Nik's Saga

Today I've completely failed to do most of the things I've attempted but, to be honest, I don't really care.

I started the day off successfully enough, producing quite a good pan of scrambled eggs to go with breakfast. Martin, Fred and I then went down into Carnforth for a little shopping, in my case to get some new caravan keys cut (they didn't have the right blanks), to visit the embroidery shop (it was closed for the weekend) and to get some Citrus Spring from the supermarket (they didn't have any lemon).

The day continued in the same vein when I got my patrol ship blown out fomr under me by an unfriendly missile volley playing DeltaVee and then failed to make it to the final vote-off of the states in my bid to become President of the United States in Martin's evil US election card game.

It doesn't matter though - minor annoyances compared to the joy of realxing at the caravan. :) And on the plus side I picked up some really garish costume jewellery at the car boot sale in Carnforth that is just idea to go with late period garb.

On top of which the Far Pavillions resteraunt must have a new chef, as their chicken dhansak is even yummier than ever. All in all, an excellent caravan Saturday.
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Another caravan day, and another chance to relax... mostly.

Breakfast was early today so that we could squeeze in a game of Close Action before we had to leave. Close Action is a very good Napoleonic period naval wargame, made even more fun by the fact the Fred has beautifully painted figures for all of the ships. Fred and I (playing the plucky American rebels) beat Martin (playing the evil Galac... Royal Navy) in a 1777 historical scenario amidst much discussion of the practical problems of tacking and reverse-tacking a frigate into the wind.

We've played the game before, and I admit that I'm quite taken by its simplicity and gameplay. Now that Fred has the ships painted I'm very tempted to buy it myself together with an appropriate set of miniatures to paint myself. The miniatures are from another company but just happen to be exactly the right scale for the map and look quite stunning in play.

Afterwards Fred and I headed down the motorway to drop me off in Liverpool for a couple of days. Both Mum and Dad are no longer on my christmas card list for noticing my grey hairs. I retaliated immediately by pointing out to Dad that he's officially a shortarse for only coming up to Fred's shoulder. :) At least Mum covered up by saying that I was beginning to look distinguished.

That's it though - I'm going shopping tomorrow and I'm going purple for Worldcon. I blame Iceland myself, as I had no grey hairs whatsoever before I moved there.
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It's quite impressive how a plane-load full of scouts and guides can raise the spirits.

Over the last week or so there has been an international jamboree in Iceland, with scouts and guides from all over the world descending on a campsite somewhere on the island. The flight back was therefore full of about forty assorted scouts and guides from all over the UK plus others from elsewhere in Europe clearly planning to fly onwards from Stansted.

As a result the atmosphere on the plane was very happy - well-behaved but excited - and left me thinking about my time with the guides and scouts. I was with the 431st Liverpool Brownies, then the 50th Liverpool Guides, the 1st Allerton (Seafield) Cubs, the 2nd Fife (St. Andrews) Cubs and the 8th Fife (Freuchie) Cubs. At least I think it was the 2nd and the 8th. It might have been the 8th and the 15th... it was definately St. Andrews and Freuchie though. :)

It also appears that Iceland Express is making money, as they've upgraded from 757s (737s?) to MD-81/82s, which are much wider, with wider seats and wider aisle. I'm not complaining - this leads to a much more comfortable journey.

Fred met me at Stansted to drive up to the caravan. I can relax for the next couple of days with the intention of doing nothing more strenuous than a bit of gaming.
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No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.

This applies to house-moving plans as much as battle plans, I fear. According to my original... well, slightly modified plan, I was going to spend the afternoon transferring stuff to the new flat, but it turns out I'm not going to get the keys until 15:00 and will only really be able to store stuff in the storeroom. I suppose this makes the physical moving easier, but it does condense the timespan somewhat. It also means that I'll be staying overnight where I am and plonking the bedding in the car to go to the airport tomorrow.

It's not only my plans that have gone awry though - I see that NASA are still having problems with falling foam and have suspended all further shuttle flights pending yet more investigations. It begs the question what are they going to do if the cre discover that Discovery is seriously damaged and have to take shelter in the ISS and await rescue? To start with, the ISS isn't big enough to hold them for very long and secondly will NASA lift it's ban in order to allow Atlantis up to retrieve them? Will Atlantis have the same problems?

I doubt that the situation is as serious as that. Things have been falling onto the shuttle ever since it started flying, and similarly the shuttle has been landing safely with damaged and missing tiles for an equal length of time. The important thing is where the damage has been done, and by the sound of it it's not too bad in that it's not on a leading edge.

Probably the most interesting space news of the day isn't the shuttle though, it's that Richard Branson and Burt Rutan have formed a company - The Spaceship Company - to build the ships needed for Virgin Galactic. This private venture is due to have ships in space by 2008. Hmm... I wonder if NASA will have the shuttle flying properly again by then?
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Everything is packed but I haven't moved yet.

I was hoping to get a phone call to say "OK, that's us clear, you can start moving your stuff over" sometime today but it didn't happen. Which means that if I want to succeed in my aim of getting everything out and the place cleaned before the owner comes back to sort our the meter reading tomorrow night, then I have about four hours tomorrow afternoon to move and clean downstairs. Upstairs is already cleaned and dusted, thankfully, although I'll have to do a quick zoom around the bathroom tomorrow.

Looking at the amount of stuff I could probably do it in three reasonable trips - given that I've acquired a couple of large things like a golf box for my fencing stuff, several boxes of DVDs and another of fabric - without having to load up the roofrack. I can probably put a lot of small things in around the golf box before I head into work tomorrow, where I will be getting the keys, so I can go straight form my meetings with the first load.

