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

Monday 26/04/04 @ 12:45 am

Lovely weather

It's been quite a busy weekend, in the good sense of busy - the weather has been fantastic, and I've done quite a lot of stuff. Carl arrived on Friday afternoon, and we had a barbeque in the evening, which was rather pleasant. We got through a couple of jugs of Pimm's and lemonade, which was rather fitting given earlier comments that Andrew hadn't been drinking as much of it this year! Anyway, we all stuffed ourselves, and then watched Lost in Translation later on.

On Saturday, we went over the the University Botanic Garden, which was actually the first time I had been. It's a really nice place - very tranquil, and with lots of interesting trees/plants. They have a couple of Giant Redwoods, which (despite already being pretty large) are relatively young, and still have quite a bit of growing to do! I must say that I was really impressed with the gardens in general - I'm certainly going to go and do some revision there on a suitably nice day.

Later in the afternoon, we went punting. We went from the Granta up to Magdalene Bridge, and back again. I punted for most of the way, although Nick did take over for the last little stretch. It was good fun, and definitely good weather for it - plus, this time, I didn't fall in :-). We went for a quick dinner at Dragon, down Mill Road, then went to see Kill Bill Volume 2 in the evening. It was really enjoyable, and although not quite as 'gorey' (if you can call it that) as the first, it had its moments. I particularly enjoyed the 'eye-removal' operation :-). The best character by far, though, has got to be Pei Mei - absolutely fantastic!

Today (well, yesterday if you want to be pedantic), I had the usual D&D session, which was rather busier than usual - in fact I had a total of eight players to deal with. Most of the session consisted of a rather long and multi-faceted battle involving mind-flayers, worgs and demons. It's strange to think that this campaign is coming close to finishing - I'm doing one more session before breaking off for the exams, and then completing things in May Week.

I think that pretty much brings us up to date - Carl has gone back up to York, and I'm now back to getting on with work/revision (at least I was until I started writing this...).

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