Nik's Saga

I think I've just had a really good meal. Unfortunately I'm currently so congested that I've got no sense of taste/smell. :( The setting was astounding though - it was an underwater restaurant so it felt a little like an inverted goldfish bowl. The fish were still going round in circles, but we were on the inside.

Lots of photos to come, and lots of the Ciudad de las Artes y Ciencias - A&S City, which amused me greatly. It really does look like something out of Logan's Run. Impressive though.

Labels: Valencia

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Not dark purple, or dark brown, actually black.

At lunch today I tasted what must be the strangest thing I've ever eaten - squid cooked in its own ink. And it was black, very black. The sort of black that had me wondering about taking a broad-nibbed dip pen to the dish and testing it for calligraphy purposes. For the record it was rather tough and rubbery and I don't think that I'd order it in a restaurant, but I have at least tried it.

I'm also seriously considering having a badge made for events like this: No, I'm from England. I only work in northern Iceland. Everyone wants to talk to the person from Iceland because they've never met an Icelander before. Even the other Scandinavians view Icelanders as exotic. I may have no voice again after tonight's convention dinner (to be held in an underwater restaurant, of all places) as the throat is going with the head cold. Fortunately I don't need to talk to too many people while flying tomorrow. :)

The other first for the day was that we had live translation for one of the sessions - not a translator on the stage with pauses for him to keep up, but rather the stethoscope-type earpieces you see at the UN. A little strange, but something else to file in the been there, done that, used them category.

Labels: Valencia

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That was this evening's big question.

In fact it turned out not to be a problem, as I shall explain later. :)

Today's material at the EurosummIT has proved to be considerably more interesting than all of the stuff at the Indian conference put together. Quite possibly because it's in my field, not business stuff. Particularly interesting was a presentation from a woman from one of the Swedish universities who was talking about the issues they face in terms of international student recruitment. I had a chance to talk to her later, and it turns out that they have all of the same problems that we have. Extremely interesting.

Lunch was something of a culture shock. It was a very large meal, with three different appetisers (calamari, tuna with salad, deep-fried bechemel and bacon balls) plus bread, cheese and nuts, followed by paella with rabbit (quite tasty, and an interesting alternative to chicken) and then ice cream for desert. This took over two hours.

Once we'd finished for the day we were onto a bus to do a tour of the city centre. This started on the bus but became a walking tour later on. It was quite fascinating and I have a number of interesting photos... which the hotel internet link won't let me upload (it seems to be quite limited in terms of speed and acceptable sites). So unfortunately I can't post the photo of the holy grail. Yes, I have seen the object thought most likely to be the cup in question. The chapel in which it sits was in use at the time, so I only saw it from the doorway, but tick!.

The chapel being in use was what simplified the big question I asked earlier - embroidery market or holy grail? In the end I popped into the chapel on my way back to the embroidery market. This is in the centre of the old market area, and although I managed to make it back there before they closed up I didn't have enough time to have a good root around. Mind you, I suspect I'd have needed rather more than the twenty minutes I had by the time we'd finished the tour. I would go back on Thursday, when I have time before I fly back to London, but unfortunately that's a holiday so nothing will be open. :(

Once I'd wandered back to the market, then wandered out again I realised that I had a bit of a problem: I was in the middle of Valencia about 5km from the hotel with no organised way to get back. Oops! Eventually I found myself a taxi and even managed to pronounce the hotel name well enough to be recognisable and have returned to try to get some rest. Unlike last night, when I was so congested that I couldn't sleep and ended up watching the first episode of the latest season of Torchwood at 01:00.

I'm still very congested, but I hope tonight that sheer tiredness will win out.

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It took three attempts to land in Valencia this afternoon.

We had a bit of turbulence on the way in and ended up going around twice. I've never done that before - the seconds where the engine sound changes and you're suddenly pushed back into your seat by the changing acceleration vector is quite interesting.

