My 2011, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

2011 was a pretty big year for me, and what better time for reflection than hung over and hunched over my laptop after a boozy New Year’s Eve at home?

Click here for full-size image.

Wife., originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

The past week has pretty much been a blur of writing and crossing things off a pages-long to-do list, but our wedding on Saturday made it all worthwhile. While Vancouver shivered in the cold, we married in blinding sunlight on a beach in Surfers Paradise, Queensland. Janelle walked down the aisle to a string-quartet cover of “There is a Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths, the reading was a Mary Oliver poem that seemed to perplex people more than anything, and our vows made people laugh, awwww and cry in the space of about 90 seconds. Then a great house-party reception, complete with kids swimming in the pool, septuagenarian Chinese-Australians talking about gambling in the corner, and plenty of tanned Aussie chicks.

A good day, all told.

I haven’t fully had time to process it all, but Janelle’s immigration application is finally complete and in about 12 hours we’ll be on our way to Kuala Lumpur to begin our extended honeymoon vacation walkabout. It seems amazing how much has happened, and is continuing to happen. Like we’ve crammed three years worth of life-changing experiences into a few weeks. But it feels surprisingly okay, and very right.

research complete, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Well, okay, I’m not Dr Brochu just yet. There’s a list of minor revisions and some paperwork ahead of me. But on Friday, November 26, 2010, I successfully defended my thesis and passed my doctoral exam, so the days of gut-churning anxiety are finally over.

It’s disturbing how similar this feeling is to what I felt when I finally beat Nethack. (And I thank former fellow Kommunist and Nethacker Eddy for the title of this post.)

Commence info dump in 3… 2… 1…

tower with bird, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Paris, France

This was my first trip to Europe and I liked it more than I thought I would. Paris in particular, which I was prepared to find smug and overrated. Instead, it was attractive, clean and charming. Not the most forward-looking place I’ve ever been, but not the theme park I was afraid it would be, either. I didn’t even find Parisians rude or anything, just kind of stand-offish, which, as a kind of stand-offish guy myself, I’m totally okay with. I’ll definitely go back to France at some point, though I might try to take a French class first — my Canadian cereal-box French let me read signs and order in restaurants, but as soon as anyone tried to talk to me, I had to throw myself on their mercy, or more likely, just having my French speaking frère Tyson step in. And it really is a beautiful city. One night Tyson and I were strolling through the Champ de Mars by the Eiffel Tower, with the tower lit up and vendors selling bottles of wine in the park. I turned to Tyson: “our girlfriends will be soooo freaking jealous.”

Oh, also, the catacombs are really cool. And the Eiffel Tower. Even the Louvre has it’s good points, though the Mona Lisa isn’t one of them.

Madrid by Night, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Madrid, Spain

Madrid was cool, but the 38+ degree heat during the day got old fast. At least the city is one of these winding old European cities where everything is a twisting lane. Bad for navigation, but good for shade. Even better for shade is just to spend the afternoon indoors and go out in the evening, when the old city really comes to life. Spain may have 20% unemployment, but the bars and restaurants are pretty full. Didn’t hurt that the night after my talk was simultaneously the pride parade (the biggest in Europe), and Spain’s victory over Paraguay.

Neither Ty or I speaks any Spanish, so getting around was harder than Paris, but fortunately on our first day Nando introduced us to the Mercado de San Miguel — a gigantic indoor market full of little stalls selling tapas, empanadas and sweets, and glasses of wine, sangria and beer, all for 1 to 3 euros a pop. Not only ridiculously cheap due to the collapse of the euro (thanks, Greece!), but it reduces browsing the menu to just pointing and knowing the words “Este, por favor. Dos.” (Even Paris was cheap, by the way. Dining out in there is probably less expensive than Vancouver at this point.)

North Burleigh Beach, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Gold Coast, Australia

Then, it was so long Europe and Tyson, and hello Australia and Janelle (well, after thirty-odd hours in planes and airports it was). I’m on the Gold Coast now, Janelle’s home town. Pretty relaxing, but the entire city has a little bit of a vibe like a vacation town in the off-season. Which it kind of is, it being the middle of winter here. Our apartment was about 30m from the beach, so every day, I got to go for a run and watch the surfers. Lots of hanging out with Janelle’s friends and family, too, including a CRUSHING victory at the local pub trivia quiz night (Go, Occademics!). Also, some really nice trips to nearby Tambourine Mountain and Byron Bay. Internet situation has not been great, though. I was mostly reduced to the painfully slow, but free, McDonald’s wifi, since the rare coffee shops with wifi charge around $10/hour (!). However, McDonald’s here also serves some pretty good coffee (!!). Their flat whites are quite tasty. Such are my observations on international wifi availability and the differences between local and overseas McDonald’s (or, in Australian, “Maccas”). See? Travel does expand one’s horizons.

Up next: Melbourne. Specifically, Fitzroy. Good coffee, cheap ethnic food and hipstery shops in old Victorian buildings. I have a feeling I’ll like Melbourne. Plus, the film festival is on, and unlike the last couple years of the VIFF, there are actually a bunch of flicks I want to see. (On the minus side, though, it’s also the most expensive film festival I’ve ever been to. No wonder nothing’s sold out yet.)

Eric versus the Arc de Triomphe, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

A full report will have to wait until I have more time and internets, but hey, yeah, I made it through Europe unscathed except for a couple of nasty blisters. I enjoyed bobo Paris more than a snarky small-town Canadian really should, Madrid was effing hot during the day, but great at night, and Germany, well, I spent a lot of time in German airports and they were fairly efficient, so there’s that.

