JoelNothman.com

The coughing on my blog is a fairly desperate sign that I should write something. It’s certainly been a while since I submitted my thesis.

At least I should have written about Tasmania, which I visited in the first ten days of December. Galina and I saw the sights of the island over the first week: Wineglass Bay, Bicheno’s Penguins, Cataract Gorge, the Spirit of Tasmania turning around in Devonport (?!), Cradle Mountain, Bruny Island, Salamanca Markets, Port Arthur and the Devil’s Kitchen. In sum, I drove 1300km over five days in a hired Lancer, before shabbat in Hobart and a day-tour to the Tasman Peninsula. Some other highlights:

• We met an Israeli couple on our first walk who were completely oblivious to the news (Mumbai, etc.), and who desperately needed CDs for the small car they were travelling and sleeping in, which I gave them (Mashina and Dudu Tasa).
• Having left our warm clothing in sunny Devonport, we turned up to ice and snow at Cradle Mountain. Our hike there was shorter than planned, and we dried off at Tasmazia, a hedge maze filled with strange quotations.
• A chocolate factory.
• The GPS system we hired took us on the least scenic route from north to south, featuring hydroelectric power plants and unsealed roads.
• It also sent us north into rush-hour traffic when trying to go south to catch the last ferry to Bruny Island. We made it, thanks to a little speeding, some generous ferry operators who lifted the closed boomgate for us, and a lot of luck.
• Bruny Island, and its every scene — while Tassie is stunning view after stunning view, this island off an island off an island exceeds.
• I gave thanks to our shabbat lunch hosts by recording tunes for them the following Tuesday.

But the real reason I was in Tasmania was for ALTW, the tribe-meet of Australia’s students and academics in language technology. While I enjoyed the conference, it was a little disappointing to be one of only about thirty attending, twenty of whom (myself included) made presentations. Since then, a paper of mine has been accepted to EACL, which should be big enough to give attendees options for each lecture session.

It seems I’m returning to USyd in March to take the PhD path, and despite this being my last real holiday from such stuff for the next three years, I’ve been doing lots of other computery stuff, such as attending the awesome National Computer Science School as a tutor (first time!); preparing material and puzzles for a talk on linguistics and language technology presented at the latter; making contributions to the Natural Language Toolkit; helping to edit their upcoming book; and playing around with a few other ideas.

There has also been a lot of music in my life lately, rehearsing regularly with Jenny and the gang, working towards a March concert (no date set yet) of Mediaeval, Renaissance and early Baroque music. At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve met once with a more jazz/pop-oriented a capella group, and might finally get around to arranging the Screaming Jets’ Helping Hand for them. I’ve even been looking back at an unsung piece I arranged in 2006, wondering what I need to do to make it more singable. Jenny and co. will be pushing me soon to find a voice teacher, and want me to use more of my alto falsetto range…

I guess the silence is also because, for whatever reasons, I’m writing (perhaps thinking?) less about Jewish and Classical Hebrew stuff, which had often been the topic of this blog. While I wrote a few posts on Rashi and Ibn Ezra last year, I’ve been reading Ramban over the last months, and he is simply not as witty; his long rants correspond with low comprehension, and his determined point of view leaves one with little to say, even while disagreeing. But I continue to read (although reading the Mishna Berura is falling behind), enjoying the interpretation and the language, even if I say nothing about it.

And there’s a social life to be had, and time to be spent with a girlfriend. And if I get around to it this holidays, I might teach myself some Russian so I can understand her grandmother. So far I’ve changed my Facebook interface to Russian, but it hasn’t helped much yet.

Amid all this, I should also think about Thailand where I’ll be spending a fortnight from the end of the month for a wedding of Galina’s friend Raquel. It’s very exciting, but right now I feel like there’s enough to do in my life without another holiday… my inherited workoholism shining through.

I hope the coughing ceases, and maybe I’ll even try push out a few posts amid all the other madness…