Other than that the journey went quite well. Well, that and the fact that I have the mother, father and several grandparents of all head colds (with taps turned on) and, as a result, have been on the ground for over six hours but still have un-popped ears. I had planned to pick up some Contact 400 at Boots - or at least some Lemsip - but I was wandering around like a zombie after not a lot of sleep last night an a 4am start. Such is life.

I got off the plane an thought it's warm, but nowhere near as hot as India. I can handle this. It seems to have got warmer and warmer over the hours... unless I'm developing a fever, that is.

I also think that I was ripped off by the taxi driver on the way from the airport to the hotel. I was charged just under 30 Euros; according to the assorted tourist booklets it should be about 14 Euro. Grrr.... at least the office is paying, not me. The route we took seemed to include quite a lot of freeway-style roads, and approached the hotel from the north paralleling the old river bed. That's quite strange - it seems that there was a major flood in 1957 which led the government to completely re-route the river leaving a broad rock-strewn channel spanned by a variety of bridges. Very strange.

We also came past the City of Arts and Sciences, a complex with the most fantastic architecture. It looks rather like something out of the original Logan's Run movie. We're due to have the summit dinner there on Wednesday so I'm hoping to get some good photos then.

In another SF-related item: you know you're a Sci-Fi looney when... you move the tines of your fork through the dark fruit sauce artistically dropped into the lemon sauce and think ooh, that looks like a Shadow ship!. Sad but true. The dinner in question was in the hotel restaurant (I generally eat in the hotel on the day I arrive as I don't have to worry about going and finding somewhere) where I started with a cold melon cream with port-soaked melon balls and crunchy ham (strange but pleasant). For my main course I had pork medallions in an apple sauce with caramelised yucca and stuffed courgette. I had to try that just for the yucca (it was a little like a sweet but slightly stringy potato). Finally I opted for the orange blossom mouse with citrus and plum sauce and candied orange. It was all rather tasty and I'm now feeling pleasantly full.

Time for me to get some sleep ready for a deeply thoughtful day tomorrow.

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I'm almost ready to go.

I'm also seriously considering seeing if the hotel, which I know has a pool, also has a masseu(r/se), as my neck and shoulders - particularly my neck - are so tight that they're painful and tender. If things don't improve by the time I get back from Valencia I might have to go see a doctor. Maybe.

Other than that, I've packed, sorted out all of the electrical stuff, got all of the necessary information together, and hoped very hard that this trip will be less stressful than the last one. Then, once I get back, I can catch up on everything that's been delayed over the last month and clear the desk again... just in time to do all of my marking. Having said that, I do have an exam paper to write while I'm away.

I've also checked my flight times and discovered that I have an entire morning free on Thursday before I have to leave for the airport. My plan, then, is to do the tourist thing and take a wander around the old town centre... and, of course, see the holy grail. :)

According to the BBC weather forecast I'm only going to be doing a jump of 25 C (0 C to 25 C) compared to the 50 C (-5 C to 45 C) jump I did last week. Should be a doddle. I will, however, pack the fan I bought the last time I was in Spain for a conference. I think I might need it.

Labels: Valencia

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I am very glad to have picked up some strepsils while in the UK earlier this year.

My voice started going a couple of days ago, and my throat started feeling a bit painful yesterday. Today, though, it's officially sore. I've also got the stuffiness, sneezing and general blearghness that suggests to me that I picked up a bug on one of the many flights of the last week and a half.

Given that I'm flying off to Valencia tomorrow I've decided to have a very relaxed weekend. As a result I've done nothing of note today, just lounged around, slept and watched season six of Buffy. Ah yes, season six. I'd forgotten how (relatively) weak season six is. Okay, so it has its highlights but the nerds as villains were particularly poor - especially after Glory in season five.

Ah well, it's entertaining, which is all I need right now.
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I've finally got the rest of the Indian photos online.

There are 70 of them, so I'd recommend using the slideshow option for viewing. Ah, the joys of iWeb. Having said that, I'll be moving them over here at some point in the near-ish future so they get a more sensible URL. And a link from my homepage, for that matter.

