Nik's Saga

... The plot. If found, please return to...

I think I've finally gone completely nuts. I spent almost a quarter of an hour in Rúmfatalagerinn considering precisely which pale wood television table I wanted. Or whether I wanted a pale wood bedside unit as well. And if so, did I want a four drawer or a five drawer one? This is not normal!!! Pale wood? Not black MDF? I wonder if I've got a fever...

Last night I tidied the bedroom at 02h00. This evening I plan to do the rest of the flat and make a partlet - I was going to wear my linen fencing shirt with the kirtle but it's a bit too bulky. It shouldn't take long and I can always do the hand sewing on Thursday evening in Reykjavik.

Must go do things. Distract myself. Decide where to put the new pale wood television table.
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I've been out looking at furniture again.

At present I have two sofas, a comfy chair, a dining table, 4 chairs, a couple of small tables and a TV that belong to a colleague of mine. She moved out of this place and temporarily moved back in with her parents, so rather than have to move everything twice I've had her assorted furniture here. Now that she's found another more baby-friendly place she's collecting the furniture on Wednesday. This means, of course, that I now need to acquire at least a sofa and preferably a table and some chairs too.

It's not a major problem, and today I went into Rumfatalagerinn (whence I got the bed) and saw a rather nice three-seater sofabed for under £200. I think I'm going to be going in there on Wednesday to buy it. This would mean that I can have it delivered that evening and I won't be left sofaless. It's a bit paler than I'd normally like, but I can always put a throw over it. It also has nice high arms upon which I can lean when embroidering.

I also saw a rather nice table and chairs with a similar price tag. It's a round table, but might be a little small for playing Risk. Nevertheless, I'm quite tempted by it. After all, I'm not going to be playing Risk that often, am I? What I actually need is a craft and sewing table, and it'll do that very well, I think. In the meantime I'm not planning to do any dressmaking over the next couple of weeks (I decided against making a new linen shirt for Protectors) so I can live without a dining table for a while.
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This time it's Top Gear.

Yes, Jeremy Clarkson and the other two have made it to Iceland. Actually they seem to have made it here in person, as tonight's show was all about testing convertibles up here in the frozen north. Except they cheated and did it in the middle of summer. It was interesting to watch, though, as several times I recognised exactly which part of route 1 they were on. One comment was that the Audi was the one to buy if you had your own private rally track - I would suggest that be modified to add or live in Iceland.

Pah! Who needs an Audi to go rallying? I manage quite nicely in my Citroen Saxo. It's just that here they call the rally tracks main roads.
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Woo-hoo! Skype works!

With a bit of tweaking and rebooting (don't you just love Windoze?) I got it to work and talked to Gonz this afternoon. This Skype is definitely a Good Thing, as it not only means I can talk to friends, but I can also now set it up for my parents, thus stopping them complaining about the cost of phoning Foreign Parts.

Other than that, it's been a quiet day. Strangely, it feels like a Sunday, probably because I wasn't in work yesterday. I was going to start a couple of things but I've just taken it easy instead. I seem to have listened to a lot of Classic FM and farted about with the computer a bit. Perhaps tomorrow will be more productive.
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Today I said farewell to Matt and Rebecca as they head off to Naples.

It's always sad when someone moves away, and I'd much rather that the Navy had moved them up to Akureyri - it would be really good to have them up here. Over the last eighteen months, since I first came out to Iceland, they have provided me with a link to civilisation that has truly helped me stay sane. I'm really going to miss them. Fortunately, Rebecca (Celeste d'Arles) has signed up to LJ so we'll all get to hear of her adventures in Italy.

We had a final lunch in Reykjavík and discovered a great little café - Svarta Kaffi at Laugavegar 56, 101 Reykjavík - where we had a wonderful curry soup served in a round loaf upon a trencher. The bread is a sourdough, and the loaf is hollowed out to make room for the soup. As well as the spoon to eat the soup, you also get a knife and butter to finish off the 'bowl' as well.

