Nik's Saga

I think I've answered the question of why my shoulder hurts more after lectures.

I was lecturing this morning and, as usual, my shoulder hurt. Normally I only notice it once the lecture has finished, but as it's been playing up recently I noticed it today just before the half-time coffee break. There I was in the lab, standing next to the screen when I realised that the screen was on my left as I stood talking to my students. The screen was on the left so of course I used my left hand to point things out and, as a result, the shoulder did a lot more work than usual (particularly in the raising my arm above shoulder level business). Clearly the solution to this is to either employ a long pointy stick (I have a Harry Potter-style wand that might do as a first approximation) or find me a new laser pointer (my last one eventually fell off my keyring into the one of the potholes in the car park, never to work again). Yet another thing to put on my shopping list for my next UK visit.

It's still rather chilly out here, and I expect the temperature to drop drastically overnight as we have a clear sky. This is, of course, a good thing as it gives me a chance to go comet-hunting and, with that in mind, I've even retrieved my binoculars from the car. They were sitting in a bag with a large ball of sulphur collected from the Blue Mud Hverrir near Mývatn on my last visit.

Certainly it looks like a good Samhain night - cold, clear, with stars, although not that much in the way of bonfires, I suspect. Never mind, I have at least lit a candle and will later on tuck into a baked potato with cheese and some mulled cider - okay, so it will be of the packet variety not the freshly-made type, but it's the principle of the thing. The candle is now producing a warm glow and a pleasant pine smell which, together with the careful application of my hot-water bottle, will encourage me to celebrate the new year in a warm and comfortable manner. And a blessed Samhain to you too!
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According to my Firefox weather forecast it is currently 16 C in Liverpool, and 0 C here.

The projected low overnight is -8 C, which is definitely a bit on the chilly side. I believe this, as my shoulder is beginning to ache in the same way that it did when we had the cold snap this time last week. There is definitely a pattern here, and I'm beginning to wonder if I've developed post-traumatic arthritis in my shoulder after the two injuries to it this year and last. Tonight, then, I'm going to curl up with a hot water bottle on my shoulder as that does seem to ease it somewhat. It's almost a shame that it's not an acute injury - after all, we still have enough snow around to make icing it easy!

It's a little strange being back in the same time zone as the UK. I was about to curse because I'd left it too late to phone Dad last night when I realised that the clocks had gone back and it was okay. Today the Classic FM news is actually on at the right times, which will no doubt take me a little getting used to over the next couple of days. I see from the BBC news site that there's the normal kerfuffle about the UK needing to go to BST and Double Summer Time instead of GMT and BST. What rot! The problem is not that the clocks are mis-set, the problem is that the working day is no longer centred around noon but rather is centred around 13:00. If people worked from 8:00 until 16:00 there would be far less of a problem.

We nominally do 8:00 to 16:00 here although the shops do 10:00 to 18:00 in order to allow people time to go shopping after work or to do their banking and other business before work. It's a very effective system. All times are GMT in spite of the sun, as in winter there's so little light and in summer there's so much of it that there's no real need to change the clocks at all. In many ways historically it's an extreme case of railway time - let's ignore the sun and fix our working day so that people can easily conduct business with Copenhagen.

I didn't actually see the sun today, although I did see a big glowing thing through the clouds. Even at this time of year I'm glad for the blinds in my south-facing office. Which reminds me - I really ought to sort out moving to my new, bigger, north-facing office sometime this week.
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I was going to do all sorts of things today.

Things like starting the embossed Christmas cards getting on with some embroidery. Instead I've spent a fair portion of the day with a work colleague trying to sort out the final financial affairs of the NUCOG workshops before a deadline on Wednesday. All of which reminded me that I've got to try to complete my submission for the promotion board before bed tonight. *Sigh* No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy - who is, in this case, Time.

According to the little weather forecast add-on in Firefox 2 it is a clear night in Liverpool. I wish it was that here - I'd like to get a look at Comet Swan before it drops below naked eye visibility again. It's currently in the constellation of Hercules, as show by the map from the East Antrim Astronomical Society, and is not only well-placed for viewing from the northern hemisphere but is also a brand-new comet straight from the Oort cloud. Exciting! The skies here, however, are generally grey and full of rain (except when they're full of mist) so there has been no chance to see anything astronomical for a couple of weeks. Not even the moon.

i say rain rather than snow as the six inches of the stuff that we had at the beginning of the week has mostly melted away. We still have the small mountain in the car part of the shopping centre across the road, but it's only about three feet high at present. These things appear in varying car parks in the winter as the snowploughs use them as final dumping grounds for the snow that builds up over time. A good one can be ten feet high and last until June (much to the delight of the local kids). I wonder if this current one will have time to melt away completely before the next snow? Maybe not, given that there's more of the white stuff forecast for tomorrow.
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Nanowrimo is approaching.

Amongst the thousand and one things I haven't done today has been finishing the outline for my Nanowrimo novel. Not only have I not finished it, but I've thrown it away and decided that I'm going to write something completely different instead - the book I've been threatening since university. As the whole point of Nanowrimo is to get those unwritten books out of your system it seems the right thing to do. I doubt it'll be much good, but it will at least stop me from thinking about it next year.

Christmas is also incoming, so as part of my day I have tidied up my crafting table - I do, after all, have about fifty assorted festive cards to start work upon and, although I can't do the centrepieces yet (I'm awaiting a parcel for that) I can do the outer embossed borders. I've even managed to complete the threading of some beading. And here I was thinking that I hadn't actually done much today other than watch The Simpsons and episode one of Torchwood (it's amazing what effect tweaking the firewall had - my download rate has literally quadrupled after I wrote a rule for the port in question).

Tomorrow... tomorrow I really have to do some more embroidery on some more midwinter gifts. I'm having problems remaining focussed on these, but if I can get the first couple finished tomorrow then perhaps it will help me complete the rest. I hope. Maybe.
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It has been a day for grading.