In other news, I've sorted out my trip to Valencia. There were one or two fairly major issues which needed attending to but I'm now flying out under my own name and staying in a hotel organised by the summit organisers (who know that I'll be attending the entire event). I haven't managed to sort out my expenses for the last trip yet, so I'm definitely looking forward to getting paid on Thursday. :)

A photo of my silly hat has been requested. Well here it is. It is very, very silly. Perhaps I should run a competition at Revel for the silliest hat, just so that I'm not along in my silly-hat-ness:

Very silly indeed. I've yet to line the veil, but it is officially wearable at this point.

Labels: India

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I've finally finished my gable hood.

This has been sitting 90% complete for about 9 months now - the only thing remaining was to add the striped ribbon across the forehead. Unfortunately I couldn't get appropriate striped ribbon for love nor money. The closest I got was bright red with gold stripes or bright yellow with international orange stripes, neither of which were appropriate. Eventually I had to get cream ribbon and gold fabric paint then paint the stripes onto the ribbon. It's not what I'd have preferred, but it passes the 6' test.

I managed this during the extended A&S meeting we held today to celebrate the first day of summer; it's a bank holiday and we decided to do this rather than the traditional ski trip. As we had six hours instead of the normal three I gave a class on making coifs and arming caps - everybody needed either one or the other. The inspiration for this was my filling out the MoAS report for this quarter and realising that there was nothing to put in the classes held at meetings this quarter section. How embarrassing! I'm not going to let that one happen again. :)

This gave me a chance to make a second attempt at a coif for myself. I'd previously tried the basic design from the pattern linked from the Elizabethan Costuming Page but had found it rather too small. I scaled up the pattern from A4 to A3 and found that this now gives me the necessary width but is far too long. Still, I now have something to work from in terms of a third attempt. Once I've got the pattern right I'll then be able to do an appropriately embroidered one (and maybe even enter it in an A&S competition sometime).
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Not one of mine, but one I enjoyed.

The True Dragon
by Brian Patten (Liverpool poet), commissioned by English Heritage to celebrate St. George's day 2008.

St George was out walking
He met a dragon on a hill,
It was wise and wonderful
Too glorious to kill

It slept amongst the wild thyme
Where the oxlips and violets grow
Its skin was a luminous fire
That made the English landscape glow

Its tears were England's crystal rivers
Its breath the mist on England's moors
Its larder was England's orchards,
Its house was without doors

St George was in awe of it
It was a thing apart
He hid the sleeping dragon
Inside every English heart

So on this day let's celebrate
England's valleys full of light,
The green fire of the landscape
Lakes shivering with delight

Let's celebrate St George's Day,
The dragon in repose;
The brilliant lark ascending,
The yew, the oak, the rose
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After less than 48 hours at home I am planning my next academic trip.

This is to an IT education summit in Valencia, Spain next week, and after my recent travel problems I checked my tickets when I went into work this morning. They are booked in the name of Mr Nik Whitehead (male). *Sigh* I have put in the request to get them changed now, as I can't change them myself. I'm waiting to hear about accommodation (I'm assuming that it hasn't been arranged but I'm hoping that will sort itself out tomorrow) and then I can book my internal flights and hotels.

A trip to Valencia isn't anywhere near as scary as travelling to Delhi. It doesn't need a visa for starters. I also suspect that I won't feel as anxious walking around the city in the evening as I did on my one trip out on my own. There also seem to be a number of interesting things to look at in the city centre - such as the Holy Grail.

No, I'm not joking. Valencia claims to have the grail. I can't possibly pass up on a chance to see that, can I? I wonder if they also sell HHOA? :)
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I am back on my sofa.

Yesterday's travel travails were finished off, as expected, by a delay to this morning's flight to Akureyri. This, however, is fairly normal. And, I suppose, one advantage of having no check-in luggage is that I could walk straight off the plane and back to my car.

It'll be no surprise, then, that I've spend about six hours asleep this afternoon. :) My ankles have returned to normal, having blown up like balloons yesterday with all of the flying, although I'm regularly applying germolene with anaesthetic to the mozzie bites on my legs. In spite of my industrial strength mosquito repellant I have a number of centimetre-wide lumps where the beasties got through. They itch like mad, and I must admit to having scratched some of them to bleeding point, hence the germolene.