The less-than-fun thing is going to be getting them up to the flat. Fortunately there's a big storeroom on the ground floor, and there's a big part of me that's tempted to take only the bare essentials upstairs tomorrow and lock everything in the storeroom until I come back from Worldcon. After all, it's not as if I'm going to need the fabric or my fencing kit before then, is it? So
it might just be clothing, bedding, TV/DVD and basic kitchen stuff that make it upstairs.

Then if I can do another run in the afternoon, I can load up the third load for the evening if necessary... yes, I know that a lot of this is thinking (or typing) aloud but I'm trying to persuade myself that it can be done. At worst I can do a fourth trip on Friday morning before I go to the airport, although I'd really rather not.

Roll on the day when I never have to move again...
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The Space Shuttle Discovery has safely blasted off after an incident-free countdown.

Or that was the case when I left work seven hours ago - who knows what has happened since then? Nothing unpleasant, I hope.

It's a good time for the new NASA chief administrator, Michael Griffin, as he can celebrate his first hundred days in the job with a successful return to flight. Which is probably good news all round.

Griffin seems to have the right idea on the whole when it comes to what NASA should be doing. He has cancelled the plans of the previous administrator, Sean O'Keefe, to close down the assembly lines manufacturing shuttle parts as the shuttle is due to be retured in 2010. This is an excellent idea, as it makes much more sense to build the next generation of vehicle - the CEV - with ready-made parts than it does to redesign everything from scratch. It would probably take as long to design something with the power of a Saturn V today as it did back in the sixties, because the plans and technologies used were discarded in order to get funding for the development of the shuttle.

He's also junked O'Keefe's plan to go to the Moon and Mars by building the main vehicle in orbit from four seperate parts. While I can see the logic in this from the new administrator's point of view - four parts means four launches and four chances for things to go wrong, let alone the hazards and difficulties of constructing something in orbit - I think we still need much more practice at zero-g assembly, and that it's the only way to build anything large enough to do real manned space exploration beyond the Earth-Moon gravity well.

Griffin has taken to President Bush's plan to go back to the Moon and on to Mars and is running with it. OK, so it's probably the only good idea Bush has ever had, and Congress has been helpful enough to vote it extra funds so the cutbacks in other projects will be lessened, although not prevented entirely. The Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, for instance, has been put on indefinite hold.

Therefore he gets a guarded thumbs-up from me. He's heading in the right direction although he's not necessarily taking the best route to get there. Let's see what he's done after the end of his first full year.
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Well, lights and action anyway.

My car now has left-hand-drive lights at last. I took it into the garage this morning and when I returned at lunch time it had new lights and I had a pair of boxes sitting on top of the fencing kit in the back seat containing the old right-hand-drive headlights. Naturally I'll be keeping these for when I return to the UK.

That dealt with, and the current account a lot lighter than it was earlier in the day - one of the hazards of having to have parts shipped in from Citroen in France, I fear - I failed miserably in getting the pictures of Snæfellsjökull off the camera by dint of having forgotten to take the camera into work. One of these days I will remember this... although I haven't got long left before I fly back to the UK.

The big action was getting more of the house packed. It's mostly done apart from odds and ends and fits into a pleasantly small number of boxes. Pleasant except for the prospect of carrying them up the dtairs to my new second-floor flat. I'm giving thought to rigging a pulley from the balcony and hoisting them up that way instead. And yes, the flat may be much smaller than the current house but it still has its own balcony. Most houses in Iceland seem to have balconies, which is nice.

Tomorrow is the last bit of packing ready for the move on Wednesday.
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Damned network is on the fritz again.

Now that's a politically incorrect way of putting it, isn't it? No offense intended to any German - or Austrian, for that matter - readers out there. Assuming that the origins of the term 'on the fritz' do indeed date to one of those periods of politics extended by other means last century. If anyone does know the origins I'd be interested to hear them.

Isn't it interesting how words make it into a language. Here in Iceland I see a number of words whose origins I recognise thanks to the Old Norse roots of Modern English - obvious words like hamar (hammer) and dag (day) and less obvious ones like staðir (stead as in Hampstead or Stansted) or svein (pig). Then there are the few odd imports like kók (that fizzy brown liquid used for cleaning silverware and making kids and computer programmers hyperactive).

And the strange sayings, such as the one for a stroke of luck, which translates roughly as a whale washing up on your beach or to be as drunk as a sheep. Why a sheep? Are sheep known for their alcoholic tendancies elsewhere, or is it just Icelandic sheep? Maybe it's something in the way that they wander across main roads in the same manner that drunks do...

But I digress from my network woes. It went down on Thursday afternoon and still isnt up. My iBook is communicating perfectly well with the router, but the router isn't communicating at all well with the world outside. I've even tried the sad standard approach of the computerised world... switching the router off and on at the switch rather than just using the reset button, but to no avail. It looks like these recent blog entries won't make it out until I get back into the office tomorrow.

It is slightly heartening to hear that my good friend Fred has had router troubles too, to the extent that he had to buy a new router and then discovered that actually the old one still works if you reset it by connecting it to a specific IP address.

Nevertheless, I occasionally wonder if I would have more success with a router if I took up woodwork instead.
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Although I'd have liked to stay and relax in Keflavík until tomorrow I do have a house to pack and clean.

So after completing the venetians - now officially called the 'octopus pants' because of all of the fabric strip 'legs' that run from the waist to the knees - and a further doublet from scratch while Rebecca did the trunkhose to go with them, I hopped straight into the car and drove back up to Akuryeri. My shoulders feel like they're on fire after 550 miles and two days over a sewing machine. :) Never mind - the representatives of Klakavirki at Pennsic are going to war well turned out, which is the important thing.

Today was, is seems, the perfect day for going snowcatting on Snæfellsjökull - just my luck - as I had a fantastic view of the volcano for the first couple of hours of the drive up the coast. I've never actually seen it before, as the peninsula is normally covered with cloud in the way it was at the beginning of the week, but today it was crystal clear and I could see both the volcano and the glacier.