First up. I have now upgraded both home and work machines to Firefox 2.0, as is my sacred duty as a computer professional and Mac owner. Although I haven't upgraded the Mac, come to think of it... mind you, the Mac seldom talks to the internet nowadays as it's acting as a radio substitute in the bedroom now that I've got the power lead working again. The add-ons are fun - I like the weather bar for the bottom and no doubt I'll find a couple more that are useful.

Next out. I am graded out. At 17:00 today I finally finished grading the 139 courseworks for the Practical Computing module, which means that I can upload the results on Monday morning. I had a pass rate of over 97%, which isn't too shoddy, although it wasn't exactly a difficult coursework; most of the marks were for the ability to use Powerpoint and Word (or their OpenOffice equivalents). A couple were borderline, mainly through not reading the instructions properly, but I have to give some leeway for the fact that it's all in English not in Icelandic. In fact the standard of English has been very high - although I wasn't grading them on English, just on technical skills. Grading them on English is someone else's module.

Up again. Sometime over the weekend I've got to try to get my CV into the university-standard format for the annual promotion board. It happens en masse once a year so we all have to update everything on a regular basis. It's another one of these things that exists only in Icelandic so I've got the section titles and have to shoehorn things into them in the hope that I've put them in the right place. Fortunately (!) I've got a 10am meeting on Monday with the Chap Who Knows how it all works to check it over.

Over the weekend I plan to tidy up, do some embroidery and make some fabric Christmas trees for people using special Jólaefni (Christmas fabric) from the quilting shop. At least, that is the plan... reality may differ.
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Of the audiovisual variety.

Last night I looked through my DVD collection and realised that there was nothing I really wanted to watch. I eventually stuck Troy on again as background while I did various computer stuff (having given up half way through Alexander the previous evening) and listened with half an ear. As a result I resolved to pay a trip to BT, the largest of the local purveyors of audio-visual goodness to see if there was anything on offer that I fancied.

Indeed there was - I came away with Fantastic Four (which I haven't seen) and season four of The Simpsons (which I probably have but what the hell?). BT was also the only remaining place in town that I hadn't checked for Sting's latest album From the Labyrinth. They didn't have it but the chap therein told me that it hadn't arrived yet but had come into Pennin either yesterday or today. So over to Penninn I wandered and there it was. Admittedly I did have to ask for it (it had been filed under films and soundtracks for some reason) but I was able to purchase it at last and, even better, get 15% off the price with the discount card those nice folks at Penninn/Eymundsson sent out to all university staff.

I also had a very interesting discussion with my students today about downloading and pirating music. Everyone does it, they say, for a number of reasons:

• CDs and DVDs are so expensive out here


• You can't get a lot of non-Icelandic stuff here


• The iTunes store doesn't work in Iceland


• A lot of kids who do it aren't old enough to have credit cards so how are they supposed to pay for music?


• Iceland has a tax on every blank disk sold that goes to the music industry, so the artists have already been paid.

I find the last two reasons very interesting. They're right; if you don't have a credit card you can't buy music online. Which means that the 12-18 year old audience - at whom a lot of chart music is aimed - have no way of actually buying it. Of course they're going to download it from filesharing websites! What else can they do? I can't exactly see them asking mum or dad to break out the credit card every time there's a new track released, can you?

The tax issue is the one that really rankles with people. Many Icelanders feel that as they've already paid for the music through taxes, the way they pay for schools through taxes, they have a moral right to download the music for free. A company did try to sue someone for downloading music a few years ago but it never came to court and, as a result, people believe that the music industry couldn't successfully sue anyone here even if they tried. Sites such as www.piratebay.se are immensely popular here both for music and for video. Yes you can buy stuff from Amazon but there are always huge import duties slapped upon CDs and DVDs. Since I've arrived here even I have occasionally used less-than-legal download sites. I've used www.allofmp3.com for music, although I've only actually bought CDs of albums I've already got on vinyl (yeah, those big black round things!). I've also used PirateBay to download Torchwood because I can't possibly wait until Christmas to see it - if I wasn't going back to the UK then the chances are that I'd miss it entirely.

Which is what I've got planned for tonight. The final item in my poki of audiovisual delights. OK, so I've got to tweak my firewall before next week so that it doesn't take 20 hours to download the next episode, but at last I'll be able to join the chorus of appreciation I've seen here online.

And for those of you who haven't guessed, poki is Icelandic for a bag of the plastic variety you get in supermarkets and record shops. :)
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Yes, my grey fleece Drachenwald hood has been restored to use.

We are now up to between four and six inches of snow with regular updates through the day and a chilly wind; having something warm to cover the head that isn't going to blow off is definitely an advantage. Of course I do get the occasional strange look, but I'm used to that. Although I do wonder if I should try to get some lilac fleece and make one that matches my purple Pringle cape - which is wonderfully warm provided that I button it at the neck; otherwise it slips down my back almost exactly the same way that my St. Andrews undergrad gown used to. And maybe a plain black one to go with my other wrap.

Decisions, decisions. I really ought to continue work on the various Christmas presents I've got underway. Except I can't maintain focus for any serious length of time. Perhaps I should get the fabric to make that quilt for which I bought the pattern last year - I'll do it by machine so it'll be relatively speedy, and I think I need to see something coming together quickly right now.
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Yes, it's the latest chapter of Bílasaga - The Car Story.

As you will have gathered by now, it has been snowing for a couple of days up here. The general consensus of opinion in the common room is that this is it for the winter now. There was a general shaking of heads, complaining that the winters now arrive much later than they did ten years ago, that this year the final day of the hunting season was completely snow-free when it's supposed to be waist-deep in places, and that we haven't had a decent snowstorm in at least four years.

Even without the metre of snow that we should have had by now if it wasn't for this global warming business, the weather is beginning to hit the traffic. This morning I attempted to get up the hill onto the road and found that although I could quite comfortably reverse, I couldn't make headway in any forward gear. Hmm... I decided that the thing to do was to reverse into the flat shopping centre car park, turn around and pick up speed and momentum in order to get over the hump. Fortunately it's a quiet road and I made it.

