So it’s been a long while since I’ve taken the time to blog.  I never thought it would let it go this long, but here we are with a big several-month-long gap in blogging.  Essentially the 3 big things that have and are happening are what are in the title, the move, working at Philips, and working on CHI2010-2011.

I blogged previously about being the preferred candidate, and when I was later offered the position outright I accepted.  Then, even after buying tickets and scheduling movers we got the news that my visa/work permit had not come through.  This was in late April with a May 15th starting date.  It threw us back into limbo while Philips tried to work things out.  After much travail we were able to get everything worked out by Late June, so we chose August 1st as a start date.  So we flew out on July 29th and stayed in a temporary apartment for a few weeks while we found a house.  There was much hullabaloo about finding the right place, and then our stuff was stuck in customs forcing us to stay in the apartment longer, but in the end we’re finally settled in more or less.

Working at Philips has been an interesting experience.  Some of the bigger challenges are involved with the fact that I started on Aug 1.  For those who are not familiar with how much of western Europe works late July and August are the vacation (though they are more like to say holiday) period.  My supervisor here was gone for the entire month plus some, my line manager here also gone for most of the month.  As I walked down the hall of my floor in building 34 on the beautiful high tech campus I saw many of them empty each day.  I’ve never worked at one of the really large corporations or one that has been around for decades upon decades.  While I’m sure they’re not all like this, it’s pretty crazy how much bureaucracy there is.  In many ways one part of the company has no idea what another part is doing.  A very funny thing happened where I corresponded with the human resources department.  As a series of people from different departments came and went from vacation,  and changes in job function a huge misunderstanding came about.  A concerned HR supervisor type person asked me for a meeting over in the building not too far from mine.  After a few minutes of chit-chat he came down to the question, and in a matter of perhaps 15 seconds the whole thing was cleared up and we both laughed.  We both kept on laughing as we thanked each other for a fun and easy meeting, and we did it again via email.  Almost all these kinds of incidents have happy endings, like when I called the IT helpdesk “engineer” who insisted that the exchange server name I needed to set up mail on my ipod touch didn’t need a top level domain (tld) in order for it to work.  Of course that is true on a local network, but I would certainly be taking my handy portable device many places, and even on campus the wireless is outside of the intranet here so yah nice.  He insisted that the iphone was not supported so there was little he could do but he pointed me to a site that was designed to help Windoze mobile users set up their phones after 10 mins on the phone.  Within a minute I found the super secret information I needed (www.mail.philips com, shockingly difficult stuff) and it worked perfectly.  So yes it all does work in the end, but I ask at what cost?  I guess that is part of my research, which I will certainly blog more about in the future.

CHI, the premiere venue for those working and researching the topic of Human Computer Interaction is a fun dynamic conference.  One visit in 2006 to the annual conference in San Jose and I was hooked.  Now I’ve been asked to help organize the student volunteers for the conference in 2010-2011  (Incidentally you can now register for the lottery for 2010).  It’s been a blast to be on the organizing committees for these two conferences and get a peak at the tremendous amount of work that it takes to pull a conference like this together.  Of course with all that organizing I have perhaps let my own preparation for my submissions suffer a little, but hopefully I’ll still have something to present.

So these are the three things that have been taking my time lately, keeping me away from blogging, but I am sure to be more prolific in the near future.