The volcano actually looks like a classic storybook volcano, a solid cone with a big bite taken off the summit. A bit like a walnut whip without the walnut, actually, especially when you take into account the brilliant white of the glacier. Think of it as a walnut whip from which the top half of the chocolate has been removed without disturbing the white inside. And one whose apex angle is about twice that of a normal walnut whip. Or maybe a mutant walnut whip whose top half was made of white chocolate. Or covered in icing sugar. It looked a bit like that.

Unfortunately it was in the west, less than ten degrees away from the sun so I couldn't photograph it. At least I've seen it though - I got a better sense of what it was like today than I did driving around and over it on Monday.

It was also quite impressive coming into Akuryeri after eleven this evening. The sun had dropped behind the mountains to the north (although I don't think it had quite set yet) and the sky above the mountains to the south spanned the entire spectrum from violet just above the mountains themselves through blue and green up into orange and red. This wasn't just directly opposite the sun; rather the entire southern horizon looked as it a rainbow had been spread across it behind the mountains. Very impressive.

Oh yes, and in spite of serious provocation on several occasions, I managed not to kill any of the sheep wandering about on the A1. Probably a good thing, as I'm sure a sheep would put quite a big dint in my bumper.
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With the exception of sitting at the table in front of or not in front of a sewing machine, not a lot has happened today.

I think we've completed one robe, two dresses, two shirts and two chemises plus a hat and a codpiece, and I'm about two thirds of the way through a pair of venetians with ribbon-strips over them.

On the way I've cursed at the difficulty of sewing velvet to anything that isn't velvet, extracted long pieces of thread from the cat (who was locked out of the room shortly thereafter) and several times had my toes licked by the dog (I prefer to operate the sewing machine barefoot, and Sporri seems to prefer that I do it that way too).

We have all marvelled at the fact that plain cheese and tomato pizzas have to meet higher food standards than the meat ones (meat ones falling under the purview of the USDA rather than the FDA), discussed the literary merits of the Gor novels and considered how useful it would be to have house-elves to clear up after a marathon garb-making session such as this.

In fact we got more done today that was orginally hoped for over the entire weekend, which means that I can finish the venetians tomorrow morning then relax a bit before driving home tomorrow afternoon.

Not a bad day's work, I would say.
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So what am I doing in Keflavík?

Well, I got home from a full day's work (writing lectures, having meetings, trying - and failing - to get a spare set of caravan keys cut, you know the kind of thing) to a phonecall from Rebecca, who has just had a big box of garb delivered from the US in time for her and Matt to go to Pennsic.

Unfortunately, half of this garb - mostly Rebecca's half by the looks of it - is unfinished. So the phonecall was a plea for help and I couldn't not help... it would be decidedly un-chum-like behaviour. Six hours later and I'm here and wide awake.

Fortunately I foresaw the awakeness and brought the computer and the Dr Who DVDs. Tonight: Episode Three - The Unquiet Dead.
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I see that Google has designated today as Moon Day.

That's not a bad idea. Maybe if the UN declared today an international holiday in celebration of the moon landings then people would be more interested in space.

So, almost forty years on, where have we got? Well, we're doing pretty well in terms of unmanned exploration, but the manned exploration is pretty pathetic. We haven't been back to the moon for well over thirty years and the shuttle is still grounded due to technical faults. It's not looking good, is it?

We've made quite a lot of progress in other areas though. When Eagle landed the big bang model of the universe had just about been accepted, although there were a lot of holes in the model. This weird inflation thing was still over ten years off (1981). Pulsars had only been discovered two years previously, as had gamma ray bursters (although this discovery was by the military and immediately classified). We hadn't even landed anything on any of the other planets.

Ah, if only the enthusiasm of the late sixties had been harnessed! Still, we'll do it one day. It's too great a challenge and an adventure not to.
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I'm beginning to get rather annoyed with the implication by the media that if you admit to understanding something you must mean that you also agree with it.

Naturally, the big thing that people are being castigated for 'understanding' right now is terrorism. I've understood - note that this use of the word is entirely in its original form, to intellectually recognise the logical arguments behind a theory while offering no value judgement upon the theory itself - terrorism for quite a while now. It's something that happens when a group of people feel that they have no legal channels through which to affect a major external influence upon their lives.

Note that I say major external influence. Most people think of this as the government or an occupying power; in fact it is any group of people with more power or money than the individuals involved in causing terror.

Robin Hood was a terrorist. According to the romantic literature he roamed Sherwood Forest looking for likely Norman targets and set upon them, much to the delight of the majority Anglo-Saxon population whose support he enjoyed and engendered by providing regular handout of money and goods. He made several attacks on government installations (Notthingham Castle) and regularly attacked government ministers (the Sheriff of Nottingham).

Jump forward six hundred or so years. The colonists in America have no representation in the British Parliament, yet that parliament imposes taxes upon them. The colonists feel that they have no option but to take up arms and perform acts that induce terror in the British and their supporters.

Two hundred or so years later we see the same thing in Palestine, where the population have no way of making their views heard other than by blowing themselves up and hoping to take some of their oppressors with them. The leaders of Hamas are, to the Palestinian people, just the same as Robin Hood was to the Anglo-Saxons.

Each of these shows the same basic basic pattern of events. A group of people feels disenfranchised by the current administration and, having tried other methods to improve their living conditions, resorts to force of arms and begins to induce terror in that administration in the hope of achieving by force what they could not achieve by peaceful means.

It's not difficult to understand, is it? It is a logical chain of cause and event. I can understand why these things happen without having to agree with them. I can say that I understand why people would feel that their only chance of influencing the controlling forces in their lives is by buckling on a harness of high explosives and getting onto a bus to detonate it without feeling the need to do the same thing myself.

