Day conference went well. I was last up this time instead of first. And my colleague, S, who is not known for such effusiveness - especially where it's not required - thought it the best presentation of the lot. Which was a huge relief as the first one had rather intimidated me by being very researchy and not at all what I had in my bag if that's what they were expecting.

The road trip went well enough as well with a spare battery for my laptop meaning I had power for as long as I could be bothered to work and no major hold ups which was surprising. I even found a taker for my poster so I didn't have to carry *that* home.

Oh, and one oddity. Turned out that I was speaking *after* another poster award winner from the conference a couple of us took the e-book poster to and won the judge's choice award. As she was introduced as one of the winners, I assumed at the time she'd won the 'people's choice' award and made some joke about it. But looking it up afterwards discovered she'd actually been the runner up to us! Probably a good job I didn't know that at the time.

Off to do my 'Ostrava talk' at another university now. 6 hours driving (road trip! [1]) seems a long way to go for a 20 minute talk till I think how far I went in the summer for the same.

The colleague I'm going with *had* agreed to go in a rather nice RV we found for hire. (Worked out the cost was about the same as trains and two hotel rooms). But he repented of the offer (made after nearly bottle of wine) and has in the interim had to suffer much ribbing from other colleagues about the "Brokeback Winnebago" trip. I think it would have been fun - in a sort of interesting way! Ah well, another time.

Delivered my library staff development hour on my trip to Ostrava this morning. Seemed to go down well. I covered the conference in enough detail to satisfy the 'trickle down' requirements but also got to cover some of the non-work bits as well. From a gigabyte of photos I selected 30 ones I thought were the best plus some extra ones that set scenes or were unique in some way.

The highlight though for people seemed to be that they could choose how they navigated through the pictures and stories.

I'd thought of doing it all chronologically but then picked 8 or so 'themes'. On a slide with the 8 themes represented by a word in Czech, the PowerPoint would link off to whichever bit and then return to the 'title' slide. Folk got to guess / pick a word and if we didn't get through everything, it wasn't the end of the world. In fact, we just managed to do them all so I'd got it about right.

Stayed late tonight to hear one of my Heads of Department give his inaugral professorial lecture. Given that it was on math it was surprisingly interesting and accessible. Big crowd attended and well worth bothering with.

Two more goes with Flock and Twitter this morning. Two lectures to computing final year students of about 60 in each group.

Quick straw poll before they'd all arrived suggested *at least* half a dozen had the technology and Twitter logins to participate.

But for whatever reason, and despite my encouragement, none of them chose to do so. Not even in the second session when they should have been more awake. Not quite sure what that's about. They participated verbally. So were they just unsure of me or what I'd do? Not keen on using the technology that way? Shy?

At least one of them was gracious enough to pose for a photo. (From over his shoulder as I took a picture of him with his his cellphone on Twitter and the main screen 'behind' (actually in front of him) showing the Library homepage and the twitter sidebar). I needed a picture of 'active learning' for a workshop I'm attending next week and thought that was about the only opportunity I had to contribute something.

Same trick again but this time with Library staff during one of our training sessions.

As I wasn't actually leading the session I set up the presenter with my Twitter account in the sidebar and once again people could comment or ask questions via the @reply feature.

Didn't work quite as well as the presenter wasn't engaging with it but a couple of people 'played' with comments and questions to each other. Still worked well at that level.

One snag using my own account from two different perspectives as it were: a couple of my followers wanted to know why I was talking to myself!

Tried out the Twitter in a side-bar trick with Flock today. Running a workshop for computing academics as one of their lunchtime briefings. Seemed to go very well with a couple of dozen turning up and lots of input. Better yet, having them Twitter questions and comments meant that I had a record of them next day when I tried to respond to the queries I didn't know the answer to!

Of course, computing academics might not be a 'typical' audience, but it was a promising start and not as distracting or useless as it might have been.

Prompted by a comment to our 'surreal' blog (see, it does have uses), I downloaded a PowerPoint template that allows Twitter to feed straight through to the PowerPoint live as it were.

The practical upshot being (and the reason I looked) that I could have students tweeting direct to a screen that would update itself as I lectured them.

Why? Two reasons:
firstly it allow them to ask questions semi-anonymously
secondly it would allow them to send in their project titles for the moment when I use their examples to show how to analyze for keywords etc.

A lecture this morning to final year computing students was a prime example of why I might want to do this. Using the 'hands up' method that at least has the advantage of technical simplicity, I had a student tell me her project was about 'event management software'. Sounds reasonable I thought and proceeded to scribble it up on the board and start dissecting it. Until - fortunately she was brave enough - she pointed out she'd said 'inventory' not 'event'. Only it took at least three goes before I caught what she was saying. Between her reasonably heavy accent, the appalling acoustics of the lecture theater and my awful (and fast declining it would appear) hearing, it was thoroughly embarrassing for all concerned. And it's happened before when an oriental student with the quietest voice I've ever heard put me (and herself) through the same trauma.

Anyway, the snag with tweeting to PowerPoint I immediately saw was that I don't actually use much PowerPoint for final year students. Typically I'm showing them a live web page. But as I was messing with the PowerPoint solution in one of our coffee shops, an academic came in and pointed out the solution.

