Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

I had a passion for the content of physics, but I was also possessed
by a hungry ambition for its earthly rewards. Both passion and hunger
persisted over the years, despite the inevitable disappointments. Ten
years later, as a postdoctoral researcher at Oxford in 1976, I
experienced a minor epiphany about ambition’s degradation. At age 16
or 17, I had wanted to be another Einstein; at 21, I would have been
happy to be another Feynman; at 24, a future T. D. Lee would have
sufficed. By 1976, sharing an office with other postdoctoral
researchers at Oxford, I realized that I had reached the point where I
merely envied the postdoc in the office next door because he had been
invited to give a seminar in France. In much the same way, by a
process options theorists call time-decay, financial stock options
lose their potential as they approach their own expiration.

From My
Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, by Emanuel
Derman.

Dear diary. Wow, its been a long time since I’ve updated you. I kept meaning to but … life got in the way. I’m writing this from the lounge at Ben-Gurion airport, waiting for the boarding call to the flight to NY. This is the first time I’m leaving home for travel since Yael was born. Everyone kept telling me it’s different, and I didn’t believe them, but it is… I haven’t even boarded the plane and I already miss Orna and Yael something fierce.

Then why am I leaving, you ask? I am headed for the Xen summit, taking place at the IBM T. J. Watson research center in upstate New York, where I will be giving a talk on IOMMU performance (or lack thereof…). What’s that? what’s so lacking in IOMMU performance? well, I could tell you, but the data is still preliminary and we’re still analyzing the results. At the summit I’ll be presenting preliminary results and some thoughts for the future — the real deal will be presented at OLS ’07.

There’s the boarding call. Later, diary dearest.