I wasn't as lucky when it came to going up the hill to the university car park. We have two car parks, and I thought I'd go into the upper one so that I wouldn't have to go uphill on my way out. This didn't work and I ground to a halt about half-way between the car park and the turning for the lower car park. So I reversed down the hill (avoiding the herd of schoolchildren being marched through the snow to school) and then found that I couldn't actually turn into the side road because I had no purchase on the snow. Drat and double drat! Fortunately a couple of chaps from elsewhere in the building recognised my plight and stopped to give me a push onto the road. They also told me what my problem was - one of my tyres wasn't gripping the snow at all. Indeed, when I looked at the tyres I had noticed that while three were packed with snow the fourth (what had been the spare before I changed the tyre the other week) was still a pristine black.

It seems that the solution is to get a bottle of white spirit and pour it all over the tyres to clean off any gunk from the manufacturing process that hasn't been worn off by day-to-day word. At lunchtime, then, I popped down into town to my local Esso garage and bought a bottle of the stuff and, lo and behold, it worked! OK, it's not a permanent solution, but it's a good temporary measure. I say temporary because of course it's time to change to the winter tyres. There are currently queues at the garage for this very purpose. Unfortunately the tyres I have are from the Saxo and are therefore may well not fit the Carina. I'll have to check the numbers on each tyre type, I suspect. It would be very nice if they were to fit, but I suspect it's about to cost me somewhere around £500 for a set of winter tyres. I may end up walking until the beginning of next month...
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On which I have done, amongst others, three scary things.

Scary Thing #1: Drove into work. This isn't normally a scary experience, but we had some more snow last night and the snowplough hadn't been out by the time I left. The scary bit was that I've discovered that my new, heavier car doesn't seem to grip the road as well as my old little car. The uphill stretch and hump that I need to surmount to get onto the side road from the car park road proved to be quite a problem, even in first gear. I may be forced to go and buy a set of winter tyres tomorrow if this doesn't melt overnight.

Scary Thing #2: I wrote an email containing the salutation 'Your Excellency' and it wasn't an SCA-related one. I know that Iceland is terribly informal, and that the oh-so-British approach to etiquette when addressing the direct representative of the head of state is considered vaguely amusing, but I just couldn't bring myself to starting my first direct communication with the British Ambassador with 'Hi Alp'. I'll probably loosen up later, but it just wasn't right. The SCA is probably partly to blame - most people don't interact with 'royals' or their representatives in any manner; I clearly do it far too often. I suspect that I'll automatically curtsey when I meet him, no doubt to the amusement of any locals nearby. When the King and Crown Princess of Sweden visited the university I had to keep a very tight rein on myself not to curtsey as he walked down the aisle in the lecture room!

Scary Thing #3: I invited my colleagues to my lecture tomorrow in order for them to tell me what's good, what's bad, and what's indifferent so I can improve it. I must admit to an ulterior motive for this one - I'm hoping that they'll do the same and it'll open up a forum for improving lecturing standards throughout the department in accordance with our new long-term plan. This leading by example is a terrible and terrifying thing; all the more so if, like me, you've spent too much time reading heroic science fiction and fantasy novels.

As well as all of this I've managed to make inroads into the scary list of courseworks I've yet to mark. I managed to mark 30 today, taking my current total to 70 - half way there! So I'm still on course to get them finished by the end of the week. At which point my third year data visualisation coursework will be sitting in a fresh new pile on my desk.
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Which was a real shame, given the drive Michael Schumacher put in in Brazil.

Yes, I was one of the many willing Michael on, hoping against hope that he would win both the Brazillian Grand Prix and the World Drivers Championship. It would have been a fairy tale ending - last race of his career, driving a fantastic race to not only come back from 10th place on the grid but also overcoming bad luck on the day to win the race and the championship... but it wasn't to be. What we got, though, was one of the most exciting races I've seen for a long time. I'm certainly going to miss him next year.

Other than that it's been a quiet day. I've discovered that there are in fact two separate BBC World Service streams available over the internet. One is the standard World Service, albeit without some of the live sports coverage that you normally get at the weekend, and the other is a rolling news channel, World Service 24 Hour News. This is fine as far as I'm concerned, as there have been a number of occasions when I've wanted news and found some sort of world music or arts programme. The other thing is that the internet version isn't quite the same timings at the Western Europe schedule so I was getting quite confused for a while as to what was supposed to be on when. I think I might have to email the Beeb and suggest that they make this clearer on the World Service home page as I found it entirely by accident. I was rather surprised at the Beeb in that respect, as their websites are normally quite good in terms of usability.
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Isaac Newton was known for giving lectures to empty rooms. I know how that feels.

No, I haven't gone mad, lecturing to empty lecture rooms. This morning I gave the last of my three distance learning lectures, on Operating Systems, and for the first half an hour I gave the lecture to a video camera and an empty room. I know that there were people on the other end of the video links - I saw and even spoke to them - but it was a very strange experience standing there talking to myself, in effect. After about half an hour someone arrived, but he wasn't one of the normal Akureyri students, rather he was a Hafnafjörður student who'd missed the flight home last night.

Ah well, at least it's done, and I've just got the rest of the coursework to mark. Forty down, another hundred to go. WebCT actually makes the marking take longer, as all coursework is submitted electronically and then has to be opened and closed as well as read. I can't even just print it out because the powerpoint needs me to see the actions. Still, I should have got it completed by the end of the week.

This afternoon I watched the recent Avengers film. I can't decide whether it's a surreal homage to a series born of the silver and new wave eras of science fiction or just a terrible film. It was good to hear the Avengers theme within the music though - I've always rather liked the Avengers music.
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On my door is a notice. It says Nik Freydís Whitehead.

From time to time someone will look at it and frown in conclusion - what's this outlander doing with a proper middle name? One of the departmental cleaners once asked me if I had an Icelandic parent or grandparent. When I explain the reason behind it they always look rather surprised.