I've also just had a phone call from Icelandair to say that my luggage will be ready to collect at Akureyri airport at noon tomorrow. That's not too bad; I imagine it means that it's being put on tonight's flight from the UK and then transferred to tomorrow morning's flight up north.

In the meantime I'm going to go and eat something that involves protein rather than just carbohydrates. I do still feel a bit jetlagged (I thought I was doing okay until the yawnfest I'm currently enjoying) but having done a 6.5 hour jump that's no surprise. Fortunately I don't have any lectures tomorrow except for a fencing class at 17:30. I foresee a light day tomorrow.
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Sometimes I think that the universe is trying to tell me something.

That message is stay at home!. Except, of course, that these things are just random events that could happen to anyone. I probably just take them too personally, that's all.

This morning started well - I got up and packed. Then I checked out, no problem there, and waited for the two shops in the hotel to open so that I could buy a variety of things for a variety of people for Christmas. As it turned out, I should have done it last night, as although the shopkeeper had said that he'd be open by 09:30, the shop was still closed at 10:00 when B came to collect me to take me over to the airport. What I should have done was bought everything last night when I picked up the pendant, but I was still feeling rather stun-struck at that point. Ah well. Another reason to go back, I suppose.

Indira Ghandhi International was an interesting experience. The recommendation is that you check in three hours before take-off... a piece of advice I followed but found insufficient. It took over three hours from arrival to make it onto the plane, let alone get the plane off the ground.

First you queue to get into the terminal. Only people with valid travel documents (passport and tickets) are allowed into the terminal building proper (passport check 1). You then queue to have your luggage x-rayed (PC2). Not a problem there, I've been through this sort of thing before at Belfast... although I really don't think I'd want to try to bring my rapiers through IGI.

Once your luggage has been x-rayed and sealed with an IGI security cable you can join the check-in queue (PC3 and PC4), and while you're slowly winding your way towards the desk someone comes around and closes all of the fasteners on your luggage with cable ties to dissuade would-be pilferers in the baggage handling department, while a second person give you security tags for each item of hand luggage. Here, at least, IGI is an improvement on Manchester, as you're clear to take a piece of hand luggage, a laptop and a handbag rather than Manchester's one-bag-that's-your-lot policy.

At check-in I was encouraged to upgrade to a 'premium economy' seat - given that the economy seat was okay I thought that this would be a good idea, give me a bit of extra space, more room to do some work and so on... More of this later.

The next queue was the immigration queue (plus PC 5 to enter it). This was the killer - two hours in a queue to get my passport stamped with an exit stamp. There was a lot of muttering and grumbling in this queue, and I was very glad that I'd remembered to bring the ubiquitous litre bottle of water with me. When I finally got to the desk it only took about a minute to get through (PC6) but it took considerably longer for many ethnic Indians, presumably because they have to be quite paranoid about Islamic and Hindu fundamentalist threats. Although, having said this, I found myself eventually in the diplomatic/government stream (at random) and a rather irate local gentleman behind me (who'd already jumped 90 minutes of the 2-hour wait) commented about the immigration official's enthusiasm for stamping papers is he trying to emigrate the entire population of India?

This got me into the main departure hall, although I didn't have time to do anything as it was already closing time for the flight. Fortunately there were so many people stuck in the queues behind me that it had already been announced that the flight would be delayed. Another passport check (PC7) got me into the security check queue where, after another half-hour wait I had my hand luggage and myself x-rayed (PC8).