I’m in Australia now, where it’s actually possible to get free wifi, but time is short, so… more later.

thesis page count, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Holy crap. It’s 2:13AM on a Friday night, I’ve got Mogwai playing on the stereo, and I think I might actually kind of be done writing my thesis. I feel… odd.

(Well, done until Nando and my committee read it and tell me to go revise it all, but still.)

I’m pretty happy about getting this accepted for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a big part of my thesis, so getting it accepted to a good venue is a major step toward finally graduating. And second, it means a free trip to Madrid to present it! Hopefully I’ll be mostly finished writing my thesis by that time (early July), so I’ve already booked a bit of an extended tour that takes me to Paris for a few days before the conference and lets me stay in Madrid for a couple of days afterward. My brother-slash-coauthor Tyson gets to go, too, so that should be fun. Especially as he actually speaks French, so he can deal with any potentially snotty Parisians for me.

After that, it’s off to Australia to visit Janelle. I’ll be flying in and out of Brisbane, which is cool, but we’ll also be spending a good chunk of time in Melbourne, which I’m stoked about. From all accounts it’s a really cool city. I’m imagining it as kind of a mix of the best aspects of Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. Will I be disappointed? Don’t worry, I’ll let you know.

I’m also hoping to talk to people in Melbourne in the research community (for start-ups in particular, but in general, too), so if you happen to know anybody, or know anybody who knows anybody, or you are that anybody, you know what to do.

Broadcast at the Biltmore, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

It’s been a beautiful fall weekend here in Van, but I’ve mostly been home with an annoying rhinovirus. However, I did get out to see Broadcast at the Biltmore, and being stuck on the sofa in a Neo Citran haze has been a good excuse to spend hours reading TV Tropes (which may be an even more powerful timesuck than Wikipedia). Meanwhile, my parents are at this very moment in the process of purchasing a pretty spiffy retirement home on Vancouver Island, the lovely Janelle comes to visit in just 24 days, my apartment is the cleanest its been in weeks (months?) and I have some time to ramble on the ol’ Haiku Factory.

So, first up, I think I’m going to make this blog a once-a-month kind of deal, probably until I finish my thesis. I’m thinking that on or around the first of each month, I’ll post a longish update like this one. At the same time, I’m going to try to put more Eric (my links, photos, etc.) into the sidebar. Unfortunately, the volatile combination of WordPress plugins and my hosting company seems to be so fragile that at least half of the plugins I’ve tested seem to cause the dreaded “500 Internal Server Error.” So we’ll see how that works out. Hopefully my future posts will have go beyond the self-involved meandering of this one, but give me a break, I’m siffly and whiny today, and my throat hurts.

Ironically, though, the main reason I’m restricting my blogging is my writing. I’m doing a lot of writing these days — not only my thesis and the occasional paper, but I’m also working on a book with my supervisor, and I may soon be working on a special soopersekrit project that I can’t tell you about right now. The thing about all these projects is that they have a finite end in the next several months, so if I have the writing impulse on a Sunday afternoon, or late at night some evening, I feel like I should be working on those. Now that the end of grad school is finally in sight, spending a few hours writing in the middle of the night means my book or my thesis will be finished all that much earlier, right?

The flipside of this is that I’ve been finding myself up at 3AM editing papers and writing code and sleeping ’til noon. It’s not because I’m really pushing myself all that hard, it’s more that I know how lazy, unfocussed and unmotivated I can be, so when I don’t feel that way, I want to take full advantage of my finicky brain. Oh brain, why must we always be at odds?

Well, actually, I’m not sure that’s really a problem. While operating on a noon-to-4AM schedule puts me at odds with normal people, I kind of do like working at night. I’m definitely more creative in later in the day — I think pretty much every good idea I’ve ever had came to me after 8PM. And what’s more, I kind of like that I’m in a position where it’s an option. I’ll admit to a holding a certain nerdily romantic view of being awake in the wee hours, working on a PhD thesis in an empty lab or annotating papers in a 24-hour coffee shop. It’s like I’m some kind of cool Bohemian, or something. Mainstream society be damned, I’m a Creative!

phantasy of phinishng a phd, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

So for those keeping track at home, I took leave of my position at Worio last month to go back to work on my PhD full-time. I’d been either a non-student or part-time for the last two years, which seemed kind of incredible to me. How the hell did a six-month leave turn into two years? I guess by extending it and then getting sponsored to be a research intern, is how, but that answer seems too literal and lacking the existential resonance I was hoping for. So I’ll just say that the PhD is simultaneously the best and worst thing I’ve ever done. I’m glad to be back and gladder that the end is finally in sight.

But for now, I’m fully immersed in the full-time grad student lifestyle again. It all came back easily, as I immediately had to dive into submitting a paper to a fairly high-profile conference. Which means the past month has been the tick-tock of an approaching paper deadline with far more to be done than time to do it. Days with the sickening feeling of knowing you’re procrastinating and feeling powerless to stop it. Other days enjoyably lost in elaborate code, listening to Four Tet and Aphex Twin. The sudden happy click when a once-obscure paper starts to give up its secrets and make sense, or the rush of getting a really clever idea for solving a problem. And then biking home from the lab, exhausted, in the early morning hours, and passing through Kitsilano, which is still and quiet and smells like flowers and marijuana and the ocean.

All that, and I kind of think the paper I submitted was not-so-good. The code stayed buggy, the experiments unconvincing and the writing something less than a model of clarity. Oh, well, the “good” news is, there’s always another conference deadline coming up soon!

Until I’m finally done, and then there isn’t.

Bloody Vivaldi, originally uploaded by Mister Wind-Up Bird.

Janelle + Eric + photo booth + the random album game = the best new album you’ve never heard.