Sabbatical Diary: Weeks 39—45

OK, so even for me that was a long break from this. In my defence, I had to go through a lot of hassle to get a holiday with the children sorted out, and then having sorted it out I didn’t intend to waste it on a computer :) The beach was lovely, since no-one asked… I remain firmly of the view that swimming in swimming pools, even outdoor ones which at least don’t usually smell of chlorine, is tedious at best due to the lack of buoyancy. Give me the Med any day!¹

I also took time out to go any watch Toy Story 5 which is, I’m pretty sure, the first of the Toy Story franchise I’ve watched in the cinema. Though I recall seeing snippets of the first Toy Story ad infinitum as a Ph.D. student: it seemed to be used by several colleagues working on the interaction between video encodings and provision quality-of-service in the operating system as the primary test vector.

Service-wise there was a fair amount of TPC activity (reviewing over multiple rounds, reading rebuttals, discussing with other members) for Euro/Sys’26, SEC’26, and HotNets’26. The latter is trialling (not before time in my opinion) a new approach to try to get it back to what it was supposed to be: a venue for hot new ideas rather than mini conference papers. So the first round (just completed) involved reading only the abstract and introduction, and making a binary progress/reject decision only. Will see how that goes.

College service focused on the Room² and its wine books. Finally starting the process of looking into properly preserving a 250 year old collection.

As, I suppose, a slight but constructive hangover from having chaired the project board for the West Cambridge Datacenter refurbishment project, a contact of a colleague pulled me into helping with a business school teaching case study she was writing. I’m no expert at all on these things but it seems to me to have turned into a very interesting and very well written thing. Which is nice as I had to do almost nothing :)

The other piece of research that I did manage was to finally start turning my WOWMOM’26 keynote into a paper submission. Very draughty due to life having got in the way and it being produced in a massive rush over a couple of days while on holiday. But at least I started.

I also did a mock admissions interview session for the Department’s Women in Computer Science event. This was remarkably good fun: I’ve never done an admissions interview in front of an audience before but it seemed to go OK. And massive credit to Annabel³ for being willing to be an interviewee in front of an audience. I don’t think I could’ve done that.

And finally! That signified, in some ways, the start of the end. Now starting to ramp back up into coming back from sabbatical as I’m roughly 85% of the way through and the end is definitely hoving into view. I’ll be picking up the role of Director of Undergraduate Teaching for Computer Science, so getting my head around that has started already. And, inevitably after a holiday, so did the catching up with email (not fun), Ph.D. students (fun), and University business (surreal?).

Onwards and upwards as someone once said. At least until I fall off.