Hmm … wouldn’t it be nice if work travel could take me somewhere other than the excitement capital of Australia? Anyway, another early morning start yesterday, and a typically late flight leaving Sydney. Then the usual ten-thousand-round-about-hell-ride from the airport to ANU campus. There must be something in the Canberra water supply that makes taxi drivers actually speed up to go around those round-abouts.

An interesting meeting though, so it wasn’t a waste of effort . Presented my recent work on re-architecting the retrieval API for our Myriad platform to a bunch of software engineers in our Canberra lab. I’ve basically been borrowing lots of service-oriented ideas to produce a flexible, modular, declarative API for others to hook-in interesting retrieval technologies to our platform. Ended up having some interesting discussions around web services, WSDL, genericity, and declarative configuration of Myriad, and we’ve got a reasonable plan for progressing things from here.

Finished up early afternoon, and ended up getting wait-listed for an earlier flight back to Sydney. Got confirmation of seating on that plane, but then was a couple of minutes too late to the airport, so got bumped back a flight, and ended up spending 45 minutes or so in the thrilling confines of Canberra airport (not for the first time either …). Still, I did get home earlier than originally anticipated, which was good. Most of that was negated by a 1 hour+ trip back home from the airport through peak hour gridlock though .

Shell’s mum is up for a few days, but I get the feeling I’ll hardly see her, since I’m madly trying to finish off my research proposal and presentation before the next uni semester starts next week. So much for a break between semesters!!