Understanding is a value-neutral word. Ministers and other politicians are supposed to be intelligent, rational creatures. As such I would expect them to understand the reasons for terrorism. I would also expect journalists - another group of generally intelligent individuals - not to attack people for the correct use of English. This is, in effect, what they are doing. In an attempt to whip up sales the papers are castigating politicians for using the word 'understanding' correctly.

Given the media is built entirely upon the use of words, I find that quite disgusting.
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Today didn't go quite as planned, thanks entirely to the weather.

After a bright night the clouds settled in across the peninsula well before breakfast, so by the time I got down to Arnastepi, where resides the office of the glacier tour company, the wind had got up to 'Tay and Forth bridges closed to all traffic magnitudes - force 8 gusting 9-10. This put paid to the snowcat expedition on grounds of both visibility and safety.

Instead I took a chance with the Snæfellsjokull road - something officially described as a 'mountain road', i.e. a narrow and uneven dirt track with a lot of steep gradients. It was quite possibly the scariest and yet most exhilarating piece of driving I've ever done. The track regularly had gradients of 15% which meant that it regularly disappeared into the fog a couple of metres ahead of me. I couldn't see the glacier itself due to the feg but the mist-shrouded desolation was incredibly atmospheric.

Undelayed then by a trip onto the glacier itself I set off back towards Akureyri. The Snæfellsnes peninsula sticks out quite a way on the west of Island, and the journey took about six hours, a similar duration to the drive between Akureyri and Keflavík. That journey is, however, on the tarmaced Route 1. Today's journey, on the other hand, included almost a hundred miles of the dirt tracks that are also classed as main roads here. Combine that with two hours of mountain driving in the morning and I'm absolutely shattered. :) I'll process the photos tomorrow, I think.

So I got back and relaxed with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. It was OK, but she does need a more forceful editor. I'm still not convinced that a certain someone actually is a baddie. Not the best of the series, in my opinion, but I look forward to the final installment.
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When I last went back to England I was hit by how green the land was compared to Iceland. Today I discovered that Iceland does, after all, have some greenery to rival English fields.

It is almost midnight and I am sitting on the bed in an apartment in Grúndarfjördur, where the grass is green, the sky is crimson and I can hear the waves lapping against the shore.

The Snæfellsnes peninsula is a wild and windswept tongue of land that juts out into the North Atlantic and is permanently buffetted by winds of "Tay and Forth Bridges closed to high-sided vehicles" magnitudes. Nevertheless, the winds bring the rains with them, and the fjord on its northern shore is quite, quite green.

I left the base this afternoon, my US edition of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince tucked into my embroidery bag, and headed north then turned west at Borganes. The ring road may seem remote and deserted at times, but that was nothing to route 54 along the peninsula. Brooding cloud-capped mountains rose sharply from the flat coastal plains as if some giant hand had made a slice in the earth and pushed one side of it hundreds of metres into the sky.

But it was when I turned inland to cross a pass in these mountains that I discovered the lush vegetation I'd been missing - verdant clumps spread across a barren red landscape that gradually merged together to form first a thick green carpet and then a green dwarf woodland, one of the native forests of dwarf birch in leaf. Every few hundred metres the greenery was split by another waterfall where one of the myriad streams dropped off a hidden lava shelf.

For now the Snæfells volcano has hidden itself from me in clouds. It is, no doubt, saving itself for tomorrow.
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Today has been a day bent over a sewing machine making garb.

Which was pretty much according to plan actually. I managed to make my way through finishing most Matt's gambeson at the cost of only three needles. This was the main reason for bringing the sewing maching in the first place as it's rather heavier and more powerful than a modern one like Rebecca's and hence is cabable of stitching much heavier fabrics. The gambeson is two layers of canvas and a great deal of padding, so by the time you've put two of these together it's difficult to do anything else with them without a heavy-duty machine.

Interesting enough the machine had no problems switching down from 240V to 110V - it just worked at roughly half speed - not bad for something that's a little older than I am.

Of course half-speed running meant half-speed garb-making as well. Before we started the meeting I had time to complete the work on one of Rebecca's dresses that we started last time, which was good.

The meeting was smaller than expected, although we do have a new member, which is great news! Instead of making basic garb for several people I ended up making venetians, lined doublet and cloak for . I would have made the hat to go with them but we were about 12" square short so I'm taking the remaining piece home where I have some almost matching fabric I can use to complete it. I only did the basic sewing so he's still got to put fastenings and decoration on them yet but all the grunt work is done.

This killed another needle (putting cartridge pleats in the cloak) but the final score was still

• number of pieces of garb completed using sewing machine: 5
  
• number of sewing machine needles broken by garb: 4
  

so I think I won in the end. :)

The cloak will make a great non-rigid parrying device too.

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Today's wander down the country was a little strange - I recognised almost nothing of it until I got to Reykjavik.

Almost nothing - I do recognise the two locations I've taken to using as pitstops: Blonduos (or Blondes-R-Us) and Borgarness (or Bugger This) - but otherwise the countrysode seemed to go on forever. I tried to find the woolwear factory shop on the way (and the turning is further than I thought it was) but failed miserably on this count. Maybe I'll have more luck on the way back.

A no-stop at the wool factory meant that I was a bit earlier in Reykjavik than planned so I pulled off into a shopping park to see if I could pick up a couple of bits and pieces. Moderate success there, and it was interesting to see the larger version of our local wondershop Rumfatalagerinn. What I hadn't expected was, upon turning out of the retail park, to see a Debenhams attached to the other shopping centre. I may be forced to pay that place a visit some time. Of course a John Lewis or an M&S (with food hall of course!) would be better, but Debenhams is a start.