Back when I was doing my pre-arrival research, I went to the Icelandic government's web pages for people moving to Iceland to live. One of the things that it mentioned was that it was usual for incomers to take an Icelandic name, not necessarily as their forename but at least as part of their name. Fair enough, I thought. After all, I was already used to answering to the name Freydís and, although it wasn't a common name it was definitely on the list of acceptable names. So I stuck it in the middle of my name and thought that I was doing the Right Thing. Once I arrived here I discovered that nobody really does that. OK, it became a conversation piece as to why I'd taken such an unusual name, but people seemed quite impressed that it was my name as part of a mediaeval history group. But nobody actually used it.

What I did find was that people assumed that I was related to the noted historian Þór Whitehead of the University of Iceland in Reykjavík. As far as I know I'm not. Instead, people use either their forenames or, in what seems to me to be a terribly viking manner, they have nicknames. Take Ragnar, one of my colleagues who works for the Icelandic Met Office studying and predicting earthquakes. He is known as Ragnar Skjálfti or Ragnar Quake, from the Icelandic word jarðskjálfti for earthquake. One of my students, Ívar, is actually Ívar Björn - which is useful as he might well have become known as Ívar Björn - Ívar the bear - anyway, given that he's rather tall and bear-like (although whether that may be a bear of soft and fluffy variety is still open to debate).

I still haven't got used to the fact that in any official document I'm always Nicola Jayne. It doesn't matter how much I try to point out that I'm Nik, I'm always Nicola Jayne. Still, it could be worse. I could have been Candy Diane (shudder!).
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You knew there had to be a whaling post eventually, didn't you?

My faculty at the university of Akureyri is the Faculty of Business and Science, the 'science' being a mixture of computer science and natural resource science. This has been described before now as the Faculty of Finance, Functions and Fish, and it occurred to me that 'fishing' might not just include fish. I spoke to several of my colleagues about the whaling issue during coffee breaks and after a faculty meeting we held this afternoon. The discussions were quite illuminating.

The first of my colleagues didn't know why they bothered, as the stuff doesn't even taste particularly good and most people won't eat it. This is quite a common view over here - although the government condones the hunting of whales for both scientific and commercial purposes, a large proportion of the population are against it. It's pretty easy to get whalemeat, as the current 'scientific' whaling programme more than covers the human market for the stuff. His view was that it was entirely a case of keeping people employed, something that the government has turned into a fine art.

The second colleague - and here I was a little hesitant to mention the subject as he's in the fisheries department - admits to being right in the middle of the argument. Although the faculty isn't formally involved in the scientific whaling programme he is personally very involved in his research connections with other organisations. When he's in Iceland he tends to argue against whaling, but when abroad he defends Iceland's right to whale if they wish to.

The question, according to him, is which whales you hunt. Minke whales are common in Icelandic waters and research suggests that the population can support the level of hunting that is proposed. Fin whales are also common here in spite of being on the Red List of endangered species worldwide. On top of this the argument that whales have large brains is a spurious one - in terms of brain size with respect to body weight both Minke and fin whales are far closer to cows than humans. It's the smaller cetaceans, the dolphins and porpoises, that are the intelligent ones and they are completely protected. Hunting an endangered species is completely unacceptable and Iceland fully supports this idea, having introduced a ban on the hunting of sperm whales back in 1906.

My third colleague - whose research field is in the economics of fishing - feels that there are no economic grounds for commercial whaling and that it's pointless starting it up again. Whaling is an expensive business and there just isn't the market for the increased volume of the end product nowadays. He is of the opinion that if the government wants to make money out of whaling then the only way to do it is to set quotas and then make the licenses for these quotas available on the open market. That way, if people want to eat whalemeat then they'll have to pay a price that will reflect the hunting costs. Alternatively, anti-whaling groups would also be free to buy up the quota and not use it. I must admit, I rather like that idea.

The only thing that I can see which would change the Alþing's policy on this would be if they saw a drop in the tourist trade. I've read a lot of reactions from people across Europe and the US saying that they won't holiday in Iceland until the hunting stops. Tourism is massively important here, particularly ecotourism, and this is likely to be hit hard given that whalewatching is one of the more popular pastimes. The idea that the whale you saw on an whalewatching trip today will be on someone's dinner plate - or being fed to someone's dog - next week is not going to entice people to visit Iceland. Icelandic sources claim that tourism accounts for approximately 13% of the national income from foreign sources and that percentage is increasing - that's 4.5% of the GNP. Boycotting Icelandic goods is likely to have less of an effect as the major export is fish products in any case.

External governmental pressure isn't going to have any effect. Icelanders are a very independent people, and if the world tries to tell them what to do then they'll it'll become a matter of national pride and they'll increase the hunt as a result. If you get to the point where you're considering sanctions then you've already lost the war.
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Yes, Christmas has arrived at Hagkaup.

The stand between electrical goods and the perpendicular aisles of general foodstuffs is now brimming over with Christmas decorations - baubles, tinsel, small trees, lights; the normal harbingers of the festive season. I almost bought some baubles in order to make some beaded decorations for various people but decided that these were a bit on the large side.

As it was, I'd only gone into the place to a) see if they still had the Simpsons DVDs on special offer and b) to get some antihistamine cream. The DVD sale has ended, to be replaced by the first tranche of books. I'm quite impressed - even though books are ludicrously expensive there is a huge market for them. There are even adverts for books on prime-time television. Instead I came out with a copy of Ben Hur to add to my DVD historical epic collection (last night I watched The 300 Spartans (1961) and tried not to root for the Persians - I have a soft spot for the Immortals and may be forced to do an embroidery based upon one of the Persepolis friezes).

The antihistamine search was a success though. Earlier this year my wonderful blue plastic Swatch watch suffered a catastrophic failure of the time adjustment mechanism. Drat. So, in a hurry, I borrowed one of Dad's spares with a leather strap. The strap was fine, but unfortunately the back of the watch disagreed with my skin. Last time I was home then, I picked up another Swatch at the airport, this time plastic (no problems there) with a soft leather strap. This should be fine, I thought...

Unfortunately for some reason my wrist now objects to the strap rather than the back of the watch itself and I've had to swap wrists due to a nasty case of eczema where the wristband sat. And now the other wrist is doing exactly the same thing. Hence the cream and a lot of thought about new watches. Sadly I can't find anywhere online that still sells the previous model. I suspect that when I return at Christmas I'll just have to bite the financial bullet and get my gold Omega serviced, as I know that I don't have any skin problems with that one. The problem I do have is that it's an odd design that has to go back to Omega for a battery change as you have to take the face off to get to the battery rather than removing the back.