Hurrah! I was now free to find my gate (not an easy task, given the lack of signage, the layout of the terminal and the building work (the airport is being upgraded ahead of the 2010 Commonwealth Games - and if today's queues were anything to go by, it's certainly needed). There were three more security checks between the gate and the plane (PC9-12), including another metal detector. By this point it was the original take-off time, so I felt it wise not to try wandering around the admittedly-small duty-free shop, but got straight onto the plane. I found my seat, which did indeed have rather more leg-room than standard economy seats, but considerably less bum-room, plus a fold-up table rather than a drop-down one. Premium economy clearly only works for tall stick insects. :(

We were delayed for an hour while they managed to get everyone through the queues. The flight was quite full, but the helpful cabin staff managed to find me another seat, which I then managed to convert to a seat with a space beside it by offering my original premium seat to the chap beside me. Once we got underway though, I managed to watch The Simpsons Movie, The Golden Compass and Ratatouille (to add to Sweeny Todd and Bee Movie, which I watched on the way out) to keep myself amused. I tried to watch the animated Beowulf but failed - the animation style works for Shrek but I found it annoying within the first five minutes.

A decent tail-wind allowed us to make up half an hour of our delay by the time we touched down at Heathrow... where I discovered that the Icelandair flight had been delayed for two hours. *Sigh*.

As I'd not had a chance to go shopping in India I found that I had quite a few rupees left, so I went over to the Thomas Cook exchange at terminal 1 to convert them to krona. This was much to the delight of the assistant, who told me that he hadn't handled his own currency for over six months. The process was expensive, mind, as he had to convert it to sterling first and then to krona, thus ensuring that the moneychangers got advantageous rates at both ends of the transaction. There was a difference of about 25% between the direct exchange rate and the one I eventually received, but such profiteering is, I believe, traditional for moneychangers.

The Icelandic flight eventually got out an hour and a half late, about five minutes before the airport closed. It was touch and go, and they almost had to delay until the morning and put us up in hotels overnight. This would have been fine by me, as by the time we took off I'd been on the go for 21 hours. Instead, we got off and back to Keflavík, although my luggage didn't. It wasn't only my luggage that was left; in their haste to get off the ground they left approximately a third of the luggage behind. So there was another queue to fill in the necessary paperwork. I am consoling myself with the fact that there's nothing of any major value within the suitcase; my one important Indian purchase was in my handbag, and my laptop was in my shoulder bag.

When I eventually got to the hotel it was 03:00 local time, 09:30 Delhi time. Just enough time for 3 and an half hours sleep before my flight up north tomorrow. *Yawn*

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The temperature in Delhi today was about 45° C.

The original plan for the day, to go up to Agra to see the Taj Mahal, went out of the window with the weather forecast. 120 miles each way on Indian roads in this sort of heat is not to be recommended even for locals. Instead, then, we concentrated on some of the monuments that Delhi/New Delhi has to offer.

First stop: the Red Fort. This was built in 1638 by Shah Jehan. It is an incredible fusion of Moslem, Hindu. Christian, Sikh and Buddhist art, as the emperor designed the palace so that all of his subjects would find something there to make them feel valued and included.



The outer curtain wall - the postcard photo of the fort - was build later to protect the palace. The geometric design of the palace and the garden make it quite peaceful even though it's full of tourists (almost all Indian, which was good to see).



The Red Fort is in Old Delhi, not New Delhi, which is the southern part of the metropolis. Old Delhi was the original capital, while New Delhi was the British capital. The British architecture is very clear in Connaught Place, the centre of New Delhi, which consists of a large circular garden surrounded by a ring of buildings designed by Luteyns, now filled with shops (including the MacDonalds where we had lunch). I was very good and didn't go shopping - mainly because after this morning's ...er... distraction, I managed to leave my main purse in my work bag not my hand bag. D'oh! Still, it did mean that I didn't go wild and buy up the entire contents of the bazaar at the Red Fort. :)

After lunch we headed further south again, this time to the Qutub Minar, a huge sandstone tower that was the minaret for the first mosque in India. It is, indeed, huge. It's also built within what was originally a Hindu temple complex dating back to the 5th century AD. This is also the site of the Ashoka Pillar, which I recognised immediately from my teenage reading of Eric von Danieken. :) Just so that we have the requisite Nik in India photo, here I am with the minar and the pillar, and also my friend and guide Bilal beside one of the carved archways:



