Van Gils Blogs

It is about time to replace my old faithfull friend Gaspode; my laptop that has served me well over the last four years. Well, almost four years now. Gaspode is a Acer TravelMate 420 series with an Intel 2.5Ghz CPU and 512Mb of RAM. It was about the fastest laptop around when I bought it. Furthermore, it has a fairly good (Ati) videocard, Win-modem (yuk!) and a cd-burner inside.

Gaspode’s been everywhere with me… Australia, NewYork, dragged around the Netherlands, you name it. But now it’s about time to retire I suppose. Not that it’s getting bad in terms of Cpu/Ram… my faithfull companion is fast enough still. The battery is becoming a problem, though, and the screen isn’t as good as it used to be. Add the fact that gaspode ’s heavy (3.4kg) and big/bulky… well, I feel retirement is deserved.

Big problem though: what machine (laptop) to buy next? This time my requirements are pretty high:

• small, preferably 12″
• light weight… preferably with an external cd/dvd player
• lots or ram, at least 1Gb
• long battery life, at least 8 hours, but preferably 10+
• Sturdy, I tend to take my laptop everywhere I go
• Not overly expensive, I’m not that wealthy

I’ve been looking around on the Web a bit to get some ideas. The IBM x-60 seems nice, but expensive. Asus has a few nice ones.. and I’ve heard good stories about them but… well.. I’m just not sure. Mac is out of the question… Any suggestions?

A while ago we (Erik, Theo, Patrick, and myself) finished a paper titled Typing and transformational effects in complex information supply as part of my PhD project. We submitted it to a journal, whose name I won’t mention here, and after waiting 8 months we received a reject. We were a little surprised, as the comments of the reviewers didn’t seem that bad at all! Either way, we updated the paper and submitted it again, this time to the International Journal of Co-operative Information Systems and this time around it got accepted! yay! It is always nice to get such good news…

This time around the reviews were very positive. Frankly, so positive that it amazed me, especially since the paper had been rejected elsewhere already. Below are parts of the comments that I found especially pleasing:

Very well written paper. The material follows a logical flow from the previous work by the authors.
[...]
Although quite abstract, this kind of work is nevertheless valuable for systems and tools to build upon.

This reviewer actually took the time to read some of our older papers, as well as studied the details of the formalism present in the present paper. Impressive.

I have carefully read most of the theoretical presentation. Authors have investigated thoroughly all aspects of information transformation and the presentation is excellent. I hope authors would not mind if I differ on some points.
[...]

After this remark follow some comments of technical nature. Again I was impressed with the level of detail of this review. It doesn’t happen very offten that both reviews of a paper are so in depth and to the point (and thus: of high quality and very useful for the others). I have no idea who the reviewers are (blind reviewing prevails in academia), unfortunately, for else I could give them two thumbs up!

Well… it seems like the sun has found its way to the Netherlands for sure. I normally don’t swear a lot but damn it is hot! Actually.. the temperature in itself is not so bad. I think it was about 36° today. In itself that’s not so bad but the humidity made it unbearable. In my opinion there’s only one thing you can do in such weather: sleep!

Unfortunately that wasn’t an option today. I had to be at work for various reasons. Yesterday, however, I got off pretty well. I snuck out early, went home, and decided to work in our garden last night as you can see on the picture. It was still warm, then, but not as bad as during the day. I’ve just seen the forecasts… looks like it’s going to be warm for at least a few more days. Well, guess I should put some extra beer in the fridge!