The other recent event that impelled me to start my internal blog was last week’s Extreme Blue European Expo at Hursley. Extreme Blue is a student internship program that IBM runs every summer. It lasts 12 weeks. The projects are proposed by IBMers but are implemented by students. The Expos are held in different locations each year, I think, but this year the European one was held in Hursley, UK.

I’d heard a bit about the Hursley-based SiSi project from a friend who was mentoring the team, so I moseyed on down to Hursley House and spent a good hour-and-a-half visiting the Expo stands and hearing about those and other projects from around IBM sites in Europe.

I’ve been learning British Sign Language (BSL) for about a year and, having learnt just the basics about how to communicate in BSL (that is, it’s not just hand signs or fingerspelling but also facial expressions, lip shapes, and the spatial location of the signs that matter), I couldn’t imagine how an avatar could convincingly sign – especially not translated in real time from speech, which is what the SiSi project aimed to do.

The SiSi team’s demo blew me away. They use a third-party piece of software to convert speech input to text. The text is then sent to the client machine (I think) where an avatar signs the text in BSL or American Sign Language (ASL), depending on the language you selected. I can’t remember any more of the technical details than that but the demo text they tried was translated to BSL at a reasonable speed, I thought (probably as fast as a human interpreter). The demo was on a local system but the students reckoned it did okay over remote systems.

The project was done with the University of East Anglia and the RNID (Royal National Institute for Deaf people) who supplied the database of signs (which I guess is probably a database of video clips and associated labels). I’m not sure who marked up the signs in Sign Language Markup Language (SLML), a form of XML, but I expect that’s the most intensive part of it.

The great thing for IBM and the Extreme Blue scheme is that, like last year’s LAMA project the SiSi project has attracted loads of press coverage, here and around the world.

SiSi aside, there were loads of other cool projects including (you can probably spot a theme in my interests here!) the Accessibility in Virtual Worlds project. For a change, the virtual world concerned was not Second Life but, instead, Active Worlds. Active Worlds enabled the project team to devise a way to mark up objects around the world using XML so that blind people can walk through the virtual worlds using sonar. The user wears headphones (or has speakers set up) and the nearer something is, I think, the louder the sound (or something like that).

I came away from the Expo with a handful of really professional-looking Moo cards and leaflets from the stands I had time to visit. I think the most amazing thing that occurred to me about the Expo was the amount and quality of work that the students were able to produce in just 12 weeks.

Tony just found this gross but ace site: whatjeffkilled.com

It especially appealed to me because Bailey, our ginger killer-cat, brought in the first mouse in ages tonight. He managed to throw off his latest collar (and bell) a few days ago so he’s now silent and deadly. He came into the house meowing out the side of his mouth because the rest of his mouth was stuffed with dead mouse. He came into the living-room and dropped it on the carpet to admire for a while.

He was most put out when I removed the mouse and dumped it in the outside bin. He sulked for a while, then stalked off outside again.

The closest we came to a blog was the CatTails wiki page that Tony started when Gizmo and Bailey were kittens. We used to keep it up to date with all the kills and crap that they brought in. Their count is way too numerous nowadays, though.

While not the most gross (though yucky and messy), the magpie to the right is the most bizarre. He wasn’t small and our kittens (at the time) were. We can only imagine that one of them (Bailey?) had managed to catch it and drag it through the cat-flap (no other way in) then been scared off by a massive flapping vicious magpie. Tony sums up the story nicely on his blog.

I love my cats.

A couple of years back, a friend from work was doing an AS level in photography in her spare time and was given a piece of coursework to complete over Easter. So she figured it’d be a good chance to have a girlie day out and we (me and some other work friends) could be her models.At first we were slightly apprehensive about exactly what we would be modelling… But she soon put our minds at rest and said we’d be going up to Avebury standing stones for the day to pretend to be fantasy warrior characters a la Lord of the Rings etc.

So one windy Sundy in April, Katja, Tess, me, and Keren (as shown in the piccie to the right) dug through the supplied sack of costumes to create ourselves as characters for the photoshoot. We spent much of the day running around fields with plastic swords (or, in my case, the extremely sharp dagger that you can see in the photo).

We had a great time but as the day went on, we got more and more tired and cold, which probably added some authenticity to the scenes.

The best of the photos are tagged avebury on Flickr. My friend passed her assessment and we all went along to the exhibition and felt just a little bit important as we wandered around and admired ourselves on display.

p.s. And while we’re on the subject, I quite like this one, which isn’t tagged as avebury but is the result of my friend more recently playing with her graphics package. I like the soft-focus, air-brushed effect.

I’ve just done the Political Compass test after reading Roo Reynold’s blog post. According to the test, I’m a libertarian-lefty.

I’ve just got back from a fun and extremely girly weekend in Manchester. My friend, Claire, is getting married in a couple of weeks so 17 of us converged on Manchester city centre for the weekend. The theme of the hen party was ‘cowgirls’ because Claire’s a big Dolly Parton fan (I’ve been friends with her since we were about 4 years old but it was only about two months ago that I found this out!) so we were all provided with white cowboy hats (adorned with tiaras) and told to bring appropriate outfits for the Saturday evening.

On Saturday morning, at breakfast, Maggie (one of the bridesmaids-to-be) announced that we had to meet back at the hotel at half-two so that we go to our pole-dancing lesson. This was news to at least some of the party but we were reassured that we didn’t have to wear skimpy bikinis or heels if we didn’t have them or didn’t want to. During the morning, Claire discovered some stunning black t-shirts in Primark with ‘Dancing Queen’ emblazoned across the chest in sparkly pink and got a job-lot of them. So, at quarter-to-three, clothed in our matching t-shirts (and Kerry in her fantastic neon pink leg-warmers), we trooped across to The Ruby Lounge.

Having to knock, mid-Saturday afternoon, on the big, red, locked double-doors to be let into a nightclub in a basement felt a just a tad bit seedy, and I think we looked generally apprehensive when our teacher met us. We were a bit fazed when she said we could get changed but she wasn’t at all fazed when we (dressed mostly in jeans or combats) said we were changed – she just suggested that we roll up long trousers. She was wearing her company uniform of matching cami and very short shorts – the more skin, the better, we were told.

After a short warm-up in flat shoes, anyone who had heels could put them on and the lesson began. After two hours of swinging round poles and hauling ourselves up just to slide back down again, we were absolutely knackered and also rather sore. When we went out that evening, I was sporting a lovely friction burn/bruise on my right wrist. When I went to bed that night, I discovered, too, that I have a matching pair of bright red bruises on my knees from sliding down the pole and landing on them too fast. And today, my arms, sides, thighs, and stomach ache.

So I think you get the idea that it was pretty hard work. Our teacher (from Polestars) was great – she made it look so easy but was very patient and clear about how to do the moves she demonstrated. In the last five minutes, she offered to teach us some lap-dancing moves. By this time, we’d lost much of our earlier nerves and, although it was slightly weird having to dance in front of each other (despite being called ‘lap-dancing’, there’s little contact), we giggled our way through it – it was basically similar moves to what we’d learnt on the pole, just without the pole.

That evening, we went to The Birdcage cabaret nightclub, which appeared to be mostly populated by hen parties wearing a wacky range of themed costumes (we were quite sedate by comparison). Just before we left, a woman came on to the podium to dance incredibly energetically in a bikini and did a bit of pole-dancing. We were, of course, all very impressed and full of a whole load of new-found respect for exotic dancers. And we got very excited when we spotted her doing moves that we recognised from our class.