Sabbatical Diary: Weeks 19—21 / Month 5

Well, it was less runny. Though as you can probably guess from a 3-week hiatus, also unproductively busy :/

Proofread the proof of a book chapter that was first conceived and later submitted during the pandemic. To be honest I’d pretty much completely forgotten about it! It looked mostly OK though, so that’s nice.

Got round to replying to the various toots on my post about end-to-end encryption and lawful/exceptional access. A summarizing blog post will follow soon. (And maybe I should finally join Bluesky so that I don’t have to rely on Martin to reskeet (is that the verb?) it for me.)

Had a few interesting chats with new faculty, old¹ administrators, the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, and my Ph.D. and Masters’ students. Also reviewed several papers for conferences and a post-doctoral fellowship competition, and wrote several reference letters.

Wrangled some budgets into place so that I’m now the proud owner² of two “AI supercomputers”.³ In the process of which I learned that it’s only Equipment if it’s over £5000 per unit otherwise it’s just sparkling consumables. Also that two devices on a single purchase order can exceed the insurance limit for the shipper in question with DHL, but one device on each of two purchase orders delivered in the same van is fine. Can’t help but feel that the subtleties of correlated risk have been passed over rather loosely there but hey, they arrived safe and sound so who’s counting.

And some external work in London that was moderately interesting.

So another period that was not unproductive in a general sense, but also wasn’t very productive in a specific sabbatical-outcome sense. Hopefully better to come this week. Although I have to not think too carefully about how fast the halfway mark is approaching.