Later this evening we went to see War of the Worlds on the base. I thought the fighting machines were pretty good but the film could have been improved with one simple change - killing off the main characters in the first attack and replacing them with people about whom I could give a damn. I'll gloss over the ineptitude with which the aliens planned their attack and the stupidity of the general populace (although I fear that the depiction of Joe Public is true enough to be depressing).

I think that it may perhaps be that H.G. Wells is sufficiently rooted in the nineteenth century that updating the story to the twenty-first is not feasible without a rewrite so drastic that it would be a travesty to even retain the title. Independence Day handled the alien invasion story far better than this does. I give it 3 out of 10 because I'm feeling generous.

I wonder if I can get my hands on the straight-to-DVD period version? It can't be any worse than this and does include the Thunderchild incident. Better yet, roll on the animated Jeff Wayne musical version.
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I droped Syed off at the airport this morning and am now rattling around the house on my own.

I've now got a fortnight before I move myself, so I've got time to pack and clean gradually. As a first step I've moved down into the downstairs bedroom - it has the advantage of having blackout curtains, so I might be able to regulate my sleeping patterns. When Doug moved out Syed moved into this room for the same reason, so I'm clearly just following a traditional approach. :)

I don't think I'll have too much trouble sleeping tonight, as I got about an hour and a half last night. It was just one of those nights, I think, so I took Syed to the airport and came beck for a snooze... which was interrupted by what, I'm told, is the sound of freedom - American aircraft flying up and down the fjord. My first though was 'I wonder if C waved them off this morning?'

I also had an interesting televisual feast this afternoon. It seems that Bugsplat are showing the Open live so I watched a bit of it just for the shots of St. Andrews. OK, the commentary was in Icelandic, but I could read the scoreboard well enough.

Tomorrow I'm off down to Keflavik for the weekend. I'm giving serious thought to stopping off at Snaefellsjokul on the way back to have a look for the entrance to the centre of the Earth. Unfortunately I'm a little late for the kalends of July, so I doubt I'll find it, but it's worth a quick peek. And maybe the change to go snowcatting on the glacier - who knows?
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Yes, Nikrandir and the forces of light have overthrown the Dark Lord Syed.

Lort of the Rings Risk is an interesting game with some added extras over the more traditional Terrestrial version of the game. Thing like leaders, strongholds, missions and, of course, taking the ring to Mount Doom.

Syed and I opted for a gentle introduction to the game, deciding to play standard Risk rules on the Middle Earth map. This map makes things very interesting indeed, as the topology and connectivity of the regions is far less obvious than it is on the normal world map. Mountain ranges cannot be crossed except through specific passes and rivers only crossed at marked bridges.

In fact the game proceeded along a moderately traditional manner, with the Dark Lord rapidly acquiring control of Mordor and lands south thereof, together with Mirkwood and lands to the north east. The forces of light held everything to the west of the Misty Mountains, while Rohan and Gondor were the designated battlegrounds of the game.

I rolled lots of sixes, particularly in defence. You know the Arnold Rimmer Risk bit - I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say the game was finely balanced until I made a daring breakout from Moria and established a beachead in the Gladden Fields before liberating first Mirkwood, then Lorien and gaining control of everything west of the Anduin. By this point the Dark One was in full retreat, allowing me to free the Gap of Rohan and finally Gondor itself (including climactic battles at Minas Tirith and Osgiliath) after which I could storm Minas Morgul and Barad Dur with huge numbers of armies to win the game.

It's fun. It'll probably be even more fun in the four player version with the missions and everything else, but that will have to wait until Syed and I return from our various travels in the middle of August. I think I'll give it an 8 out of 10.
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The space shuttle Discovery is due to take off tomorrow... assuming the falling tiles haven't damaged it too much.

The space shuttle has been grounded since February 2003 when the orbiter Columbia was lost on re-entry as a result of damage to the wing surface caused by debris shaken from the external fuel tank on launch. In the intervening two and a half years NASA has implemented a number of design and procedure changes to prevent this sort of thing happening again, as well as developing ways of making in-flight repairs.

All of this is good news, and not just for the shuttle programme. During the two-year hiatus the ISS has been entirely dependent upon the Russian soyuz capsules for supply and transport missions, with the result that the ISS science programme has been drastically cut in line with the drop in occupation from three to two people.

Both the shuttle and the soyuz capsules are now very much showing their technological ages. The shuttle is due for retirement in 2010, while the basic soyuz design is forty years old. Admittedly, the Russians are very good at improving on their designs and the current soyuz craft are far more sophisticated and their launchers more powerful than their predecessors, but the core system is still rather dated.

So both sides in the space race have new craft in the design pipeline. NASA, not surprisingly, has lots of designs on paper but stand no chance of having anything ready by the time the shuttle is paid off. The Russians, however, have several interesting plans that might just work, particularly if their recent overtures to ESA are heeded.

Take the Kliper, for example. This is a reusable spaceplane launched on top of a extant booster (although there is hope for a custom-designed new Onega booster).

And you know what? It might just work. Collaboration with ESA would give the Russians the funding they need and give ESA the know-how in manned launch systems that they need. Remember, the Russians built a shuttle, Buran, that was considerably more advanced than the NASA version but had to shelve it due to funding problems. The projected launch data for Kliper is 2011, no later than 2012.

The shuttle is, as I write this, still due to launch tomorrow in spite of the damage caused by a falling window cover that fell some sixty feet and damaged several of the all-important heat-resistant tiles. NASA has replaced these and claim that the launch will still go ahead.

It would be very satisfying to see the shuttle replaced by a European (remember, Russia is part of Europe too) orbiter. The 2012 deadline is likely to slip - they always do - but as NASA seem to be institutionally incapable of deciding what to do next there is a big opportunity here for European space exploration.

