Author: Börkur Sigurbjörnsson

Cursa Bombers 2008 ?>

Cursa Bombers 2008

At 9:30 I was at the starting line of the 10th race of Barcelona firemen — Cursa Bombers 2008. I arrived early in order to get a good spot on the starting line and hence skip the traffic at the start of the race. The plan was to run the 10k in 50 minutes. For people like me — who have difficulties with dividing and multiplying — 50 minutes is a good goal for a 10k race. The fifth row…

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24a Mitja Marató Sant Cugat ?>

24a Mitja Marató Sant Cugat

Approximately a year ago I managed to run my first half-marathon. Not only did I manage to finish the race, but I also met my target of finishing it within two hours. This achievement was the result of six month long systematic training on the streets of Amsterdam. Now — a year later — things are a bit different. I moved form Amsterdam to Barcelona in March. In the move I lost my running rhythm. My running frequency went from…

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Cursa Bombers 2007 ?>

Cursa Bombers 2007

The first day of April is ideal for tricking people. Today I was tricked into running around the streets of Barcelona as part of the annual 10k race, Cursa Bombers. Since my office is located close to the starting point of the race I planned to store my sweatshirt, the legs of my pants and my GSM in the office while I was running. So I rang the bell, waiting for the porter to let me in. No answer. I…

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Focused Information Access ?>

Focused Information Access

The main research topic during my PhD research was XML Element Retrieval [1]. I took a corpus of scientific articles in XML format and built a search engine on top of it to run experiments. For a given user query, the task was to go below the document level and return the XML elements that best matched the users’ information need. Most of the initial research effort went into evaluating different search concepts against the INEX XML retrieval evaluation collection….

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The Amsterdam Marathon 2006 ?>

The Amsterdam Marathon 2006

Six months ago I decided to start running regularly. I bought myself new running shoes and hit the street. In my first attempt I struggled with running 4km. As time passed my struggle continued. I continued struggling with the distance. An ever increasing distance. At first I could barely run 4km without stopping. A few weeks ago I could barely run 18km without stopping. The six months have been an interesting time for the number crunching enthusiast I am. I…

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