Flock - a Firefox based browser I think she said - that handles social media really well in a side bar while your main window holds your ordinary web page. No sooner had she showed me than it was downloaded and installed and appears to do just what she said. I might even dare to use it with some computing staff I'm speaking to tomorrow and the remainder of the final year computing students I see in two sessions on Friday. Bit scary - but could be fun.

Oh, and in my other technological development, I was inspired to solve a problem I've had in my appraisal for a couple of years now.

I've long wanted a second monitor for extra screen real estate - working on documents and web pages and other things all simultaneously. Would be great.

A snag I realized recently would be that it wasn't just the cost of new monitor that would be a stumbling block. I needed a dual graphics card on the PC as well. I don't have one.

However, the light dawned today, my *laptop* does! If the monitor I have has two inputs I may be able to reverse the idea of using my PC as the main screen and use it as the extension. I nabbed a cable from one of our techie guys and after a little bit of fiddling (mainly because I had to tell the PC monitor it no longer needed to display the PC desktop), got it working a treat.

Couple of kinks - can't print to my local printer as my laptop can only print to a networked printer. Have to switch the monitor manually each time. Email behaves in a way that makes it only usable on the primary screen. But nothing unmanageable and at zero cost may yet please the boss! Be interesting to see how useful it actually is.

Workshop for staff this morning on Web 2.0 seemed to go well. Packed with 28 in attendance which is most unusual for our staff workshops. Feedback had some interesting points but almost all postivie which was a relief.

With that and some other teaching today it's been exhausting - and an exhausting week. But done now and time to brave the awful rain and head home.

News just in...

TheOldPlace don't want me. Nice, polite email but the upshot is the same.

Rejection doesn't get any easier to take, but perhaps there's a bit of me that thinks it's something of a relief. In any case, I'm sure all their candidates will be much better qualified and likely to succeed at the job.

I wish them all the best in their search for a new Head and shall watch with interest.

H invited me for coffee this morning to chat over her preparations for a conference next year. I didn't think I'd be able to contribute much but to both our surprises I was able to contribute some useful ideas for people and things she could invite or arrange. From slightly worried to much cheerier - I wish I could do that for people more often!

School visit this afternoon. Supposed to be a class full of 17 year olds but there's a tiny bit of rain and apparently they didn't want to travel from the island.

So we got a rather apologetic call from the teacher in charge saying only four of them could make it, did we still want to continue.

The law librarian and I, detailed off to run the afternoon and already armed with a page long plan of what we'd cover, who'd present it and what activities we'd get them to do, thought about it and decided that we were geared up for it so we might as well. But it's a bit disappointing to prepare and then find the students can't be bothered. I guess they're preparing all too well for their university experience.

Tired now. Four or forty or four hundred - it still takes it out of you.

Asked about the TheOldPlace application I realized it was ten days and I'd not heard anything. You might assume at that point that you weren't going to hear anything.

But then I recalled that TheOldPlace was the employer that 10 days after a job interview hadn't told me I'd got the job and only revealed that I had becaused I called to ask. (Due to having been offered another job but really wanting the first one more).

So I can only be patient and try not to be too stressed. Of course I have no idea if they do actually notify unsuccessful applicants. I did get a nice email saying thank you for the documents after I'd submitted them. I'm still not holding my breath but I hate the waiting all the same.

One of my occasional late nights this evening. However, the day doesn't seem quite as bad for having had a serious lie in this morning, a quiet time reading, an early lunch and the oddest journey to work for a while.

A odd looking young man sitting near me, with a short read beard, was knitting a scarf on giant needles with giant wool. At the same time he was lecturing - that's the only word for it - a drop dead gorgeous girl across the aisle on how to knit (and how he learned), that he was a musical prodigy by the age of 11 (with details on what pieces he'd had to peform at each grade), and that he had read 4000 books in the last 8 years. Even he admitted that it was only a matter of devoting time to it.

It was difficult to tell whether his audience of one (well, two counting me trying hard to read my book but utterly failing) was merely being polite in her interest, resigned to listening, or genuinely agog at gush of words. (I was in the latter camp.) Definitely one of those moments when you want to know the back story - and indeed the forward story - of how they get on.

One of our staff training sessions this morning - "The US government in a nutshell". Great fun and brought back all sorts of memories of 4th and 5th grade for some reason. Our trainer for the morning had all sorts of obscure facts not many knew - she'd really done her homework.

Supposed to be the technology faculty's library committee this morning. But in the light of the delays to the new budget information (it's up somewhere with directorate), it seemed sensible to suggest a postponement and the new chair has gone along with that.

Here's a question:
How much was I influenced by my current reading to put in the job application?

I'm presently 7 books into Lois McMaster Bujold's rather excellent stories set in the Vorkosigan universe. (There are 15 or so all told). And I only started them two weeks ago. I've read them before a couple of years ago but I'd forgotten how much fun they were and how compulsive they can be.

If you're not familiar with Miles Vorkosigan, he's the son of powerful Count on a militarised world - but he's been damaged by poison whilst in the womb and born physically very deformed. However, he more than makes up for his lack of stature and his brittle bones by being very clever, very charismatic, and 'seizing the day'.

While I'd lay no claim whatsoever to his intelligence or charisma, I can't help wondering if his 'can do' attitude and ability to see the bigger picture and persuade those around him to catch the vision, seeped into my thinking enough to convince me that I wasn't wasting my time in the application.

Anyway, enough pop psychology for the day. Onwards.