Go Kliper!
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The headlights are still in France but at least the swords are registered.

I took the car down to the garage this morning to have the new headlights fitted so that I can finally get the it through its MOT only to find that the parts haven't arrived yet. I'm to try again next week when the chap who ordered them comes back from his holiday. Oh well...

After a moderately productive day at work I then took the rapiers and assorted paraphenalia up to the police station to register them. Actually, I could only register four of the rapiers as the other is still on the base, but as I'll be down there this weekend I'll pick it up and then take it and my bows in next week.

Unsurprisingly they got some strange looks. After all, your Darkwood rapiers do not really look like your average sport-fencing epees... or even your sport-fencing sabres for that matter. Fortunately my standard explanation including the magic words 'Three Musketeers' worked like a charm and the officer photgraphed them and my SCA membership card, made a note of my new address and kennitala and seemed quite happy. Handing one of them to him to try for weight while I disassembled the other also seemed to go down quite well. Several other officers stopped to have a look too.

Once I've got the other items photographed I believe that I get to talk to the local chief of police - 'my boss', as the officer put it - to get the vital piece of paper to take through customs. Hmm... I'm developing quite a large amount of travelling paperwork - passport, driving licence (both halves, although I think that spliting it in two was a stupid move in my opinion) and now a weapons licence...

Still, it's another one of those things to add to the list of strange things I have done in my life - forget the gun licence, I'll have owned a sword and bow licence!
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Just when you think you've got thngs sorted something goes horribly wrong.

Take, for instance, my home network connection. We recently upgraded to an unlimited download broadband package with Vodafone. Wonderful, I thought, now I can listen to the BBC news. But it turns out that I have exactly the same problem now that I had before we changed - regular but unpredictable network outages that prevent me from doing anything online.

The network here has always been a bit flaky, although I wondered for a while before Christmas if it was a problem with my iBook. It seemed to be that if I played certain albums on iTunes then the network would go down. Of course this might just be that if I was working on the iBook I had a particular set of popular albums so these were the albums I played most of the time.

I did a google and found an update to the OS - 9.3 as it was at the time - and this seemed to work for a while, but probably only for a couple of months. By mid-March it was as bad as ever. Now I've done a complete wipe and upgrade to 10.3.9 and it's still happening.

It isn't the router in the house. Syed has also had similar problems with the router whereby the wireless network is fine but the connection from the router to the phone system has failed. This is, I believe, what's happening here. The problem has occurred using both Siminn and Vodaphone packages so I have to conclude that it's the phone line that's at fault.

Other circumstancial evidence for phone network problems are the difficulties we have getting an international line either in or out - it often takes a couple of attempts to get an external international line and folks who phone in from abroad normally have to try several times as well. Mum regularly reports that she gets a ringing tone but we hear nothing.

As I'll be leaving here in a couple of weeks I'm just going to bear with it and hope that the new flat has a more solid system. I'm considering which company to go with for the phone at present - Siminn (the national company) have a new cable package which involves broadband and real TV, but Vodafone are promising something similar. Mind you, Vodafone have been promising us digital terrestrial TV since before Christmas and that still hasn't arrived. I'd rather go with Vodafone as, amongst other reasons, one of my students works for them and is very handy to have around for technical support. :)

In the meantime, my blog entries may be posted at strange times dependant on network availability or my remembering to transfer them onto the memory stick to post from the office. Grrr.
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This evening we broke out the new Risk set.

Syed and I played host to our colleague Jim and two of our students, Davíð and Jói for an evening of global domination and pizza. Syed hadn't played before but got the hang of it rapidly and was soon merrily causing mayhem like the rest of us.



Syed, Jim, Jói and Davíð: planning world domination

The hosts got the worst of the draw for initial territories and got stuck with most of our land scattered across Europe and Asia while Jim took Australia, Davíð got South America and Jói North America. Needless to say we were the first two to be eliminated.

Eventually Jói won after having eliminated Jim and gained enough cards to do the Round The World Tour and take out Davíð at last in Northern Europe, so I suppose that for now the title of Faculty Risk Champion is his. Not for long though, as I foresee many more games of Risk over the next twelve months.

Curiously enough, Jói and Davíð seem to have this strange urge to control Iceland... :)
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I'm trying to psyche myself up to tidying, packing and cleaning and it's not working.

I move out of here in about three weeks time. Sometime considerably before then I need to get my bedroom clean and vacuumed because I left the window open while I was in the UK and the room is covered in Icelandic dust.

Iceland has lots of dust. It's something to do with high winds and very poor soils. The dust that settles in your room after a month away isn't just light dust, but heavy grainy stuff as well. The sort that's really uncomfortable and scratchy if it gets into your bed. Even the river between here and the office us currently brown with particulates.

So I'm trying to psych myself up to do something about it. So far I've dusted one window ledge and thrown away some of the crap on my desk. My reasoning is that if I get the place tidy and clean it'll be easier to pack to move as I'll know where everything is and will be able to put it straight into logically-selected boxes. Fortunately I don't have too much stuff here now, so it's not going to be too big a job.

Doesn't make me any more enthusiastic though. :)
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It was, unfortunately, inevitable.

The police and security services have to be 110% vigilant 110% of the time, while terrorists only need to be lucky once. Today's bombings or something like them were always going to happen eventually because the security services are only human. At least two similar attacks prior to this were prevented through the use of intelligence gathered from the British public.

The London Underground is the ideal place to set off bombs like this. The volume of traffic, the inaccessibility of the sites and the knock-on effect on the city all make it a prime target. It's not for nothing that many of the scenarios involving biological, chemical or nuclear agents have them released on the Underground.