I've come back up north with a super new suitcase - a genuine Samsonite expandable that's small enough to be cabin luggage if necessary but large enough to take a long weekend's worth of clothing including garb. Matt and I were looking at suitcases and we saw a couple of quite nice ones - eleven and fourteen dollars - but they didn't have extra pockets. Then I saw this one and fell for it immediately. I console myself with the fact that although I've never paid anywhere near this much for a suitcase before, a) it is a Samsonite and should therefore survive the bastards at Stansted and b) it would have cost a hell of a lot more elsewhere.

It will get a proper test next weekend when I come back to the UK... although it will be coming via Heathrow, not Stansted, so I'm breaking it in gently.
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Today we spent over half an hour basking in the cold water of the Blue Lagoon.

Yes, I did say cold. This afternoon we went down to the Blue Lagoon for Matt & Rebecca to have a last luxurious soak in the geothermal pools. There seems to be quite a lot of geological activity at present, as the water was very warm and one of the hot springs that feeds the lagoon was spouting to well over a metre high. That's definitely not normal. Over in the far corner of the lagoon, in one of the quiet and unfrequented regions, the rocky floor rises high enough that you can comfortable lounge on them with your body still in the warm water.

There is a limit to how long you can soak in a hot bath - it's about an hour, after which you're so hot you have to get out to cool off. In this quiet backwater, though, we found a cold spring rather than a hot one. And boy, do I mean cold! It was wonderful - in places it was so cold that you retreated from it just as quickly as you retreat from the too-hot zones - and we lounged there for another half hour or more, with cool tummies and hot backs. It was a truly amazing experience.

So come over and visit, people, so that I have an excuse to go back!
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My naval friends have finally worked out where I should sit on the rank ladder thing.

With the aid of a copy of the current pay tables, my monthly salary and the amount of time I've been a university lecturer, I come out at O5 - that's a Navy Commander or a Lt. Colonel in the other branches. It's a little scary, as concepts go. Yes, I know that a PhD does put you up in the officer levels, but that strikes me as a scary amount of responsibility. Here I am, happily training techie types and having managed to avoid most management posts until now, and suddenly this. No wonder I've been developing this empathy for Henry Blake. :)

Yes, I'm in Keflavík again, on my final visit before Matt and Rebecca ship out to Naples. Escape from The Rock, as this place is known. Quite apt, I think. For once I arrived at the base at an hour when the Visitor Centre was actually open and I could get my pass from them rather from the guard shack/customs hut. Curiously it took longer doing it at the visitor centre, but during the wait Matt explained the intricacies of hat etiquette as performed by the US Navy. All useful gaming knowledge.

Later this evening we played Pirates of the Spanish Main, which proved to be quite amusing, partly because although I printed the English version of the rules, most of the cards are in French. Fortunately, as Rebecca is Canadian she speaks a reasonable amount of French, and we decided that between us we probably had enough French to make up one functioning Francophone. My wolfpack of three identical Spanish brigs proved both fast and deadly, so I won. ¡Vaya!
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...Remember that if you get carried away with illuminated Lombardic versals then you have to follow up with a gothic miniscule.

I can't help it - I like Lombardic versals. I've always liked Lombardic versals. They have sweeping curves and bits you can fill in, lines that cry out to be surrounded with spiky bits, serifs onto which you can stick little knobbly things. You don't have to be a great artist to do the fills, but there's enough space for figures if you can actually draw them. When, however, your initial plan was to use Secretary hand for the main text, they are not the thing to use for the initial capital letter. Otherwise the members of the SCA Scribes and Illuminators mailing list get upset. :)

In a way I can understand this - mixing, say, body text in uncial with Fraktur-like capitals does look a bit odd. Odd, but creative. And the SCA is supposed to be a creative organisation, is it not? It says so in the title, after all. I think that what I'm going to have to do is find a nice big book of late-period manuscripts in secretary hand just to see what sort of illuminated versals I can use with them. Otherwise by secretary hand is going to stagnate in favour of my gothic hand. Again.

I have indulged myself a little, though. After all, the signature shouldn't be in the same hand as the rest of the script, should it? And that's somewhere that anachronism is allowed. So I got to use my swirly Elizabethan signature with all the looyp bits. Hurrah for loopy bits!



Tristan's is a bit blurred, I'm afraid. It's a bit hit and miss getting the focus absolutely right unless it's bright daylight, which it isn't.
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Or rather, slightly damp carmine gouache.

