Nik's Saga

I know, it's been a couple of months since I posted here. Really, not a lot of positive stuff has been happening and I don't want to bore you. And there's the hassle of posting in multiple places, as I've been using LiveJournal for a number of years as my main blog location.

So I've decided to stop updating here and instead to point you over to my LiveJournal account instead. Please feel free to drop by, join up and add me as a friend. Or, if you prefer, the LiveJournal entries are available as a RSS feed and I'm also on on Facebook if you'd rather catch up with me there (although I post more regularly to LJ.

Happy New Year! May it be more prosperous and successful than the last one.
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I do like my hat. Particularly on days like today when it is raining buckets. Yes, it's not just the north west of the UK that's being drenched at present - although thankfully we're not getting it quite as badly as Cumbria. It does, however, make driving interesting from time to time.

Such as yesterday. We had a bit of snow earlier this week, which made me think that perhaps it was now time to put the winter tyres on the car. I tend to put off doing that into November because the roads up here are generally clear until pretty late in the year and all I'd be doing would be wearing down the tyres and tearing holes in the tarmac. Snow isn't really a problem - the yeti handles it with flair, partly due to its weight, and partly due to the size of its tyres.

When I got up yesterday morning I could hear the rain. Hmm... not necessarily a bad thing, as I like rain. Unfortunately this produced the rather unpleasant state of having a layer of water on top of a layer of ice - horrendous stuff. It only covered the side road that leads up to the house, but as it's a hill it was a bit of a problem. I did try. Twice. The first time I managed to do a 90-degree skid half way between here and the farm next door. Not an enjoyable experience, particularly when there's a 1m drop off the side of the road and no barriers of any kind. The second time I tried to keep on the less icy side of the road but ended up giving up and pulling off the road onto the grass verge to get back to the house. So it turned into a work from home day instead.

Today, the temperature having been above freezing for the last twenty four hours, the road was merely wet. In spite of that I was rather (and, I think, understandably) tense about the drive down to the main road. The main (ish) road is normally clear, although in wet conditions like today it does tend to be tarmac with four parallel streams running along it... in the gouges torn out of the tarmac by vehicles equipped with studded tyres out of the snow season. This, of course, leads to interesting driving conditions... :)

Which brings me back to the hat. It's not just the roads that have rivers flowing along them - our office car park has the same problem (although the new car park is much better than the old untarmaced one). As I walked across the carpark, watching the stream flow across it, and the rain bouncing off the tarmac, it struck me that my hat was a wonderful thing. My head was warm and dry. Yes, that was definitely good.

I'm now going to have a nice quiet weekend here in the warm and dry. Although at some point I'll go and put the studded tyres into the back of the car ready to take them into town on Monday to have them fitted. Then, hopefully, it can get wet and snowy again and I won't need to worry. Or at least I'll be able to worry a little less.
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It's been an odd week. At work, the normal routine was interrupted by a visiting academic from Poland, which led to a mid-week instance of the 'tour for foreigners' with her and the Polish exchange students. For once we had excellent weather with a minimal amount of wind, making the journey from the changing rooms to the pool at Jarðboðinn a little less frozen than usual. Although we didn't get an aurora that night we did have a marvellously clear sky and a particularly impressive long-trailed white meteor above Ljósavatn.

There are still no firm decisions about what is happening at work. I'm assuming that they're not suddenly going to close computing down at Christmas as the adverse publicity they'd get by closing it down one semester before the final students graduate would be a little much, even for them. Of course no-one expects the university to introduce a new applied computing degree next year, but it would be nice if they'd actually make it official.

The real news is that Operation Marigold can now be revealed. During the Novacon opening ceremony it was announced that there is a bid for the 2011 Eastercon - Illustrious, to be held at the Hilton Metropole at the Birmingham NEC. The bid will be voted upon at Odyssey next Easter, but if we win it'll be a busy year.

My ongoing quest to keep myself occupied and thinking of things other that either work or food continued to lean towards scribal stuff this weekend - mainly because I'm beginning to feel a bit guilty about not finishing these before now. I've got two more to do in the current batch, and I think they're going to be a little less, ah, intense than the first of these three.



Based upon Yates Thompson 46 f.6, this was a nightmare in several ways. Firstly, it's just too dense! I've no idea what inspired me to do something this fiddly... actually yes I do. It's the fact that the layout works for putting the Sigilum Coronae in the roundel. Secondly, I was trying to do this one and #39 in parallel, which turned out to be a Really Bad Idea as I managed to put an A over the edelweiss not an M, which meant that I had to go back and alter it. Bah.



