I was off on Wednesday (fetching parents from Brazil) and busy with teaching Tuesday and Thursday (as well as Monday) so as I surmised, it hasn't take long to get 'behind' with this.

As I'm almost certain I still can't datestamp posts correctly (I mean they're not even coming out with the correct time of day on them never mind the correct date if I choose to change it), I won't even attempt to post entries for this week.

Suffice to say, it's been busy. I was here till 6.30 last night (and then it takes two hours to get home). Ironically part of the reason for being so late was attending a seminar on 'Information Overload'. (I fear it added to the burden rather than helped.)

And will be late tonight as we have a team welcome meal (after an afternoon locked in a meeting room with said team!) for the three new assistants that have started in the last few months.

Week or two back I heard there was enough money left over in the 'fitting out' part of the library budget after all the furniture had been bought, to buy a laptop or three for the library staff at my level. That's a treat I'd not expected.

But of course, having got me all excited I then find out it won't be a dinky Sony VAIO it would be easy to lust after as apparently the IT department have a thing about supporting Sony machines. (!) (Macs I could understand). And it probably won't be for a while, so don't get too excited too soon.

But to get it out of my system...

Borrowed a library laptop for the weekend just to see how 'portable' a standard sized one was in my briefcase. Not really. It's movable but not something I'd want to carry every day - besides, where would I put my sack lunch?

Then there's the power supply. Do I carry it as well? Buy a second? [1]

On the other hand, the screen is gorgeous - 'specially when I tried watching a DVD tucked up in bed! And it was great to be able to do computery stuff while the kids/wife did school work of one sort or another. Not sure I want to give it back now while I wait for university bureacracy to slowy grind through the acquisiton procedure I'm not even sure our Head has started yet!

The real question is how useful it will be. Be interesting to see and I'm sure I will enjoy the experiment.


[1] In fact that was the solution I took with my Palm and its battery lasts much longer than the laptop's.

Busy week finally catching up after a short hiatus with most of the blogs I try to follow. Trouble is, lots of screen time reading and trying to tackle cryptic crosswords in break time leads me to suspect that a current headache will be well cured by enjoying the weekend to come.

Have a good one.

"Silence is ambiguous." Former colleague from TheOldPlace.

She was quite right.

Lunch today with a very regular correspondent who seemed to be have been a bit curt on the phone and then carefully not writing on return from a two week holiday. Turns out they'd simply failed to mention they were then off on two conferences and have only just returned.

Keep writing, keep posting, keep talking.... I get the message. (But it won't be in this forum if Blogger doesn't sort itself out soon.)

To a lecture today on 'dark energy' by a topflight cosmologist. Held by the chaplaincy which seemed odd till you thought about it. Though the speaker did admit to being an atheist.

He was excellent at keeping the science (and speculation) [1] managable for a non-technical audience and was clearly enthusiastic about his subject in a way that couldn't help but rub off.

Excellent. Even if it did raise more questions than it was ever likely to answer.


[1] Dark matter is strange enough. Dark energy is weird enough and so little understood that you can pretty much make up your own theory and it will be as right as anyone else. Our speaker appeared on the Letterman show and did his best explanation of the current state of knowledge but irritated Letterman no end (we saw the video) when he asked "What is dark energy?" with the quite honest and accurate: "I don't know."

OK, is this a temporary glitch on Blogger's part or have they really stopped allowing posts to be datestamped? If the latter then I really will go off the thing and look at alternatives. Seemed bad enough when Google took it over a little while ago.

Anyway, if that's why you think you've read the other post 'dated' today before, you'll know why - and why it looks like I had a busy day yesterday when all I was doing was 'catching up'.

That'll teach me to not blog every day.

Spent the morning in a session about disability and duties at the university.

Usual stuff from the stupidity of current law-making to the drudgery of the some of the jargon and technicalities. Still, it was made up for by the presenter being very jovial, very unPC and very antiestablishment for someone who is pretty high up in the uni heirarchy. Quite refreshing.

Throughout, I couldn't help thinking about a story I recalled reading as a boy. Couldn't remember the title or the author. Just that ballet dancers were weighted down so they wouldn't be better than non-ballet dancers and the aim was to keep everyone 'equal'.

After the session I tried a Google search on those limited ideas and didn't find the story, but did find a page with lots of stories. A quick perusal gave me two leads to try following up and the second hit exactly what I'd been remembering.
http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/hb.html

1961. How prescient!

I shared the URL with the presenter and he was very grateful having also read the story as a boy!