I came home this evening and actually got started on one of my plans for the next couple of months - I started a couple of illuminated scrolls. Now while I may have lots of patience when it comes to embroidery, I have rather less when it comes to waiting for paint and ink to dry. I did the gold (not properly gilded, I'm afraid, as I haven't been able to get the tools and materials for that out here, but I do have a very good pair of gold and silver pens that work well enough) and the carmine gouache on one of them. Then I waited. And waited. And waited...

... But not long enough. I always end up doing this. Although the paint feels dry to the touch it isn't really, and it's certainly not dry enough to take ink on top of it. Fortunately it's not a big problem and I can correct it tomorrow, but I really do need to develop patience when dealing with paints. It's a good thing I don't paint in a more general sense - there are only so many things you can paint in various shades of icky brown. :)
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... to finish the embroidery I finished today.

Some of the old Warsoc hands reading this may remember that about ten years ago I started an embroidery on black fabric. I did quite a lot of it at Warsoc and then, to my horror, discovered that I'd done it with with the long axis of the fabric at ninety degrees to the direction it should have been. As I'd already completed about a quarter of the design at this point, I was not a happy bunny. In a fit of surprising acceptance I started again. This time I started on a finer fabric - fourteen count rather than the original twelve count. This, I reasoned, as well as looking better would require less thread than the original, so that I would still have enough to finish the design.

This is a problem with Janlynn kits - they never tell you the thread numbers, so if you run out of a particular colour you have to take a piece and carefully match it in the shop to one of the wide range available. Half of the time you fail miserably because the shop lighting makes it very difficult to get an exact match. As it turned out, I did run out of pale green but managed to substitute another colour from the kit without it appearing obvious that I'd done so. I also tweaked another couple of things -- adding a bit of backstitch here, replacing the icky gold thread with a much nicer one, things like that.

Of course, it only took me ten years because I got bored at one point. I completed about eighty percent of the main body of the design and then couldn't face the blended threads any longer and was distracted by a Teresa Wentzler project. I know, I know... those of you who do these things will be shaking your heads at my getting bored with one set of blends just to pick up a TW, as she's notorious for her blended colours. Then, sometime last summer I remembered it and decided to finish it as a leaving gift for Matt and Rebecca when they leave for Naples next month. So I collected it when I went back to Liverpool in the autumn and have been stitching like mad to get it done in time. I was hoping to get it finished and framed, but there wasn't enough time and besides, transporting a framed embroidery would be much more of a nuisance than transporting the fabric alone. It also means that the Euseys can have it framed in a manner that suits their taste and decor rather than mine.

I'm not posting the picture on the here as I know the Euseys read this (hi there!), and although they know it's an embroidery I want the design to remain a surprise. I'll post a picture next weekend after I've handed it over.
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Today I herded cats across a frozen Lake Mývatn.

Well okay, strictly speaking it was a collection of philosophy and associated undergraduates, but it felt like herding cats. We had a very good guided bus tour around the area, with a very amusing and informative guide. I learned all sorts of things that I hadn't known before, such as the fact that Lake Mývatn is over 250m above sea level and is only about 2.5m deep at its deepest point. That there are 45 species of midge in the region but only one of them bites. That the oily sheen on the bubbling mud pools at the hverir is actually a layer of bacteria. That the steam vents there are actually the remains of boreholes drilled by a German company. And I found out, at last, why the mud is blue.

It isn't due to strange salts in the water, but due to the presence of dark sulphur allotropes as well as yellow sulphur. The combination of the two colours produces quite a wide range of colours depending upon the relative concentrations of the many different sulphur allotropes and compounds. So I'm a step closer to knowing the precise reason but I still have a bit of work to do.

I saw several strange ducks - Bucephala islandica or the Barrow's Goldeneye, which of course led to stray thoughts on Bond villains, particularly as we were travelling through the ash cone and pseudocone region and Bond villains have been linked with volcanoes before now. We stopped at Mývatn (the village) to have a look at the pseudocones and the best view required us to walk out onto the frozen lake. We weren't the only ones out there - there were people racing go-carts around a track further out, while another group were playing ten-pin bowls, croquet and golf on another part of the ice. Seemingly the go-cart racing has largely replaced the horse racing on the lake nowadays. Oh yes, and a couple of people were ice-skating.

