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

Saturday 21/05/05 @ 09:40 pm

May the force be with you...

Some of you will no doubt criticise me for my sudden lapse in updates. Don't worry, I've not completely forgotten to update, but remember that there are only two and a half weeks before my finals - scary! Importantly though, what's happened in the last two weeks? Let's begin with the week before last.

On Thursday (the 12th) it was Nick's birthday, so on Wednesday afternoon, Matt and I headed into town to look for birthday presents. I found a wonderful card, featuring a picture of an assortment of sweets - perfect for the gummi-bear-loving Austrian! We celebrated his quarter-century with style, having a barbecue, and then watching The Incredibles.

So, last weekend, I set to work and finished the final draft of my dissertation. Along with revision and the odd supervision, this is all I've been doing this last week. Up until Thursday that is, when I got the dissertation back from the printers, and handed it in. Woohoo! That's a big thing out of the way at least; I just need to start making a bigger dent in this pile of revision before the exams come around. I've never much enjoyed revision - it's much more fun learning new things, rather than memorising lots of specific details, that I would look up anyway, if I needed to know them. Oh well - it's the last year of all this, at least!

As you can probably guess from the title of this post, I've just recently seen Star Wars Episode III. On Thursday evening, rather spontaneously, David and I met up and had a nice meal at Prezzo, before heading to the cinema for the late showing of the film - I managed to grab tickets earlier that afternoon, much to my surprise. In any case, it was a bit of a disappointment - there were some nice bits, but it was lacking as a whole, and there were too many cliches and cheesy moments all round.

Without spoiling it for those that haven't yet seen Episode III, I'll refrain from specific comments, other than that I'll never be able to look at the Darth Vader again without thinking "noooooooo"!

Changing topic, Andrew has asked me show you all this picture:

The first person to guess who it is will win an all-expenses-paid dinner at Charlie Chan's, paid for by Andrew himself! He obviously has little confidence in your abilities, so prove him wrong, and grab that grub!

I'm watching EuroVision at the moment, whilst doing some revision. We've nearly finished seeing all the entries, and so far my vote has to go to Moldova with Grandma Beats The Drum. Go Grandma! It remains to be seen what the outcome will be, but we can be certain it won't be in any way driven by politics... hold on while I fend off the flying pigs.

Finally, let me leave you with this newly acquired knowledge - I found today, when I brushed my teeth immediately after drinking German blend coffee, that it left an aftertaste of pork sausages. There's no answer to that.

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