Presentations, papers, Harajuku girls and stuff like that.

The really complicated part of writing posts to cover large intervals of time should be collecting all ideas and writing them in a well organized, interesting and easy to read way. Unless, of course, you have not done that lot of noticeable things, then the problem is what the geek to write the the post. I guess this time I fall in the second case. In the last month not that much have happened. Not saying that I have been at home doing nothing, but I have being doing the same things almost every day. The routine is a great enemy of the blog writers. Specially of the not so inspired ones. So, lets try to write things in chronological order and as painless (for the potential reader, i.e. you) as possible.

The final presentation of the SYSPRO 2007 project was on February 18th. I managed to finish and print the poster on time and I think that this year's presentation was much more interesting than last year's one. All project leaders were required to do a 2 minutes presentation of the project's goals, and after that there was a poster session.


If you want to check the other pictures of the event there is a showcase at the project's web site. If you go there you will see that I have even got a visitor. No, really, a person that was not obligated to be there went to see the posters and asked me questions. It was amazing!

About a week after the SYSPRO's presentation I received the answer for the TIME 2008 paper submission. And as you should have guessed by the lack of enthusiasm, my paper was rejected. Judging by the comments of the 3 reviewers, my feeling and also the feeling of my adviser is that it as a ``border line decision'', i.e. there were not strong arguments against accepting the paper, but there were not strong arguments toward accepting it either, and in the end somebody else's paper was selected. The bright side of it is that some of the reviewers' comments were really good and I will be able to improve the paper. The plan is to revise and improve it, and then submit it to a journal. This process will take about a month, them it will star the process of reviewing the paper by the journal reviewers. This can take up to five months, but with some luck it can be finished in two months or so. Then, being optimistic, in about three months I can have the paper accepted.

Since I have received the notification of the TIME 2008 program committee (and the reviews) I am working on improving the paper. For that I will net a new set of experimental data. Then, what I have being doing lately is to devise test cases for collecting this new data.

OK, I have done a few things that resemble a social life. I went to Tokyo to solve a problem with my new cellphone and since Adriana wanted to buy some souvenirs from Japan, we went together. The problem with the cellphone was that I bought a smartphone and needed a SIM chip. But the phone company did not want to sell me the chip only, they wanted me to buy another cellphone. Then I had to go to the only one store that was allowed to sell the chip by itself. (I don't get it, if one store can sell the chip, why the others can not?) Adriana went on a travel to USA and wanted to take some souvenirs of Japan with her, so we went to the Oriental Bazaar in Harajuku, what was very convenient because the store of SoftBank (the phone company) was in Shibuya, that is within a walking distance of Harajuku.

Takeshita Street, where you can find the most crazily dressed people you ever imagine.

Below is a taste of the kind of thing you can see in Harajuku. The music is "Harajuku Girls" by Gwen Stefani.

That's all, folks!!!