We were a bit later arriving at the Nature Baths but we managed a relaxing 45 minutes in the water anyway. I think that we blew the minds of our students with the scenery and the experiences, which is definitely a good thing. Then, in spite of running late leaving the Nature Baths we made it back to town in time for the final dinner at Pengs, where I had a rather good chow mein (partly good because they import decent soy sauce... mmm... maybe I'll have a word with Peng and see if he'll let me have a bottle).

It was a very good day, and an excellent way to end the workshop. Now I'm going to relax and completely veg out tomorrow to recover.
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I feel the way I've always imagined Bilbo feels at the beginning of Lord of the Rings.

Sadly it's not due to being the bearer of the One Ring, but just because I've had a really busy week and I'm still fighting off the bug I picked up in Compiègne, which has now settled onto my chest in a most annoying and tiring manner. Right now chesty coughs 'r' us. I have a horrible suspicion that I'm going to feel like this for much of the rest of the semester.

Although it's been a really busy week with the workshop, I have managed to get other stuff done. For instance, I've written two lectures. And today I wrote an exam paper. OK, I admit I still have to write the solutions and make sure that the mark distribution is right, but the difficult bit is over.

I've also sorted out my more immediate travel plans. I'm off down to Keflavík for a couple of days to say farewell to the Euseys, then the next trip is Champions in Leeds. I bought the flight tickets today and discovered, to my surprise, that Icelandair was cheaper than Iceland Express. Car hire is also surprisingly cheap. After that, with the cancellation of Rent-A-Don I'm free to do what I like over the Easter weekend, and it looks like I'm going to combine a bit of systems administration for my parents with some helping out at the Glasson Dock Maritime Festival near Lancaster. Which means I can get in a caravan weekend immediately after Easter. Hurrah!
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I do not expect to open the door from my appartment block to be faced by a three foot snowdrift.

We're having a real winter storm here right now; the snow is not only falling heavily but blowinig sideways as well. My colleague who drives in from the other side of the fjord expects to stay overnight in his office (fortunately he has a camp bed in the office just for this purpose) as the twenty-minute drive to work this morning took him just over an hour. The visibility is officially bugger all right now, and the Met Office have put blizzard symbols all over the road map. The snowploughs are out and about in town and I'm really glad I'm not driving anywhere today.

Isn't winter fun? :)

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There is something inspiring about reading scientific papers.

I'm currently writing a set of lectures for a final year module on data visualisation - or human-computer interaction II as it is billed in our database of courses. The course is structured so that there are lectures, labs, and quite a lot of background reading in the form of the original papers on particular data visualisation techniques and tools. Some of them are available online but many of them I can only access through my ACM SIGCHI membership, thanks to the dire state of the library in terms of technical matter. So I download the papers, give my students printed copies, and reserve the right to refer to them in exam questions if I so wish.

The fun thing about this is that it gives me a good reason to read or re-read these papers, which I'm finding quite inspiring. I have a number of related research ideas that, if I can find some time to do research some day, are perfect for aiming at these journals. It's a little frustrating that I haven't had time to do any real research - in the four semesters I've been here I've had to write a new module every semester - particularly as one of the reasons I took the job was that I would have lower contact hours and, therefore, more time to do research. Hopefully, though, once this module is complete I'll be able to do updates rather than rewrites. And I'll be able to devote more time to research.

Research is how you get promotions here. You have to be prolific, although not necessarily in peer-reviewed publications. My presentation in Compiègne will count as an invited paper, which is nice, and I think that my interim report to Iceland Express will count too, so last year wasn't a complete blank. All being well I'll get a publishable paper out of it too, although I've no idea where to aim it yet. Then, once that's finished, I can hopefully get back to some research of my own.
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Public information films were wonderful things.

I've been following the BBC News website magazine's recent series of articles on the public information films of sixties and seventies. We've had, amongst others, Rolf Harris on why learning to swim is important, ABBA on keeping Britain tidy, the Green Cross Man and Jon Pertwee on SPLINK!