This one's better, probably because it's a little lighter. It's based on Harley 2934 f.8, which is another one I chose because of the useful panel. Books of hours are proving very useful sources for these formats. I'm particularly pleased with the shading on the leaves in this one - I had a brainstorm that involved painting each side with a different colour gouache and then using a wet paintbrush to mix them in the middle. Yes I know that's probably obvious, but remember that I did physics instead of art at school.



The final one is based on Arundel 74 f.1, which is simpler still. I rather like this style, and might use it again. It's the first time I've used paint and a brush to do the whitework instead of a white pen (it ran out and the ones I get here are not particularly good) so I'm quite pleased at how well it turned out.

I do like this approach of copying an existing manuscript. I've always been a better copyist that original artist, so it very much suits my style. Wandering through the online manuscript collection of the British Library has provided a lot of inspiration. Once I've done the final pair of this batch I think I'm going to do some work on my humanist hand instead of my gothic, as there are a number of manuscripts in that hand that I'd quite like to copy. As I'm trying to spend my weekday evenings doing jobhunt-related stuff I'm hoping that I should get the final pair done next weekend.

In some ways it's very useful that I'm alone out here - I'm sure I wouldn't have anywhere near as much time to do this if I actually had a life.
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I would have written sooner, except that I had no Internet connection over the weekend. Which was frustrating in more ways than one.

So what's happened over the last week or so? Not a huge amount, to be honest. A quiet weekend of calligraphy and illumination was replaced an the normal stresses of work and a bout of online job-hunting in the evenings. I was looking forward to another quiet weekend wherein I could do some more jobhunting, a bit more C&I and a bit more work on Operation Marigold (of which more next week).

Unfortunately I got home on Friday night to find that the DSL line had gone down. Of course this messed up all my plans, with the result that after a flurry of emails on my BlackBerry I ended up going into the office on Saturday in order to use the network connection there. Bah. It did, however, give me the chance to try Google Wave. Hum. Not very impressed, although the problems might well have been due to issues in the Icelandic network. Perhaps whatever had knocked out my DSL line had had other effects.

As I was in town anyway I decided to head out of town to the two B&Q-equivalents in search of an apple corer within their kitchen sections. This may sound like a strange thing to be hunting, but a couple of weeks ago I had this desire for a raisin-stuffed baked apple for desert. Sadly I discovered that I had no apple corer and had a look for one the next time I went shopping. In each of the seven shops I have now visited in my search I could have bought a combined corer and slicer, but not a simple corer. Clearly it's something I'll have to put on the shopping list for when I visit Tesco at Christmas.

Instead of getting a nice quiet weekend I got half a quiet weekend. Which is, at least, better than no weekend at all. I spent Sunday lazing a bit, watching the Simpsons and starting another of the backlog scrolls - which rapidly became big and scary and complicated, mainly as a result of me working from a existing manuscript again. One layer of paint is drying even as I type. I think I'll let it dry overnight before I apply the white.

Right. Now to have dinner. Chicken casserole with carrots, cauliflower and potato. Yum!
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The second half of the weekend was spent working on something that's far more closely based upon an extant manuscript than the previous one. I was ambling through the BL's collection of books of hours when I came across Yates Thompson 13, a manuscript whose interesting use of two circular illustrations was just what I needed for a double Sigilum Coronae.



The initial is from f14 of the same manuscript (and has a beautiful knight slaying a dragon at the base of the page). I had to tweak the left border a bit in order to place the loop in a suitable position so there wasn't enough space for the upper leaves, and the circles are a bit too big and too high, but it seems to work.

That'll probably be all on the C&I front until next weekend.

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I've had a pleasantly quiet weekend, and I don't want it to end. Particularly not in a manner that requires me going into work tomorrow morning.

I seem to have spent quite a lot of it perusing the online manuscript collection of the British Library looking for various things. It impressed me greatly that the BL's URL is merely www.bl.uk - it's sufficiently important that it needs no subdomain. Not even the British Museum manages that one. My search didn't turn up the exemplar I was looking for, but I thought what the hell? and went ahead with the scroll anyway.



I can justify the style of the border and the shape of the box, but it's more generally used for large images with a small amount of text at the bottom rather than a small image and a lot of text. So I'm pondering whether to submit it as a backlog scroll. Mind you, it's a lot more accurate than some of the scrolls I've done in the past, so at present I'm leaning towards letting it through. Next time I'll make the acanthus smaller, but I'm much better at drawing large things than small things.

