Welcome to lanther.co.uk

Welcome to my website. Please feel free to browse at your will, using the menu on your left. The main page below is home to my (long neglected) weblog for those of you that are bored enough to take an interest in what's going on in my life :-). I'm currently a Principal Scientist at Adobe, working on the architecture for asset management and collaboration in Creative Cloud. Prior to this, I was the lead developer for Creative Cloud Libraries - a revolutionary new way of sharing creative content between different applications, devices, and people. I previously helped to develop Adobe Scout, which was a visual profiler for Flash and AIR applications. Prior to this, I was a researcher in the Language Based Technology group at the Technical University of Denmark, Copenhagen. I was part of the MT-LAB project, which is a collaboration between DTU, Aalborg University, and ITU, investigating formal verification techniques for advanced software systems. My particular research was concerned with probabilistic and stochastic analysis of distributed systems. I did my PhD in the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh, supervised by Professor Jane Hillston. Previously, I studied at Robinson College, Cambridge. I originate from Bridlington, a little sea-side town on the Yorkshire coast. In the summer of 2005, I was a Senior Technical Associate at Fraser Research, in Princeton, New Jersey. Non-academically, I've been studying Japanese since January 2006, and I have been playing the fascinating game of Go since September 2006. I was previously the president of the Edinburgh University Go Club, and was a member of the Japan-UK 150 sub-committee for Scotland. My current grade is around 3kyu. Other than that, there's not much else to say. Feel free to enjoy the site! 楽しんでください！ Michael Smith

Sunday 01/05/05 @ 02:43 pm

Raccoons...

So, the last few days have been pretty uneventful. Lectures began on thursday, and I had a meeting with Dave and John over lunch on Friday - of course, I still need to get my visa, and I have an appointment at the US embassy in London on thursday, which I just realised coincides with voting day! I got some feedback from Alan about my dissertation, and I'm now working on refactoring stuff to make it read better, as well as losing about 2000 words worth of stuff. It's all hectic at the moment; that, and all the revision to do...

On friday evening, I met up with David and Katharine, and we went to Pizza Express for dinner. For want of anything else to do, we went back to mine, and I introduced Katharine to the delights of Little Mouse and Look Around You. David and I then watched Kiki's Delivery Service, which remains one of my favourite little films - the sort of thing that's bound to cheer you up!

Anyway, you may be wondering what the title of this post has to do with any of this. Well, I stumbled across a fantastic little site dedicated to that 80's cartoon we all know and love - The Raccoons. As well as having all the songs, and a complete episode list, you can download and watch all the specials. Cyril Sneer, eat your heart out!

Of course, not everyone seems to agree about the magnificence of this programme, and indeed I found a rather amusing site proclaiming Ralph Raccoon to be Stalin! Typical of some people to try to ruin a nice little cartoon, by calling it communist propaganda; just because it has an environmentalist theme and a red t-shirt! I mean, how could anybody confuse these two with evil dictators??

Anyway, looks like it's back to work for me. I don't know about anyone else, but sometimes the thought of just getting away from it all to go live in a tree sounds quite appealing. Oh well.

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