SPLINK! What a memorable word!

• Find a Safe place to cross


• stand on the Pavement near the kerb


• Look all around and listen


• If traffic is coming then let it pass


• when there is No traffic near walk straight across the road


• Keep looking and listening while you cross.

What wonderful acronyms we had then...

The quest for the silliest acronym continues though, and I nearly drowned my keyboard when a reader response to the SPLINK! article pointed me in the direction of the Australian BATBYGOBSTOPL! Ensure your mouth is empty before clinking on this link.

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Today I went into the office before 08:00 and left after 17:00.

This is not the normal Sunday of an academic. Our cognitive science workshop, however, needs to be ten days long to qualify for EU Erasmus funding so we've had to start yesterday and continue until next Saturday. So today started at 08:15 with a lecture on Humean philosophy, continued at 10:15 with a lecture on cognition in psychology and then continued after lunch with a selection of student presentations.

The students seem to be enjoying it though. When I left the building seven students from various countries were playing Risk in the common room. I have already heard tales of Italian students being taken horse riding by moonlight after a chance meeting on the way home after a couple of beers. I suspect that a lot of people are going to leave Iceland with some a lot of good memories, which is one of our aims. The computers are working and the people who followed my instructions had internet access as soon as they arrived, something of which I am very, very relieved. The rest will have it on Tuesday although they all have access to the machines and printer in our lab already.

It also turns out that one of our lecturers who arrives later today is another ex-Warsoc St. Android. Small world indeed.
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Today I moved from left-hand drive (automatic) to left hand drive (manual).

It was an interesting experience, as I think that the single act that most prepared me for driving the Hyundai 'something big enough for 9 people' was driving Dad's old Land Rover from Liverpool to Aberdeen and back. It turned out that the right hand gear change was far less problem than I thought it would be, and that the most significant factor was the size of the beast.

It's interesting - the indicators and windscreen wipers were on the same sides of the steering wheel as on my right-hand-drive Saxo. Yet on more than one occasion I found myself turning the wipers on when I meant to turn on the indicators. I wonder if this is because my mirror image of the entire car was swapped over? I had no problem with the pedals, so my feet must have been acting completely independently of my hands, perhaps because I couldn't see them and thus had no visual clues to continually reinforce my mental model. It might be interesting to do some serious experiments to investigate this. I shall talk to my psychologist friend tomorrow about the subject. (Yes, I will be in work tomorrow... lectures, 08:00 on a Sunday! What is the world coming to?)

I've just looked up the Hyundai website to try to identify the make of car, failed miserably, but did discover the Hyundai 4x4 I wish I'd been driving... the Hyundai T88 K1A1 Main Battle Tank. Unfortunately it only takes a crew of four... although I suppose I could have tied the fifth onto the back with the luggage. :)
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Minus several million style points if you know the next line. :)

Today with flew down to Reykjav&ik; and hired a car to go off looking at the southern bit of the island. It was a bit weird driving a left-hand-drive car for the first time, and I feel as if I'm far too close to the traffic on the other side of the road. Which is odd, considering that in the UK I'm just the same distance but the traffic is on my right not my left. I got the hang of it eventually, but it still feels as if I'm in a very wide car that's been chopped off where the handbrake should be.

And thinking of handbreaks, that was the most difficult thing to get to grips with - literally. The car we hired was (accidentally, I should point out) an automatic, so in theory today I could come to terms with left hand drive without having to worry about changing gears with the wrong hand. What actually happened was that I got the hang of the position business reasonably rapidly but kept going to the wrong side for the handbrake. Fortunately Andrew was on the correct side of the car and when we stopped instinct cut in for him too and he went for the handbrake. So between us we managed not to roll into anything.

Our original plan was to go to the Saga Museum then up to Geysir, but I'd misread the opening hours (February counts as winter, d'oh!) so we eventually did them the other way around. While at Geysir we got caught in a horrendous hailstorm and I'm sure I'm going to have a bruised head as a result. Nevertheless, watching - and being able to predict from observations - the eruptions of the smaller geyser Strokkur was quite fascinating. We returned to the Saga Museum, where I bought a bunch of handmade glass viking beads before we had a quick waffle snack.