So with that in mind, it could have been much worse. Not for the families of those people killed or injured - and my thoughts and condolences go out to those people - but London itself has got off lightly. The emergency services seem to have done the fantastic job that they always do, helped, no doubt, by their experiences in numerous exercises designed to mimic this sort of disaster. It sounds as if the air ambulances have been particularly effective, bringing doctors into the city on the way in and evacuating casualties on the way out.

Horrendous though these events are, Britain can survive them. We are a modern western nation with an infrastructure which, while obviously a target, also make it possible to react quickly in times of need.

There is a section of the British populace who are doubly affected by this. One of the bombs, the Aldgate one, went off in an area where many of the Britons who live there also happen to be Moslems. The Moslem community has come out immediately and condemned the actions of the bombers as much as the rest of the British people have. Nevertheless there will be some idiots who will try to take some form of petty revenge on these law-abiding Britains. Let us hope that the police handle this problem sympathetically and deal with these idiots before they cause too much trouble.
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I'm back in the land of the midnight... twilight... and my sleeping pattern's shot to pieces again already. *Sigh* Which is why I'm reading the BBC news about birds and watching them out of the bedroom window.

Every now and again I get the urge to identify the strange chirping flappy things out in the garden, so when I read the BBC article on the top 20 UK garden birds it made me think a little.

The most common bird in the UK garden is the wood pigeon. OK, I can understand that - they're all over cities, although we don't tend to get them much in Aigburth. Instead we are treated to collared doves, with their continuous "I don't know" call. Well, that's how Bill Oddie described it the other week - locally we all refer to them as the "United" birds...

I dpn't think I've seen a chaffinch in the garden for some time, although I have seen them at Tebay service station. Blackbirds are common, as are wrens, robins and crows. We also get starlings, thrushes and sparrows, although the sparrows are unfortunately becoming rarer nowadays.

We have huge numbers of magpies that make a terrible mess of the lawn digging for grubs, but that's about it on the top twenty. There's also a sparrowhawk around occasionally.

Here in Iceland the birds are rather different. The most common birds are the gulls - common gulls and black-headed gulls in particular. The arctic terns are now in residence, and these have particularly pleasant lines, with a swallow-like forked tail. Of course we also have puffins by the tens of thousands, but these tend to live on the off-shore islands.

Also common are the ravens, of course - they're everywhere, and now that I've seen them I can really appreciate how small your average crow or rook really is. As for other large birds, there is one species of swan native to Iceland, which surprised me because it's the whooper swan rather than the mute and Berwick's swan's I'm used to in the UK. The beak is thicker at the base, which made it look quite strange the first time I saw it.

And there are the ducks. I'm not very good at duck recognition as there are too damned many of them (I have a similar problem with gulls a lot of the time) but we certainly have eider ducks and, of course, the ubiquitous mallards plus a couple of others I couldn't identify. I now have a book to help solve that problem. :)

I also saw oystercatchers in the marshy areas when I was driving back up north on Monday, together with what I think were a pair of greylag geese.

There aren't many different species of very small birds, but we do have wrens and meadow pippits, which have a bright yellow chest and distinctive bars across the wings. These fly around in noisy flocks that land on the roof beside my window and make an incredible amount of noise.

Overall, Iceland has far fewer species of bird than the UK has, so this might be a good opportunity to identify things. I picked up the pocket version of my big bird book (currently stored in a box in St. Andrews) to aid me in this task. Once the midges die away at Mývatn I'll wander along there and see what's to be seen in Iceland's largest bird breeding ground.

And who knows - I might even bump into Bill Oddie.
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I have just got my accommodation for next year sorted out. Hurrah!

It's a one-bedroom flat about two minutes walk from where I am now that is even closer to the embroidery shop. Potentially dangerous, that. :) I need to get a bed and a washing machine but everything else is already there. Although it only has one bedroom there is plenty of space to put a camp bed in the living room as well as a reasonably long sofa should anyone come to stay. The living room faces west and is full of light, which will be great for sitting embroidering. Oh yes, and it has a balcony (being on the second floor) and a large ground-floor storage room too.

I'll be leaving the current place to fly back to the UK on the 29th but I'll be able to move stuff over before that. Which is a good thing, as I'll be in Liverpool when my contract ends a couple of days later. So I'll return from Worldcon to the new flat ready to face the oncoming winter.

Did I mention it's even closer to the embroidery shop? And the craft shop opposite the embroidery shop? :)

The fact that I was limited in what I could bring over in the car now becomes an advantage as, even with the things I've bought in the last eleven months it'll still only take a couple of car loads around the corner.

I can now comfortably start packing things back into boxes in preparation. Now is a doubly good time for that as while I was away for a month the ubiquitous Icelandic dust (normally kept in check with a weekly clean) went into overdrive and came in through the open window and the bedroom is covered with it. Serious cleaning begins tonight.
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After yesterday's bombshell, today things are looking up.

I'm going to see an apartment tomorrow that would be a bit more expensive than this place but I'd be back on my own again. Actually, sharing with Syed again wouldn't be a problem, but I set this up before I knew about The Bombshell and when I thought that he'd be buying a house. More on that tomorrow.

As I write this I'm listening to the midnight news on Radio 4. Upgrading to OS X has made this possible, although the quality is radio standard rather than digital standard. This means that I can also access the BBC radio Listen Again archives, thus allowing me to catch the R4 midnight news every night in future.

Potentially even better is the news that the two main phone/cable suppliers are now operating a new tv package with BBC World, BBC Prime plus a couple of the Discovery channels and several other interesting things. That's certainly on the shopping list when I move into the new appartment (wherever that apartment may be).

On top of all that, Syed and I are planning a Risk party this weekend. We have a large dining room table and we intend, at last, to use it...
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I drove back to Akureyri today to be greeted by Syed with a bit of a bombshell. I have, in effect, just survived a round of redundancies.