Drat. And double drat.
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As posted to One Day In History.

First the mundania: I'm an ex-pat from Liverpool now lecturing at the University of Akureyri in northern Iceland. My work day was as inspiring as ever - first a meeting about a meeting about a meeting. Then a meeting about a meeting I won't be attending. Then a meeting with a student about his final year project, followed by the meeting which was the subject of the first meeting. Then, finally, a meeting with another student about an earlier meeting. There are days when I don't have meetings but at present they seem few and far apart. After that I did a bit of grocery shopping and popped up to Byko, the local B&Q equivalent, to buy a windscreen scraper because I'll be very surprised if we don't have a hard frost tomorrow morning. If we're lucky it'll be snow, as that's easier to get off the windscreen.

Now for the historical stuff. In my first meeting it occurred to me that the town in which I now live is a little like the town in which I went to university. Akureyri and St. Andrews are of a similar size, although Akureyri was settled at about the same time that St. Andrews first became the seat of an archbishop, approximately 900 AD. The difference that occurred to me is that while the town of St. Andrews has absorbed the university, with the main buildings being dotted around the town centre, here in Akureyri we're out in a campus on the hill, so there is actually very little interaction between between town and gown. Still, maybe once the University of Akureyri is as old as the University of St. Andrews a little more integration will have taken place. :)

History is a strange thing here. When I decided to move to Iceland one of the pros of making the move was a chance to learn more about the viking period. After all, everyone knows that Iceland is the home of the only true remaining vikings, where the language is only one step removed from Old Norse and where they don't bother with surnames and make do with the fine viking practice of naming by patronymic. Except that in spite of these tales I find that I really miss some of the historical things I took for granted in the UK.

For instance, there are very few stone buildings here, and they all date from post-1750. True, there are some turf-roofed buildings on the other side of the fjord whose foundations and a couple of half-walls date from 1050, but as Iceland wasn't settled until around 850 there's nothing predating that. No ancient Britons, no Romans, no Angles or Saxons. No soaring gothic cathedrals or prehistoric standing stones. No castles or stately homes. It came as something of a shock to realise that a nation which puts such stock by its history actually has relatively little of it in the first place.

I now realise how spoiled I was in the UK. As a member of a historical recreation society I could enjoy weekends of tournaments and feasting at castles throughout the country. I grew up a quarter-hour's drive from a Tudor manor house, half an hour from a Norman abbey, or an hour from a Roman amphitheatre. There were standing stones just around the corner. I was so used to them that I assumed that wherever I went in Europe there would be something similar for me to visit, that it would only be if I visited north America that I'd miss over two thousand years of buildings (although they'd probably make up for it in art galleries and museums). Now I find that every time I return to the UK I want to visit somewhere, to recharge my historical batteries.

Am I a historian, waxing so lyrical about historical monuments? No, I teach computer science. Scientists can love history too.
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It's astounding, the things the Catholic church has banned in the past.

I've finally got around to reading the copy of the Fortean Times that I picked up the last time I was at home. Within it is a fascinating article suggesting that the secret of Rosslyn chapel may not be any of the normal 'treasures' - the holy grail, the ark of the covenant, the head of John the Baptist etc - but might be the secret knowledge of forbidden music.

Forbidden music??? I know enough about early music to know that it was pretty much controlled by the church and that there were particular modes that were acceptable and others which were not, but I'd never come across the idea of The Devil's Interlude before. It's an augmented fourth or tritone; the equivalent of the interval between C and F# in the key of C. Most people nowadays would recognise it as being the opening two notes of the theme to The Simpsons, but for composers of the 12th century such a dissonance was completely unacceptable. An online article discussing the link between the music and the chapel is available here.

I've been a fan of The Fortean Times for a number of years. The FT website is an excellent source of strange news on the web - readers send in links to unusual or paranormal news stories, so it's a great site to check if you're feeling a bit bored.
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I read it. All. Yesterday.

Yes, I know that I'd said that I was going to have a relaxed weekend, but yesterday morning I picked up Horizon Storms by Kevin J Anderson and, with the exception of a break for the first episode of Battlestar Galactica season 2 on TV, I spent the entire day reading it.

It's good. He's another author who's got a huge, galaxy-spanning setting and a marvellously complex plot seen from a dozen or so points of view (much like Peter F Hamilton in that respect). This is volume three of I've no idea how many and, like the previous volume, weighs in at about 650 pages. Where it differs from Hamilton is that where Hamilton has one alien enemy race and a couple of useful alien characters, The Saga of the Seven Suns has a major alien race, three separate human societies, human-built robot, a group of ancient robots and, oh yes, four ancient and powerful alien races who've been at war for at least ten thousand years. In typical human style the main human society accidentally gets embroiled in this war without realising that it doesn't have the power to be anything other than collateral damage.

I'm very much looking forward to volume four, and I'm probably going to try Anderson's Captain Nemo if I can find it. This is being advertised as the true story of Nemo and why he eventually declared war on war.

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Icelandic smoked salmon is very different to the stuff you get in the UK.

I mention this as we had smoked salmon as a starter for dinner last night. Martha's husband, Svein, cooked a fantastic dinner starting with smoked salmon and then continuing with roast smoked lamb and caramelised potatoes. The salmon was one that he'd caught himself and which had then been smoked by another member of his fishing club.

When I was in the UK I didn't tend to eat smoked salmon, as I found it slimy, tough and generally unpleasant. The only time I actually enjoyed it was when I was served a couple of slices on top of a plate of kedgeree for breakfast at the Glenesk hotel in Edzell when I was there for Warbands last year. The nice thing about that was that the salmon was cooked by the heat of the rice as well as being smoked, which made a great difference.