On then to the Blue Lagoon. I've discovered that there are some essential Icelandic experiences that you can't let guests pay for because they'll faint with shock. The Blue Lagoon is one of them. :) It's a wonderful pool, and was quite spectacular last night, with the moon, stars and occasional scattered showers, but it is a bit pricy, even for Iceland. All it was lacking was an aurora to make it perfect. I could happily have soaked there for another hour.

And for the sad folks who recognised the subject, here's an alternative version, inspired by the weather at Geysir yesterday, all hail, fire and snow:

Hail, hail, fire and snow,
Rent a car and we will go
Far away, far to see
Bubbling geysers venting steam.
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Today has been a very creative day in a surprising number of ways.

I went into work this morning and got all sorts of things done at last. (I know, I love it when a plan comes together). Then I ran a lab on data representation in which my students came up with some really innovative ways of displaying some quite disparate data. I made an executive decision to change the format of the ReadMe for the workshop, but as the ReadMe was my idea in the first place I feel morally justified. It was great talking to Andrew about the ReadMe and not having to explain what a ReadMe is - clearly not enough of my colleagues go to SF conventions. :)

After this Andrew and I did a bit of what was supposed to be window shopping but turned into more actual shopping. I now have a very creative waffle maker, we found some very creative gifts for people, and bought stuff in Úrval for a creative stir-fry this evening. And then there are the creative head/neck/wrist wear - Buffs - from 66° North.

This evening we plan to do some creative packing Andrew needs an extra bag to ship all his stuff back to the UK) and then some very, very creative slobbing. I like creative days.
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I am going to be so glad a week on Sunday.

For then the Cognitive Science workshop will be over and I can curl up in a ball and relax a while. I spent today doing NuCog-related stuff and seem to be sprinting to stay in the same place. Actually it's not that bad, but I feel as if I'm spending a lot of time for little visible outcome. I'm sure my colleagues feel the same way. :) Still, everything is under control (mostly!). I just have to finish the ReadMe and get the computer stuff sorted tomorrow and that's it.

Other than that... Andrew hired a car today to wander around the local area while I was stuck in the office, then we met up and went for dinner at Greifinn, one of the not-too-expensive local restaurants. I had a really nice cheese bread starter that was sufficiently filling that I couldn't finish my chicken fajitas main course, while Andrew had soup and then guillimot. I'll leave it to him to describe the experience. :)

Now I'm going to have a nice hot shower and then fall asleep.
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Today I bought a new printer.

I acquired my previous printer about three years ago for the princely sum of £20 in the sale in PC World. It was a Lexmark Z605 colour deskjet that wasn't particularly fast but was sufficient for my purposes. About eight months ago it ran out of black ink and I started looking for cartridges for it. What I should have done, of course, was picked some up in the UK but at the relevant moments I could neither remember precisely what numbers they were, nor the model number of the printer. Ah well...

So I looked for cartridges over here. There were Epsom cartridges. There were Canon cartridges. There were HP cartridges. There were no signs of any Lexmark cartridges nor anything other than those by the big three manufacturers. I have a vague suspicion that Lexmark is a rebadged HP and that HP cartridges will fit Lexmark printers, but I'm note entirely sure of this. This uncertainty left me with two options - buy an HP cartridge on the off-chance that I was right in my hunch, or buy a new printer.

Printers are not surprisingly expensive, but so are printer cartriges. I looked at a variety of basic deskjet printers, none of which were less than £120. Then as a last resort I went into the office supplies shop and discovered that they had a single heavily discounted ex-display but unused HP printer for only £50. Hmm... a cartridge that may or may not fit for £35 or a new printer which is locally supported and contains both colour and black cartridges for £50. A bit of a no-brainer, that one.

Once more, then, I have a printer. Woo-hoo! Now I just have to get some CD labels and I'll be ready to rock once more.
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Electric ones aren't.

Particularly if you're trying to simmer a large pot of something. I have a wonderfully idiosyncratic cooker with four electric plates and an electric oven. The knobs not only rotate in different directions but go up to different numbers - three of them go up to 6, the fourth goes up to 12. The oven goes from 1 to 9. This makes baking an interesting experience. I currently work on the theory that 5 is about 10, 6 is about 180 and 9 is Very Hot.

