Thursday 13th July 2017, 9.00am (day 2,149)
It’s that time of year again. It crossed my mind today that it’s now twenty years since I first graduated, in July 1997. Gosh…
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Category Archives: Interior
Home sweet home
Tuesday 4th July 2017, 7.25pm (day 2,140)
Feels like a while since I have spent any proper time at home, with its indoor herb garden, its dust bunnies, its strange collection of bits of dead animal.
Into the Unknown
Saturday 1st July 2017, 1.20pm (day 2,137)
The Saturday afternoon of this weekend in London was spent at the Barbican centre, where at the moment, among other things, there is a superb exhibition of sci-fi paraphernalia, films, art and so on. If you are a geek and are anywhere near London, you really do have to go and see this — John Hurt’s space suit from Alien, Leonard Nimoy’s from Star Trek The Motion Picture (Spock’s space suit!!), the original screenplay from 2001, storyboards from many movies including Dune and Star Wars… and those were just my personal highlights. Go! I don’t know what movie these two were enjoying but I like the image, the face, the shadows.
Catching the London flight
Friday 30th June 2017, 4.25pm (day 2,136)
I have been excessively mobile during June. The trips to and from Siberia and Norway had already taken 11 flights and eight different airports, and on the last day of June I added one more flight and two airports — Aberdeen to London City. Too much… I need to reconnect with home over the next seven weeks (the next major trip being the last two weeks of August to the USA). How is Aberdeen airport? Same as other airports, except that it doesn’t seem to have been refurbished since about 1980.
Gobinder sorts the blinds out
Wednesday 28th June 2017, 8.45am (day 2,134)
Even if one is a professor of information science (as Gobinder is), one may still take on the responsibility of getting the lighting in the room right, prior to the opening session on day 2 of the i3 conference…
Library, University of Aberdeen
Tuesday 27th June 2017, 6.25pm (day 2,133)
It’s conference season… I got up at 5am this morning and spent seven hours on a train to come north to Aberdeen, where I was two years ago at this time of year, for the same conference (i3, at the Robert Gordon University). We had our opening reception in the Sir Duncan Rice library of the University of Aberdeen, and that was an extremely impressive building, with this eight-storey high twisted atrium running up through the centre.
Waiting for my interview
Monday 26th June 2017, 10.30am (day 2,132)
How many generations of students have spent their time waiting around in corridors, until the time they are called into the room? It doesn’t change. Did I get the job? Not this time.
Norwegians, thinking
Tuesday 20th June 2017, 1.45pm (day 2,126)
In this ongoing image-based narrative of my life I feel like occasionally showing that I earn my right to come to all these nice places, so here’s a picture taken at the staff development workshop I helped run today at UiT (the Arctic University of Tromsø, and there’s a cool name for an educational institution). I think I managed to provoke these people to get thinking…. which is what I do for a living, in the end.
Inside Mansour’s Mac
Friday 16th June 2017, 10.55am (day 2,122)
Have been a Mac owner for nigh on a decade now but realised today I had never before seen inside one — this realisation coming about when my student Mansour turned up in my office and started dismantling his, for reasons that are too unnecessarily complex to reveal here. Anyway, there you go, that’s what it looks like inside. I somehow feel there should be more to it.
In the BBC
Thursday 15th June 2017, 4.00pm (day 2,121)
Visited the BBC site today at Salford Quays for a meeting — which was less glamorous than it may sound. Quay House is graced by a whole six-floor-high wall of these little work pods, which are kind of cute.
Being 42 