and so to bed, said Zebedee. Eldan must work tomorrow.

posted @ 10:02 PM -

Warming up

I decided today to warm up for my huge train journey across two continents by spending 7 hours on trains. Of course there was a reason for this; the two Kiwis who I used to live with in Brighton are heading back homewards next week, so this was my last chance to see them. In effect, this was the first of the serious goodbyes that I've been worrying about. I think it was done in appropriate style - getting steamingly drunk with a small enough group of people that we actually all managed to have conversations with each other over the course of the afternoon - but it was a bit emotional. Funnily enough I was saying goodbye to them for a shorter time than I will be saying goodbye to my other friends in a few weeks, because I expect to join them in NZ in January, but that's still a while off, and ought to be an especially eventful time for me.

Anyway, the train rides themselves were more of an experience than usual. On the way out this was just because I managed to miss my train (pure incompetence on my part) and the London - Brighton part was extra crowded because it was the Gay Pride carnival in Brighton. On the way back things became more interesting. You see, one of the reasons I love the London - Bristol service is that it has a mobile phone free quiet carriage. I switch my phone off, in exchange for not being disturbed by other peoples', and a large enough proportion of people respect this system for it to be worthwhile. This evening, someone sat near me was using a mobile. Initially, when they were just sending & receiving text messages, I was only slightly annoyed, so I thought it best not to say anything, and just try to sleep anyway. One of the other passengers did complain, and was greeted with a familiar sort of logic-free argument for his pains. Then the mobile phone user started swearing in a stage whisper, and then decided that he was being eyeballed by the plaintiff, so tried rather pathetically to start a fight. Gradually other travellers joined in the argument, all expressing support for the man who initially complained, and it sort of simmered down, and I started drifting off.

Then the recalcitrant knave's phone rang and he answered the call, talking loudly enough that I was woken by his voice. This irritated me far more than anything that had happened before, and collectively the passengers complained. The fool refused to back down, for reasons that I can only assume stem from machismo (it would have taken a whole minute to walk to coach B, which is not designated a quiet zone), and a fight very nearly kicked off between him and one of the more sympathetic fellow travellers. By this point I was far too awake to go back to sleep, and was quite tempted just to throw this arsehole to the floor, which would have been easy enough had I thought it would achieve anything. It would certainly have been amusing....

Still, every cloud has a silver lining, and in this case the pillock left the train at Reading, but the whole incident served as an icebreaker. The person who had originally complained offered me some of his wine, and when he and his friends saw my guidebooks (I had taken the whole stack with me in a rucksack hoping that if I didn't sleep on the train I could plan instead) I was off talking about my current favourite subject: what I'll be doing from September till January. I now have another correspondent; another person to read my travel diary as I write it, and he works for the press too, so if anything really exciting happens to me or I get any particularly good photos, I might just be able to eke a small royalty out of the story.

All of which goes to show that it's always worth being friendly and sociable on trains, even if it can sometimes bring poor rewards. Oh, and this would never have happened if I drove.

posted @ 10:02 PM -

needles

I went to be vaccinated against various diseases of the regions I'll be travelling in today. In total I'll be getting 8 jabs, of which 2 were today, and there will be 3 in each of another two sittings.

I hate needles. I wouldn't say it qualifies as a phobia, but I think it is deeper than the average person's hatred of such things; verging on fear. It was funny observing myself today - I actually felt far worse while the nurse was filling the syringes than I did during or after the injections, which were almost painless. The only trouble is that the rabies shot is sub-dermal, which means it creates a bleb of serum, to be slowly absorbed into the circulatory system, which in turn means that I have a blister on my arm that I must not scratch. The consciousness of being obliged not to touch it makes me far more aware that it's there, so I keep wanting to touch the damn thing. It's under a big plaster, which is helping for now, but it will only take a couple of showers for that to come loose, and I'm supposed to ignore this thing for as long as its there, which could be up to a week.

It's a bit like not thinking of pink elephants.

posted @ 1:19 PM -

is there no organisation that can run a webmail service reliably?

posted @ 3:28 PM -

Visas

Come to think of it, getting visas for certain countries is more unpleasant than CV writing. A lot easier, but I get really nervous filling those forms in. It's not that I have anything to hide, or even that any of the questions are actually difficult, but somehow I go into this strange state of convincing myself that the slightest unclarity of handwriting will make them reject the application.

And then it takes so long to hear back from them, even though I know my application is of a routine sort. And it's so expensive. If only everywhere made it as straightforward as Australia. That one took about 5 minutes, and costs a small enough sum of money for me to believe that they really are just covering the cost of running the system, and not using it to fleece tourists.

posted @ 1:56 PM -

there are few things I hate more than CV writing.

posted @ 3:06 PM -

Yesterday was the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. This fact had entirely passed me by until I read Moorishgirl's post on the subject. Sadly I find myself agreeing with her analysis of how the world has not changed in some important respects.

posted @ 9:21 AM -

It seems crime does pay, at least if you're the victim, and the perpetrator is stupid enough.