I don't mind electric ovens but I really do prefer gas hobs. The immediate response of the system when you turn the heat up or down is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately we don't have any natural gas here so it's electric all the way. My current moan is because I'm trying to simmer a risotto without much success.

Still, at least I haven't burnt is. Yet.
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Or they are when I'm driving anyway.

Today we did the Mývatn Trip - Ljósvatn, Goðafoss, Mý, Grótagjá, Hverir and Mývatn Nature Baths - which is about 150 miles in total. Andrew took lots of photos which will no doubt appear later, together with an interesting video of the route we took to Grótagjá. The thing with Grótagjá is that you have to go up a... farm track... to get to it. The weather is at present quite warm, but there's still snow, ice and mud in some places and it was rather going off-road in a Citroen Saxo. The resulting footage is, er, interesting. Actually the track was much better than it has been the other times I've been along it, although we were thwarted about 100m from the point where it rejoins the road by a pool that was just a bit too big to ford given how soft the ground was so we went back the same way.

The blue mud is still blue. I now have another witness who can testify to the blueness of the mud. As usual all footware was covered with caked yellow and duckshell blue dry mud by the time we got back to the car, but the car's used to it. It will need a wash after its adventures today anyway. We ended the day with a couple of hours in the geothermal pools at the Nature Baths, which was great fun in the dark and the rain.

The dark was a bit of a problem afterwards. The Mývatn Trip is very spectacular but if you do it in winter you end up driving back in the dark, and Icelandic roads are not fun to drive in the dark. The roads often have steep banks at the edges and nothing more that the occasional pole to show where the edge is. At one point where we turned onto the main road someone had knocked the pole down and, as there were no road markings nor edge of road markings we almost went down the bank too. Fortunately we didn't, although it was a bit of a shock. Naturally there were no streetlights at the junction, nor for the next 70 miles until we got back to Akureyri, which is one of the reasons I don't really like driving out of town in the dark. Unlit mountain roads without crash barriers are not my idea of fun. We also had a bit of fog and a couple of light snow showers which didn't help, but the snow wasn't going to stick anyway.

But we got back eventually and I collapsed onto the sofa to unwind. Andrew is just about to hand me a bowl of lamb and vegetable soup as a pick-me-up. Mmm... relax...
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Even the snjomokster isn't enough.

Today Andrew and I did our trip aound Akuryeri and its environs. This started off as a trip to the shopping mall at Glerátorg, relocated itself up the mountain to Hlíðarfjall and the back down into the town centre.

The view from Hlíðarfjall is very impressive, but would have been more so if there was any snow up there. Clearly the snjowmoskter - interesting big grey thing with tracks, shovelling blade of the front and a big nozzle thing at the back - doesn't work at temperatures of 12 C which is what the ski run status display claimed it was up there this afternoon. It did feel pretty warm up there. There must be all sorts up unhappiness in the town with this; by the first weekend in February the skiing season should have been in full flow for over a month rather than completely shut down So we carefully picked our way across the slush and the wet (and very slippery) ice to get a good view around the place and took photos from the lower chalet. Had everything been open we'd have gone up to the upper chalet, but as it was we settled for photographing things and us thanks to his pocket-sized tripod.



After this we went back down into town where we were going to have lunch in one of the little cafes but by 15h00 none of the cafes are serving lunch any longer. Small town problem, I suppose. So instead I introduced Andrew to the award-winning Subway Akureyri which is, he tells me, much much better than Subway St. Andrews. First of all it doesn't smell funny and secondly you can sit in for lunch rather than having to take away.

This evening two of my students, Ívar and Davið came over to play Star Wars Risk and eat pizza. I did remember yesterday to pick up Risk from the common room where it's been since last semester when the second years were creating a version as part of the HCI coursework. Unfortunately the rules were missing (so I'm going to have to either find them in the common room or eviscerate the students) so we had to make them up as we went along a bit. I think we must have missed something because I'm sure that the Seperatists are not meant to win quite that easily. Either that or it's a very unbalanced game. Still, it gave us the change to play Fluxx and Igor as well.
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Went into work, got stressed, collected Andrew, had purple potatoes for dinner.