The day began with a chorus of fire engines and police cars that made me wonder if there was some sort of incident going on... until I remembered that it was July 4th and that's how our American cousins celebrate Colonial Fracas Day. ;) We lazed about and did some garb stuff (over the weekend I've handsewn two linen coifs as well as finished a small cross-stitch design) then headed up north late afternoon.

As I haven't had particularly good email access while I've been in the UK it seems that I've missed all of the major news in the department. It turns out that the university's financial problems are greater than we thought and, although we'd all been assured that the department wasn't at risk, a committee has now been formed to consider its long-term viability. We've lost two lecturing posts and on top of this we are not taking in first year students next year.

Seemingly a number of departments have done the one-year-break thing at other Icelandic universities and have survived, but I get a feeling from the politics here that we may not be so lucky. Our mainstream UK/US method of running a department is at odds with the traditional Icelandic way of doing things even if it is easier to control the finances our way. We find out in October whether we'll have a first year again in 2006, but in the meantime I am only teaching two modules instead of three next year, which means that at least I'll have time to do some research.

I hate this. I've been through the uncertaincies of reviews and redundancies before at TelesensKSCL and I hated it then. There's nothing more certain to lower morale and effectiveness even if you try hard to ignore it. So while I've said that I'll give Iceland three years before deciding whether or not to stay long-term it looks like the decision might not be mine to make.
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Well, Movies Movies is probably more appropriate.

Another late morning thanks to another late evening, followed by an afternoon start to the gaming. A movie, a meal and gaming break, another movie, then some more gaming. What more can one ask of a weekend?

We first went to see Batman Begins, which certainly stands up to a second viewing. After that we saw Mr & Mrs Smith, which was on my to see list anyway. This way I saw it without Icelandic subtitles. :) Very silly but quite enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the final firefight/dance sequence, although the big firefight in the house was rather fun too. The best way to describe it is, I think, as an adventure-romantic-comedy-thriller. I'll probably buy the DVD when it comes out.
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I've come to a decision. I like D&D v.3.5.

We were killing things until about 3am this morning so the day didn't really start until late. Nevertheless, we had time to do a little shopping (B&J's Cherry Garcia for $1.97 - waaahhh!!!!) before we started again for the evening.

To be honest, until I came over to Iceland I hadn't played D&D much. I'd run a couple of scenarios to introduce people to RPG using it - mainly because the books were readily available should the players want to continue - but I hadn't actually played it. 3.5 seems to have made things a little more straightforward, particularly on the combat side of things. Anyway, I've now started to acquire the 3.5 rulebooks too. :)

I'm even doing something I seldom do - play a fighter. For the geeks amongst my friends, I'm actually playing a 12th-level Barbarian/Rogue/Dervish, which means that I dance, kill things and sneak around a lot. It's proving an excellent way of unwinding after yesterday's stress.

Oh yes... and the Multitasking Lady Gamer strikes again! My embroidering while I play has now got Rebecca making garb while she plays. Yay!
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I think that travel might be allergic to me.

Today's plan - trim the edges of the war banner, drive to Nottingham to meet Kayte, do a bit of supermarket shopping and post the banner to Gytha in time for the 4th, fly to Keflavik, spend the night at the Euseys' on the base. Trimming the edges of the banner and spending the night at the Euseys' have gone OK, but everything else was chaos.

First of all the RAC instructions to Nottingham stank. Add to this major congestion on the M6 plus no diversions marked for roadworks off the M6 and I was an hour and a half late for lunch with Kayte. Lunch was good though, and I was very glad to have had a chance to see her before I go back. This immediately through the rest of my plans off so that I couldn't shop or post the banner before Stanstead.

At Stanstead I checked in my luggage. Remember that I bought the hard-sided gold case because Stanstead kept mistreating my fencing gear? Now that it was in a nice case they wanted to charge me £88 in excess baggage for it plus another £15 handling charge. Eventually I didn't have to pay quite that much, but it was annoying all the same. It only ever happens at Stanstead... Next ttime i think I'll have to just take the case as my main luggage and fill it with my clothing etc. as well as the rapiers.

This farting about meant that I didn't have time to do any duty-free shopping, just barely enough to get a padded bag to post the banner. I tried to put it in the postbox and found... that the Stanstead post boxes have a very thin gap so they only accept small letters. Seemingly this is to prevent people from trying to post scissors and other sharp objects home as the postmen who emptied the postboxes were getting cut by nasty sharp things sticking out of envelopes.

By now I was seriously upset and I will admit to silent tears on the plane (which was delayed on the tarmac for half an hour due to squally showers). Once in the air though, the flight was better than ususal, mainly due to the announcements by the captain. We had a captain who reguarly spoke to us to give us updates on where we were, estimated times of arrival, what we were flying over, etc. He also had a very pleasant soft Icelandic accent.

We made up most of the time we'd lost and landed at Keflavik only slightly late, but more 'fun' was in store for me there. Whereas beforehand I've flown in and out with my fencing stuff in a fencing back without any difficulty, now that I had a golf box they stopped me and asked what was in it. When I replied that it was fencing gear I ended up having to talk to the senior customs chap in the airport as it turns out that you're not allowed to import or export even sporting weapons without a permit. The national fencing and archery teams, he told me, have to have permits for their weapons and have to declare them through the red channel every time they go in or out of the country subject to a potential £40 fine per item and confiscation if they don't. The upshot of this is that when I get back to Akureyri I'll have to go along to the police station and get something signed by the local chief of police to say that I am the registered owner of these dangerous weapons.

Of course, this also means that if we arrange SCA events here in Iceland then I'm going to have to liase with customs beforehand to let them know roughly how many people and weapons will be arriving and get the paperwork done in advance. Oh joy

Still, I'm here now, and about to sit down to the start of a weekend of Dungeons and Dragons. Things are downhill from now on. I hope.
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