I suspect that it's the method of smoking the fish. Svein's salmon had been smoked in a small smokehouse on a farm rather than in a large factory. Part of it probably depends on what's producing the smoke, and I imagine that there are also differences from batch to batch, and possibly even depending upon precisely where in the smokehouse a fish hangs. But certainly, it is a far cry from the industrial smoked salmon that's hideously expensive in the UK. This salmon is firm without being tough, moist without being slimy, and tastes of fish rather than of smoked plastic. Very definitely an improvement.

Not only was dinner excellent, but we also played Guillotine and Igor, and I won both. Good food, good company, and good gaming - it was definitely a good evening.
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And I'm really looking forward to a couple of days of R&R.

It's felt like a very long week this week in spite of the fact that my lecturing load has halved. I've certainly had no problems finding things to fill in the gaps! Over the next couple of days I intend to relax, watch the recent BBC Hannibal docudrama (I was delighted to discover this morning that my burning it onto a DVD earlier in the year had actually worked), do some embroidery and read part three of The Saga of the Seven Suns. The rest of the world is free to do as it wishes, as I need some down time before tackling the pile of 100+ courseworks that will be awaiting me on Monday morning.

Tonight, though, I'm off to dinner and a gaming party with Martha. So on the way back from work I dropped in to Vinbuðin to pick up a bottle of wine. I am frequently astounded at how much people drink here, particularly given the costs. The place was full of people buying beer - not the odd six-pack, but rather trolleyloads of cases of beer. I dread to think how much one of those would cost. After a lot of hunting I eventually came out with a couple of bottles of Californian Chardonnay (Ernest & Julio Gallo) as they were one of the few I recognised. The wines stocked here are quite different to those you see in the UK and the range is also a lot smaller than, say, your average Oddbins.

An interesting point is the relative abundance of red, white and rosé wines. Almost two thirds of the wines are red, most of the rest are white and there is an extremely limited selection of rosés. Which is a shame, since I'm quite partial to rosé wine. Perhaps next time I come through duty free I should pick one up.
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Today's lab for my Data Visualisation module was all about brains.

Human ones, rather than computer ones. As most folks have probably realised by now, I teach the squishier side of computing - HCI, data visualisation, the things that include a healthy dose of psychology and sometimes even physiology (or at the very least psychophysics) to really understand them. Subjects that would quite comfortably fit into a cognitive science degree as well as a computing or a psychology degree. So one of the labs in the data visualisation course involves sitting and watching a DVD of Robert Winston talking about the human brain, followed by a couple of online questionnaires to get the students thinking about how different people think.

The two that I use are Brain.exe and the Myers-Briggs type personality test. Of course they're both in English, which I'm sure affects the results a bit because some of the subtleties of the language will be lost on non-native speakers, but they seemed to understand most of it and asked questions if they didn't understand particular words. For the record, I'm pretty central in terms of both right/left and verbal/visual, and Myers-Briggs pegs me as an INTJ/INFJ.

Brain.exe is designed to see if you're a verbal or a visual person, and whether you're left-brained (logical) or right-brained (creative). Now I know that there's evidence that the whole left-brain/right-brain logical/creative thing is on shaky ground, but it's a useful way of thinking about how you think. What I would expect to find in a group of computer science students is that we'd have a lot of visual/logical types, and indeed all of the serious geeks were down there in the lower left quadrant. What was particularly interesting was that this year we also had quite a grouping in the centre - the all-rounders rather than the geeks.

Myers-Briggs surprised me. There was an even split between Introversion and Extroversion, which was understandable. Similarly there were even splits between Thinking and Feeling, and between Judging and Perceiving. But there wasn't a single iNtuitive. I felt very alone for a couple of minutes there, particularly as the INTJ is the 'scientist' and one of those for which 'computer programmer' is a recommended career.

Still, it's a fun lab, and I hope it allows my students to gain some new insignts into themselves as well as the academic subject.
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And half of the New Scientist podcasts are introduced by two Americans who sound as if they don't have a brain cell between them. *Sigh*

Such is life. I can (probably) live with the regular you're listening to the New Scientist podcast - for more on these stories and other science news, subscribe to New Scientist magazine, but the fact that the female reporter sounds like the brainless blonde reporter in Futurama is rather wearing. Thankfully in the later podcasts they switch to a British woman and a more intelligent-sounding American chap. The earlier guy sounds as if he should be suffixing every phrase with the word 'dude'. I wonder if lots of people complained and so they switched to reporters who sounded competent?

The weather here is back up to a balmy nine degrees so the snow has melted away. I imagine that we'll get this snow/no snow/snow/no snow for at least a couple of weeks before the winter sets in properly. It's quite impressive in some ways how easily the transition between the two states occurs. This morning I had to scrape well over an inch of frozen snow from the windscreen before I could drive in to work, but now there's nothing left. I really must get myself a scraper, as I think I left the old one in the old car when it was written off. Drat.
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I have discovered an online treasure!

Specifically, the New Scientist podcasts. Now this may sound a bit extreme, even for a science geek like me, but allow me to explain...

I find it very difficult to fall asleep at night, so I have taken to listening to odd science documentaries culled from Radio 4 and the World Service. Most of them are astronomy or astrophysics, but there's a fair number of general science ones and even the odd history one as well. Unfortunately I've had a lot of these for almost two years now as there just aren't enough science documentaries being made.

It was only today, when I was checking the latest headlines from New Scientist (I take the RSS feed to give me something to look at that's a break from computing but still legitimate science) I noticed that NS now does podcasts, and has been doing them for almost a year. Naturally I rapidly downloaded them and brought them home to install upon my bedside iBook. This has provided me with about 20 hours of new science listening, things that I can randomise in iTunes and probably get something new every night for several weeks. I am, as you can imagine, a happy bunny.

And now for the weather: it started snowing at about 16:30. At present it's more heavy sleet than pure snow but, southern wimp that I am, I would definitely consider it to be snow.
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It has now reached the 500m mark.

