find the series quite difficult and not as enjoyable as Cryptonomicon and Snow Crash.

That is it for now.