I´m just back from my vacation trip to the very beautiful Iceland, so the new year (in terms of work) starts a little late. I have realized that time plays very strange tricks with my memories and as I grow older things become worse. In particular, when I look back I tend to underestimate the things I have achieved in any given time period and how much I have developed as a researcher and as a person. Writing some of these things down is the best solution to keep things into perspective. So, I am starting something that I will try to make a tradition in this journal: a review of the past year.
Here we go for 2009.
Finished four papers: 1 paper has been accepted, 2 papers are on the verge of being formally accepted, and 1 is being refereed.
Had the opportunity to work with some great people: Henk Broer and Igor Hoveijn in Groningen, Carles Simó in Barcelona, Dmitrií Sadovskií in Dunkerque, Dominique Sugny, Pavao Mardešić, and Michèle Pelletier in Dijon.
Organized a workshop at the Lorentz Center in Leiden together with Jonathan Robbins, Dmitrií Sadovskií, and Holger Waalkens.
Gave 5 talks: Utrecht, Barcelona, Luminy, Leiden, and Athens.
Visited Barcelona twice (the first time for 3 days and the second for 2 weeks) for a collaboration with Carles Simó. Learned a lot about Taylor integration methods.
Visited Boulogne-sur-Mer for a week for a collaboration with Dmitrií Sadovskií.
Taught two courses.
Refereed 3 papers.
Applied for, but failed to get, an NWO Vidi grant. At least my proposal was judged to be «worthy of funding on the basis of its merits» (sigh!).
Redesigned my personal website and rewrote the code that runs the website to use WSGI.
Wrote a lot of Emacs Lisp. My favorites: code to show many TeX math commands in Emacs using the corresponding Unicode character (for example
\inftyshows as ∞,\geas ≥, etc.) and a small package to interact with the Simplenote application.Understood the finer technical aspects of low light photography and why my G9 is absolutely not suitable for it (in short: too many megapixels, small sensor, not the widest possible aperture at ƒ/2.8).
Visited (or re-visited) for vacation some beautiful places: Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Lisbon, Switzerland (Bern, Geneve, Lausanne, Zermatt), Liechtenstein, Innsbruck, Santorini. Iceland was the most beautiful place I visited but technically this was in 2010 so it doesn´t count.
I already have some concrete plans for 2010 on the problems I want to work on, there are papers that have to be finished, and invitations to workshops that I will attend. Life goes on.