Which is interesting, as we still haven't had any snow at 'ground' level yet. In fact, it's been quite a pleasant day again today, with a maximum temperature of about 10 degrees Celsius. That's over a month later than it was last year; we had snow in Akureyri on the morning of September 7th 2005 - I know, I checked my entries for last year). Having said that, it's getting quite cold overnight, and I'm beginning to have to scrape the ice off the car windscreen in the mornings. Tonight I parked in reverse, as it's always the front windscreen that is frozen, not the rear. I'm testing the theory that it's because I usually park facing the open space and, as a result, there's more cold air to freeze any moisture in it. My other possible cause is the difference in slope between the front and rear windscreens, but there's nothing I can do about varying that one. I await tomorrow morning's frost with interest. I've woken up every morning of the last week wondering if this would be the morning that I'd find snow on the ground. It hasn't happened yet, but I'm sure that the day is not far off.

The nights are definitely drawing in, and the sun has now normally dropped below the mountains by the time I leave work in the afternoon. The mornings are getting darker too, but they're not yet dark enough to upset my sleep patterns. The sun hasn't got anywhere near above the mountains by the time I get up, but on a morning like today that's a good thing, as I get to see the snow-capped mountains turn peach-pink in the sunlight. There's no point in my trying to capture that with the camera, as you just can't get the quality of light as it makes the mountains glow.

Beautiful it may be, but it does pose certain hazards. The big trick in the morning is getting in to work at just the right time that I'm not blinded by the low-lying sun as I head south towards the office. Sun visors only go so far down the windscreen, and if there's any fog left on the windscreen you just get a broad band of light. I wonder if there's another route that involves fewer roads that go due south?
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By Trudi Cavanan.

This book disappointed me. I've spent much of the afternoon reading it so that I could finish it and get on to something else without letting it defeat me. It's run-of-the-mill fantasy stuff; six hundred-odd pages that form the first part of a trilogy. I don't know that I'll bother with the other two volumes.

Unlike the other hefty multi-parters I've read recently, this one takes a long, long time to get anywhere. In this volume you get one diplomatic mission and one major battle (which seemed terribly Warhammer to me). The rest is introducing characters who will no doubt be important in the next couple of volumes but who don't do much at present. Oh yes, and a bit of forbidden love that is no doubt going to become a major feature upon which the fate of the world will hang.

The edition I have has a black and grey cover, instead of the one below.

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I have just ironed a tablecloth.

Then, once it was approaching a state of relative crease-free-ness, I realised that I have nowhere to put it. After all, I took it off the drawing board to which it had been taped in order to allow that board to masquerade as a table instead of being quite obviously a large piece of wood on top of a storage box. True, I do have a table - two of them in fact - but one is covered with craft stuff and the other is covered with a computer and craft stuff. Come to think about it, the first one holds craft stuff and an LCD monitor, so I guess that both probably count as being covered with computers and craft stuff. And anyway, I didn't get either of them until long after I started using the drawing board.

No, the problem is a storage one. I have a number of cupboards, but nothing really in the way of drawers. I recently build a small chest of drawers for the living room, but it's only about fifteen inches square. Now that's fine for keeping general living room crap in, but I think I need something larger. Actually, I need two somethings larger, as at present the bedroom has a wall of built-in wardrobes, a bed, two stacked storage boxes acting as a bedside table, plus one of the chairs that came with the larger table. There is nothing upon which I can put stuff, particularly once it's been folded after being washed.

Unfortunately I can't just pop in to the local B&Q and get a quick flatpack. I may have to investigate the IKEA delivery service, as the stuff from there is rather less expensive than the local shops. I could also do with a couple of DVD shelves and another bookcase or two. At least I have an IKEA catalogue to peruse before I go online. If the shop wasn't 250 miles away - say, if it was only 150 miles away - I'd seriously consider driving down there and loading up.

Although I didn't bring that much over with me, two years of living here has led to me acquiring a number of extra things - particularly DVDs and craft stuff to replace the stuff I couldn't bring with me. As for my library... that sits boxed up in a garage in St. Andrews. Renting an unfurnished flat means that I now have the basics of real furniture, but not really enough to store everything properly. I'm still trying not to buy stuff (and doing pretty well at that in many ways) but shipping everything back to the UK eventually is still going to be a stinker, because although I'm glad I came out here I don't think I'm going to spend the rest of my life on my own in Iceland.

So I'm now psyching myself up to pick up the IKEA catalogue to try to find something that's not too expensive and that I can abandon when I eventually leave. Ah, the joys of IKEA.
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This time it's Pompeii by Robert Harris.

It was quite enjoyable. The plot centres around four characters - Attilius, the engineer in charge of the Aqua Augusta (the main aqueduct serving the area); Ampliatus a corrupt ex-slave millionaire; Corelia, his daughter; and Pliny the Elder, the elderly scientist and admiral of the fleet. I learned all sorts of things about Roman plumbing from this book, which was a definite plus, as were the chapter introductions from notable modern texts on vulcanology. The action takes place over the two days before and after the eruption so we get to see the effects of the build-up and eventual release of stress on the land. Naturally, not all of the main characters survive the event (well, what do you expect when one is Pliny the Elder?).

As yet I haven't had a chance to visit Pompeii, but of course it is on my list of Places To Visit eventually. It has the advantage of combining two interesting things - history and volcanoes. Here in Iceland there are no signs of any interesting volcanic events in the near future. Hekla is now running five years or so late, which is annoying as I'd really like to see a volcanic eruption.

The telephone book here has a set of instructions on what to do in case of volcanic activity. It basically says don't worry, just be prepared to leave the area if the police instruct you to leave. I'm told that this isn't at all what Icelanders do. On hearing that a volcano is erupting, Icelanders grab their cameras and head towards it in order to get some good photographs.

Clearly there are ways in which I'm beginning to fit in over here. :)

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I'm feeling surprisingly mellow.

Not only that, but the occasional mildly good thing has happened to me today. For instance I went into the bank and, while I was there, asked about the super new Lazy Town swimming equipment for kids that they've been advertising. It seems that they are normally only available for kids with the child accounts, but when the nice bank lady heard that I'd be sending them to the UK gave me a set anyway - and more than just the item I asked about.