It hasn't taken me all weekend - although I admit that I haven't done much else apart from playing with pens and paints. While I was wandering the electronic corridors of the collection I came across two manuscripts that inspired me to do two more 'correct' illuminations, and I've got the first of these complete apart from the whitework. Pictures soon.

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October 22-24th saw Galilean Nights, a cornerstone project of the International Year of Astronomy, which aimed to have as many people as possible look through a telescope at the Moon and Jupiter.

Well, I'm a little late but I did manage to get a little Moon-watching done this evening. I haven't really had the time or the oomph on the couple of decent observing nights we've had over the last month, but tonight the stars were right and I pulled out the Galileoscope. First light was on the craters of the southwest around Mare Humorum.

There followed an audible exclamation of Wow! Craters!. Yes, I am an astrogeek. Unfortunately there's a lot of scattered cloud so I wasn't able to bag Jupiter at the same time, but I'll try again in half an hour and see if it's any clearer.
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It's been a fairly busy week, with a fairly busy weekend to follow it.

The week was back to normal teaching after project week. Although as I spent project week running around trying to set up research funding applications it wasn't exactly a mid-semester break. Fencing on Wednesday was very quiet, but as I was on the way to the gym an hour beforehand (I've taken to doing an hour of serious gym stuff before the fencing class) I was stopped by a girl who'd noticed the rapier hilts sticking out of the bag and wanted to know if I was involved with this fencing group she'd heard about. Which, of course, I was. The result of this was that K came along to fencing and then joined us for Álfadans this weekend two days later.

Álfadans seemed to go pretty well. We had three visitors from overseas; Their Graces the Viceroy and Vicereine, who stayed with me over the weekend, and Lord C who stayed on site. There was some fencing, some games, some armoured combat training stuff, some dance and a little bit of illumination, as well as a viking feast. Plus the now-traditional tour of the north and soak in the Nature Baths at Mývatn, followed by a very nice meal at Bautinn (ham, mushroom and cheese pasta). I dropped the V&V off at the airport this morning then it was back into work again. I'd quite like another weekend starting tomorrow, please. :)

I was very happy to learn some new illumination techniques - I now have a basic understanding of how to do acanthus borders. Woo-hoo! I foresee a lot of acanthus doodles during meetings in future. They will take the place of Tudor roses, labyrinths and the occasional bit of knotwork, so I suspect I'll get a lot of practice.
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I came across an interesting use for Twitter today - load-testing a new website.

Amongst the assorted people whose tweets I follow is an organisation with over 50,000 followers worldwide. Earlier this afternoon came a tweet saying We've just updated the XXX website and would like your help in load testing it. Please try to connect to it NOW. So I did, and completely failled to have it load.

Which is not, in my view, a big problem. What fascinates me is that clearly someone at XXX has come up with the brilliant idea of using Twitter as part of their site testing plan. I'm very tempted to contact XXX and ask how it went, as it's the sort of thing that might make a short conference paper somewhere.
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Another first: my office whiteboard is covered with Feynman diagrams and multi-coloured diagrams of quarks in protons, neutrons and kaons.

Yes, it's even more science geeky than the quantum computing stuff. The reason it's there is that I've spent the last three and a half days working on a funding application for a Super Sekrit Partikul Fizix Projekt. We've played host to a visiting academic from Germany, who gave a brilliant talk on the Standard Model, the LHC and the LHCb experiment (which is what the project relates to). Best of all, one of my students came along to the talk and was completely blown away by this whole new field that he'd never come across before. When I saw him after the class I told him that if he had any questions he could come and talk to me, which he did today, hence the stuff on the whiteboard.

It's so good to see someone become excited by Big Science for the first time. I'm going to count that as a victory and find him a reference to a nice popular science book on the subject to keep him interested. :)

All of this project organisation stuff meant that I spent Tuesday in a meeting, Wednesday doing the normal tour of the north (memo to self - it's a waste of time going to the Nature Baths and then going back to lecture, as your shoulders will feel as tight as ever at the end of it). Thursday was the first flight down to Reykjavik and an evening flight back for more meetings.

It's been pretty tiring, but I'm feeling quite pleased with myself because I've managed to keep within my Calorie targets even with a lot of eating in canteens and restaurant. Unfortunately it appears that the salad bar in the staff canteen has become a casualty of the kreppa, which made things tricky. I was also reminded that it can be difficult to diet at restaurants if you're not a big fan of lettuce. With our without dressings. Ah well, I survived.

Now I'm hoping for a quiet weekend to complete the last few things I need to sort out before Álfadans next weekend.
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