I'm working from home today, because the lab is open again, but there's no running water, which means no showers, and I have a 6½ mile bike ride to get there, so apart from being unpleasant for me, it would be downright unfair to Brian, who shares my cube, if I were to show up. I'm glad this happened while I was writing the report, because it means it's not actually too disruptive to me. Programming is somehow much harder to concentrate on at home, I guess at least partly because writing reports and essays is something I've always done at home at every stage of education.

posted @ 6:38 AM -

oh for *!?%s sake. I had written a nice long day-dreamy post about my travel plans, but because I wrote it while offline, Explorer's decided to lose it for me.

The gist was that I haven't yet planned beyond my arrival in Beijing on the 1^st of November, and I won't plan it in detail for a little while yet, because sorting out PhDs is more pressing. I have been thinking about it though, and I'll probably drop my original over land until I run out of land plan, and fly from Shanghai to Bangkok (possibly via Hong Kong). I won't have time to spend as long as I'd like in as many places as I'd like, so I think I'll leave Southern China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Northern Thailand for another trip.

posted @ 6:34 PM -

Coming up for air

Long post warning. I have much to tell.

Since writing the relatively full statement of my plans last week, I have been surprised by the people who have emerged claiming they knew nothing of this. I thought I had talked so much about it that all my friends were sick of hearing it. Anyway, this caused something of a crisis, with me doing a lot of soul-searching, trying to work out whether I really have been negligent (with some people I probably have, with others I'm convinced I haven't), and trying to convince people that the plans for the next 4-7 years of my life are something I've been mulling over for a long time, not an idea that just popped into my head last week.

It's reinforced my determination to make sure that I manage to say goodbye properly to the people who I'll miss most. That in turn has not been easy. I've already managed to upset some people while trying very hard to do this the right way, because sometimes the best I can do is not good enough. I'm also having to make difficult decisions. It is obvious to me that I won't be able to say an appropriate farewell to the majority of my friends. I'll organise some sort of leaving party in London a few days before I go, but that's not really satisfactory, because at parties I either only speak to a small minority of the guests, or don't have involved conversations with anyone. Yesterday I wrote to a small subset of my friends, promising them something better, and asking in exchange that they book out some time for me in that final week. Choosing the list was difficult, at least among the Brighton people (I've not been in Bristol long enough to have developed that sort of relationship with anyone here, and I've been away from London for long enough that it's become obvious who is important out of my friends there). I am profligate with my affections, and more often than not the compliment seems to be returned.

All of this has been weighing heavily on my mind, and the issue with people being surprised by my plans took away my desire to write anything about myself here. It's been a week, but I'm convinced enough that I hadn't done anything wrong that I'm no longer worried about that.

The other thing that's been keeping from writing here is simply that I've been so busy. Work was insanely pressured for a while, but an unexpectedly productive Sunday evening (I was there from 7 pm till 1:30 am, with only a garrulous security guard for company) has taken a lot of the pressure off me. Having set out to write one chapter, I've ended up writing half of the report I need to hand in at the end of the month. It has blank tables in at the moment, which I need to fill with data (a tiny fraction of a lorryload), and there's a load of discussion to write after the results are in, but the important thing is it buys me time for programming. In two days I did an amount of work that I had set aside a week for, plus having that in the bag makes the chance of my last week being a mad rush much smaller.

I am still being a bit of a monk though (I mean the Asian sort who actually take their monking seriously, not the English sort who used to eat pies and brew beer until Henry VIII decided he fancied their land for himself and promptly abolished them), because I'm spending my evenings making plans. It's going well so far. I have:

• Bought my rail pass for September


• Booked my trans-Siberian trip: visas for, travel between & accommodation in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Irkutsk, Ulan Ude, Ulaan Baatar and as far as Beijing, accounting for October


• Arranged to have all the required vaccinations, starting this Friday: a grand total of 13 injections. Hurrah!


• Written off to various academics who seem to like me to solicit their advice about PhDs


• Started to construct a serious shortlist, consisting so far (in alphabetical order because I wouldn't want to risk prejudicing any applications by letting a particular tutor know that their institution isn't my first choice) of Brandeis, MIT & UMass, which are conveniently (and coincidentally) all relatively close to each other. Convenient because I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it's worth trying to meet potential supervisors before they make their decisions.

It's been a long and productive dive, but I'm glad I had the chance to surface back here today. Writing this helps me weigh up what I'm doing, and I do feel a lot more in control of my life today.

In fact today has been particularly fun, because we were all sent home from work early. There was a burst watermain, and for safety reasons they had to shut the power to the building down, which of course means that none of us could do any work, because it's all so computer based. It's amazing how even in a place where most people like their jobs this kind of announcement (over ceiling mounted speakers that remind people of a cross between Big Brother and the Principal Skinner from the Simpsons) creates unbridled joy. Everyone was pouring down the stairs with grins like schoolboys on a snowy day.

Anyway, that's why I have had time to write so much here today, but it is about time I went back to being productive and goal-focussed.

posted @ 5:09 PM -

seeing as I'm nitpicking today, I need to check a grammatical point. Is it correct to say data is or data are?

posted @ 3:21 PM -

How big is a datum?

According to BBC News, data is a form of res extensa, requiring a fixed amount of space to store. In an article about an interesting website, they claim that:

The amount of data currently downloaded from the site every month, the centre says, would fill seven 12-metre (40-foot) articulated trucks.

I am having great difficulty with the epistemological implications of this.

posted @ 3:11 PM -