Then I went into the coffee shop and bought some good coffee and was distracted by insanely expensive chocolate - 50% and 72% cocoa solids respectively. A short trip to the bookshop led to me discovering volume three of The Saga of the Seven Suns by Kevin J Anderson for under 700kr. Astounding!

Although it has nominally been a 'research day' I didn't get any research done but, on the other hand, I did manage to do a load of other little jobs that had been hanging over me all week. And then finally I popped down to Hagkaup (definitely the best-smelling supermarket in town) and found the ideal lasagne dish. I've also finally got my Stormbird website up and running again after the technical problems Beeb.net was having last weekend.

It's strange how these little things can lift your mood. I'm certainly not going to complain about it though.
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In the UK, not here in Iceland.

But it's a good excuse to post one of my favourite poems, The Unknown Citizen by WH Auden.

---

The Unknown Citizen by W. H. Auden
(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in a hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.

Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

---

I studied this at O level. Auden was one of four poets we studied in a single volume (Worlds: Seven Modern Poets) together with Wilfred Owen (liked him), RS Thomas (he was OK) and John Betjeman (couldn't stand him). I certainly enjoyed studying poetry more than the prose we had to deal with - I got stuck with Cider with Rosie and absolutely hated the damned thing. Pygmalion wasn't too bad, but I'd much rather have studied A Tale of Two Cities and Twelfth Night.

Dumbing down was starting even back in the seventies. Or at least it was in Liverpool.
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Provider of news and information from all sorts of strange places.

Over the last while I've become quite fond of the BBC's World Service. I can only listen to it via the web as the BBC no longer broadcasts across the north Atlantic but uses local transmitters on the north American continental mass to serve Canada and the USA. Occasionally, entirely dependent upon the vagaries of the space weather, I can get the Caribbean service, but by far the best reception is over the Internet.

You get an entirely different view of the news listening to the World Service compared to even Radio 4. True, today we got news about the IRA no longer being a threat to peace, and something about David Cameron being a man of substance, but we also got in-depth coverage of Condi in Palestine, an Iraqi police task group being re-educated to teach them that they are supposed to arrest death squads rather than support them, more problems faced by Shell in Nigeria, and President Bush erecting Iron Picket Fence (like an Iron Curtain but more American) along the Mexican border. All of this, together with special features on the current economic problems of Iran and Saudi Arabia. I had no idea, for instance, that while the official Saudi unemployment rate is 10% the real rate is double that.

Of course it has the classic rolling news problem - not enough interesting news happens most days so it gets a bit repetitive after the first three hours - although it does try to alleviate this with a lot of interesting half-hour programmes. It's certainly better than the television here right now, which is at an all-time low (CSI:Miami and CSI:New York being the only decent things on the box at present). Still, if anything big does happen on the planet then at least I now stand a chance of hearing about it.
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Winter is approaching and this morning there was ice in the potholes in the car park.

The potholes range in size from about 25cm to 75cm in diameter, and are anything up to 30cm deep. They form a honeycomb-like mesh across one side of the main car park which is hell on the suspension. It's also hell on the ankles if you're not careful. Every time i use it it reminds me why I normally use the lower car park most of the time. The strange thing is that all of the potholes are circular, more or less. I'm used to British potholes that come in many different shapes and sizes, but not these. It's very CS Lewis - I'd have tried jumping in and out of them except today I remembered neither my yellow nor green rings.

It's now week six of the semester and so I thought that it was about time that I started writing the computer architecture course for next year. I've begun by looking over how other people have taught it in order to get an idea of the content. I've even started reading the latest recommended textbook. And what have I discovered..?

... That I have to do R-S flip-flops, boolean logic and Karnaugh diagrams. There was a time when I could do those, but it was a scary number of years ago. At least I've got a couple of months to get back up to speed again. And I don't actually have to teach electronics, which is a big plus. A very big plus. Mind you, I will be able to introduce the 'Not on a Tuesday' gates that one of the St. Andrews lecturers used to use. :)
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Finally I managed to get to both craft and needlework shops.

After Friday's delay and a weekend of reading and curling up in a corner I finally managed to get to both shops today. The craft shop had the stuff I needed (although slightly more elaborate than I'd imagined, not that they'll actually be seen so it doesn't really matter) and, although the needlework shop didn't have quite the linen I wanted it did have something that will work. I can now sit down and design things and then get started on some freestyle embroidery in split stitch and stem stitch. I'm feeling particularly satisfied by this, as it means I can at last make a start on some more Christmas presents. Yay!

Now I just have to exert sufficient self-control to finish the current beaded necklace before I start getting carried away with the embroidery. Fortunately I'm three quarters of the way through number two so I should be able to finish that one tonight. Photos may yet follow, although I may decide to send off for some clasps first. Ah, decisions, decisions... :)
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No-one writes intellectual candyfloss quite like Anne McCaffrey.


Yesterday I needed something to take my mind off the fact that I wasn't at Rent-A-Don. I needed something that would distract me without making me think too much, and certainly nothing that involved swords of any kind. It turned out to be Killashandra. Yes, I know I've read it before, but I needed something familiar that I could comfortably read in a day without too much effort. It wasn't as if there was anything on television to keep me occupied, after all.

This is one of the books I acquired when Sharda (one of the Gamer Girls) left Iceland for Canada a couple of months ago, and another one of my reasons for reading it was that it was on the top of the pile. It sat there and cried 'read me! read me!' every time I went past it. Anyone familiar with the book (or the series) will understand why I was so delighted on my white water rafting trip to find a rockface that looked as if it really needed a good singing to. :)

Other than that... well, I've tidied up a bit. I've done some washing. I've done some more beading. I would have got the stuff to start making more Christmas presents on Friday but I ended up working late waiting for someone in Reykjavik to send up some documents so that folks up here could sign them and send them back. I just don't feel like doing cross stitch at present, which is why I was going to start these... if I'd been able to get to the shop in time. Bah.

Ah well. Back to work tomorrow, and to my final Practical Computing lecture. I've also got to finish my final lab, and once those are out of the way I'll have more time to actually get things done. Things like preparing the Computer Architecture module I'm teaching in the new year. Ho hum.

So here's the bookbadge... although I've got an earlier edition.

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