Yes, purple potatoes. Well, possibly blue potatoes. They're certainly more blue than blueberries are... but blueberries are definitely purple. Andrew and I found them in Hagkaup together with an assortment of other exotic Icelandic delicacies. Although the purple potatoes were actually French. Ah well. They taste slightly more earthy than normal potatoes but I wonder if that's a subconscious reaction to the colour or if it's really the taste.

The big plan of the day was to go into work, finish some things then come back to do a final bit of tidying before picking Andrew up from the airport but as usual things had a different idea and I spent the afternoon in a meeting and ended up going straight to the airport from work. I was hoping to escape for a while next week but the with forthcoming workshop I think I'm going to have to go in for at least some time every day. Bah! How dare real life get in the way of my social life? :) It's not that I usually have one here in Iceland after all.

We're now both diesting happily and catching up with the news. It's nice to have two machines with network capabilities.
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One that holds journals as well as books.

I know, I should have got around to joining various professional bodies before now but, to be honest, I haven't seen the need in terms of outlay versus results. Unfortunately the library system here is sufficiently poor in terms of inter-library loans that if I want to get hold of any research papers I've got to join at least the ACM and possibly the IEEE as well just to get access to their online catalogue. A number of my colleagues get all of their research papers through links with institutions outside Iceland and have them sent in or link to them via other university websites.

Today I became an ACM SIGCHI (Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) member in order to get hold of some papers, not for research use, but for teaching purposes. I don't think I'd feel quite so miffed if it was solely for research, but to have to join in order to get hold of teaching material is a bit much. I may have to branch out and go for the graphics SIG as well. Ho hum. Such is the downside of teaching HCI and information visualisation.
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The temperature here is a pleasant 7 C.

The weather is quite astounding - I'm quite surprised that the ski slopes are still open, although I imagine that that's due to the presence of the snjomokster this year. Certainly there's a great deal of rock visible on the mountainsides. My students tell me that the roads to the north are as clear as they are in summer, and that the whale-watching boats have been out already (the season doesn't actually start until May). I'm hoping that it will stay this way for the next week so that I can show all of the impressive places around here. We won't be able to get to Selfoss though, as that road will be impassable until June... and even if it wasn't it's really only practical for 4x4s.

One nice thing about living here is that I can always find out what the roads conditions are like from the IMO website. This is one of the most active websites in Iceland as everyone uses it to plan their journeys. I've discovered that green roads are good, yellow roads are ok, pale blue roads are a bit uncomfortable and I really don't like driving on white roads. Anything else and forget it.

They have some very interesting definitions of road conditions:

Green - Easily passable - Non-slippery road surface or at least one wheel track free of ice in each lane and so little snow and ice on other parts of the road that drivers are not in danger.
Yellow - Spots of ice - Slippery road surface with ice or packed snow up to 20% of the stretch of road in question.
Pale blue - Slippery - Slippery road surface covered with hard ice or snow on more than 20% of the stretch of road in question.
White - Wet snow/snow - Road surface partially or completely covered with an up to 10 cm thick layer of ice or wet or loosely packed snow.

Dark blue - Extremely slippery - Ice glaze (transparent sheet of ice) or road surface covered with wet ice or wet packed snow on more than 20% of the stretch of road in question.
Pink - Difficult driving - Road surface partially or completely covered with a 10-20 cm layer of loose or lightly packed snow and/or occasional small snow drifts and road conditions unsafe for all except vehicles with four-wheel drive.
Black - Difficult road conditions - Road surface covered with snow more than 20 cm thick and/or occasional snow drifts. Road conditions unsafe except for jeeps and larger vehicles.
Red - Impassable - Snow cover thick enough to make road impassable for normal vehicles. This description is also valid when a road is impassable for other reasons, such as landslides, water floods etc.

I love the definition of easily passable - one wheel track free. This is a definition that covers almost all UK roads for the entire year. OK, so bits in the Lake District, Wales, the Highlands and the Pennines might make it to yellow occasionally or, even more rarely to white, but if it's that bad it's already a nation-wide news story.

Ah, how exciting the day has been. :)

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