The Foundation novels

A great Sci-Fi author Isaac Asimov wrote a great novel series that I've started to read this august in Netherlands, during train and plane rides. I had so much time that I had finished two of them Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. Unfortunately I couldn't find the first parts in the bookstore, but I will surely read them soon. This two parts are just amazing pice of work that keep you reading for so long that you almost miss the station where you should step off train.

I can recommend them to anyone because it is not a high technology science fiction but it concentrates on what might happen to the society in far future and what might happen with the science.

USMIR & ISMIR 2010

This August wasn't really vacation time like it usually is. It was quite a lot of work (but a great work). I was attending the Utrecht Summer School on Music Information Retrieval (USMIR) and International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference (ISMIR).

USMIR was summer school that I actually attended and didn't help with organisation. It was my second international summer school on my research topics and I have to say it was great. I have learned several new things that will surely help me with my research and completion of ma MSc. thesis, but the most important thing is meeting new people and people that work in same field as you. It's great feeling.

ISMIR was great as well. There were many interesting research works presented during very interesting poster sessions and we had many great chats with people from all over the globe, the people whose work you read about in all the articles and people that are doing same work on the other side of the planet. It's amazing feeling to get in touch with those people and exchange experiences and ideas that will help you on what you are doing. Hope to get to the next ISMIR as well.

Summer Schools @ FRI

Like many years before, this year we had several Summer schools at our Faculty. Most of them are intended for high schoolers and younger student, who would like to learn something new even during summer vacations. Every year I enjoy helping with organisation of some of them and I always loo forward doing it, since I enjoy passing on new knowledge to people that are eager to consume it.

This year I helped with organising the CoLoS Summer School for High school teachers where I also had a lecture about HTML5 (on-line examples in Slovene are here, and a script on HTML5 also in Slovene can be found here).

Other school that I was in charge of was Summer School on Developing Applications for Android Platform. All the materials including videos of lectures (again in Slovene) are available on-line in our Faculty Moodle.

I can't wait to help organising summer school next year as well.

Warhammer 40.000

Once again I have came across one of Warhammer role-playing game shops (you know those that have plenty of Warhammer books, figures, playing terrain and of-course bunch of geeks that play the game). First time I've encountered one it was last fall in Tokyo and I've came across one just few weeks back in Amsterdam. It was great experience both times. We still don't have any shop like that in Slovenia (there is one trying, but it's just not there yet) and that is why I always try to stop in a shop like that when I pass one.

Last year in Japan I've also bought a Warhammer comic book (Flames of Damnation) in there and it is a great book. It's been a while since I've read it but combination of comic and Warhammer realm works very good.

Gapminder

Gapminder one is quite old. It's been several times since I've first come across this web application. First time I've seen it was in one of TED talks (for instance this one). It is a great application for discovering new information in different kind of data. It's a great application to play with and to get a perspective of what is actually going on in large amount of data behind a neat visualisation.

If you do have any time to spent and want to see a great data visualisation tool, I do recommend to try Gapminder, If you do put some effort in it you will have great time with it.