Is everyone's birthday today? Several friends (or children of friends) seem to be birthdaying today. Shame one's emails are bouncing, another isn't talking to me...

Still, there are students at the door to deal with: "buckling of aluminium tubes" today. That doesn't change.

Second Faculty Library committee today. Just as scary as last time. This time I have to face the dean and the liaison officers with budgets and numbers and stuff. Never my strong suit. Need to persuade them either to spend their money or let me.

(Never had this trouble at TheOldPlace as there was no such committee!)

In actual fact they were very easy going about the whole thing and delighted to find that after (apparently) some years of not having enough there was a fair bit to spend up before the financial year ends. They're happy for me to spend but I also got back to the office to find emails already piling up with suggested orders.

'course, they'd also like some really really expensive databases...

TANSTAAFL

Here's something I've been meaning to pick up again since changing jobs: lunchtime exercise.

I had intended to start in the new year but an auto accident put paid to that. Now a health and fitness drive from the gym was offering a free badminton slot. Turned out there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. The only slots were early evening which ruled them out for the guy I was going to play with. We bit the bullet and paid the money for a lunchtime session.

I'll pay the other cost tomorrow. :-)

Really am on my 'late night' tonight (see 23rd Feb). Here till 8.45 and staffing an enquiry desk from 5pm. Not my top choice for a Friday night, but I would still have to say it's better to be here once a semester doing that than TheOldPlace style late nights for two hours every fortnight *and* another two hours on occasional Fridays.

The evening itself wasn't too busy but enough to keep me going in between catching up on _Scientific American_ articles (Dark Energy for example...). However, I lost track of the number of times I had to point out the new photocopier room just behind me (nicely tucked out of the way despite having three entrances to the fairly small space). The sooner the publicity team get together and decide on the new signage (or sinage I saw on the web today somewhere which sounded quite fun), the better. Next week fortunately.

Today there was a lunchtime talk from a supposedly top-notch speaker from a top-notch university about 'disruptive technologies' in the learning and teaching environment (blogs, wikis, RSS and the usual suspects). It wasn't that what he had to say was uninteresting but for a youngish, trendyish, knowledgeable academic you really might have thought that his presentational ability could have been several notches better.

Still, we were given lunch of a sort. (And told off when we tried to take our cups of tea into the lecture room... which was a good reminder of how students must feel (see, yesterday's post!)).

Today (and next week) I've been lurked to show round some prospective 'creative and cultural industries' students and their parents.

I've learned to do a fairly 'slick' tour I'm quite pleased with and seems to amuse those who come round. But there's always the downsides such as encountering the student with a hamburger - do I ask them to take it away and draw attention to it, or do I ignore it and have parents concerned that we don't maintain an appropriate environment?

As it happens the whole issue is up in the air somewhat as the 'code of conduct' is currently under review by the Head and we may see the allowance of "cold food" in the library.

Great. Now I foresee discussions along the lines of: "but this hamburger *is* cold!".

Last week and this and next I've been seeing some small groups of mechanical engineering students. Why they can't all come at once I'm not quite sure but apparently they can't. Anyway, these are first years and the aim is to give them a quick tour of the library's physical space and then a quick tour of the electronic space.

For this I've been making my first use of a newly refitted/finished seminar room which has worked well for them after the walkaround. I can warn them they've only seen the tip of an iceberg [1] in the physical space, demonstrate some of the main features of our e-provision, and warn them that this will become increasingly important by their third year. (Show them databases in detail in their first year and they're bored; show them in their third year and they want to know why they weren't shown them in the first year...)

Nothing changes. It must be like this in every university.

[1] try Google Images for an amazing picture of an iceberg both above and below the surface.

with apologies to those who might have been looking for posts... I'm back after a short hiatus somewhat distracted by too much work, too many emails, too much reading... you know the drill.

While it has occurred to me that after a year of writing this blog and now after six months in the new job that perhaps it's time has passed, I'll keep going for a bit. I was thinking yesterday about whether I'd "settled in". I think I have - I tend to do that fairly quickly in new environments and I'm getting prepositions about 'we' and 'they' correct - for the most part! But whatever 'loyalty' one develops towards an institution won't entirely disappear overnight after 11 years of working there and judging from past experience I'm never going to not have a soft spot for TheOldPlace. And the people that work/ed there, even more so.