As these are predominantly Moghul (and hence Islamic) architecture there are large sections which are decorated with calligraphy and geometric designs rather than images. This was also the case at our next stop, Humayun's Tomb. This was the tomb of the second of the Moghul emperors, and is the direct inspiration for the Taj Mahal:



It has been restored by the Aga Khan Foundation, so it's in very good repair with working fountains, ponds and streams. I was a bit surprised here to find that all of the decoration is geometric rather than calligraphic. This simplicity makes it a very serene place. It's generally only visited by overseas tourists so it's a lot quieter than the other monuments. In particular I love the carved screens that fill some of the archways, providing light and air while still enclosing the interior space:



By this point I was definitely wilting in the heat, so we finished our tour with the parliament building and the viceregal palace. Now that was impressive. My sense of scale has been warped by Liverpool's anglican cathedral, which leaves me thinking of places like St. Paul's as small, but the viceregal palace and the parade ground it encloses is officially big. It was also very atmospheric; it was very easy to imagine it full of troops decked out in dress uniforms, sunlight glittering off buttons and lance points...



We'd been out doing the tourist thing for about six hours and I was quite relieved to return to the hotel to have a rest before dinner. I was definitely sun-touched and fell asleep immediately. Later I received a call to tell me that the piece of jewellery I'd ordered had arrived. Well, I had to go downstairs and get that. It is what I was hoping for, and will go beautifully with my Tudor gowns. :)



B collected me again at about 20:30 to go off for dinner. On the way we drove past Jantar Mantar, the set of six astronomical instruments build by the astronomer-mathematician-poet-king Sawai Jai Singh of Jaipur in 1734. The site was, of course, closed by now but I was very happy to actually see these devices. I'm just going to have to come back to Delhi again to see them in the daylight.

We then went on to Nizamuddin, one of the Moslem areas of the city, to see the mausoleums of two of the Sufi saints. This was a fascinating place, as I'd never been into a mosque complex before - complete with poets, singers and musicians. Going later in the evening was a good idea, because it's generally quite busy during the day as the saints are revered not just by the Moslem community but also by the Christian and Hindu communities.

Dinner was at a local restaurant called Karim's which, B tells me, is the oldest traditional Mughal restaurant in Delhi. I was quite adventurous and had chicken Mughal - it seemed quite appropriate - which was absolutely delicious. I might well add this to my list of favourite Indian dishes (to go with the chicken Dhansak).

Our return to the hotel was delayed slightly by the fact that the hotel is playing host to a rather large wedding, and as we arrived the groom had also just arrived on his brightly-caparisoned horse.

Tomorrow I fly home. It's a shame, as I could quite happily have spent a week here visiting museums and monuments. There's only one thing for it: I'll just have to come back.

Labels: India

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This is written, in brightly coloured letters, across the back of every large vehicle in Delhi.

The calligraphy is generally quite beautiful, leaning towards the Carolingian, and the drivers of these vehicles - truckwallahs - don't move unless you honk at them. The trucks (and buses) are themselves often brightly painted, and I saw several during my travels today decorated with large paintings of Ganesha and Lakshmi.

I got to see these quite close up as I took the journey from Delhi to the Institute of Management Technology in the satellite city of Ghaziabad. Ghaziabad is actually in the neighbouring state, so I couldn't get a normal metered taxi but instead hired a private car with a driver. Normally this would be an 8-hour hire for a fixed price of about 5000 rupees (£1 is about 75 rupees) but as I was going to be away for 12 hours it made much more sense to hire him for the two journeys (about an hour each way), leaving him free to do other things during the day. This dropped the price to 2000 plus border tolls, and I considering the skill with which he wove through the chaotic traffic I was quite happy with this (it's considerably less than the cost of a taxi from Reykjavík to Keflavík airport for about the same distance).

The conference venue was a modern campus on the outside of Ghaziabad. It has its own arboretum (with labelled trees and squirrels), tennis courts and internal courtyards. Inside the entrance was the Om, written on the floor in flowers (the photo is from a little later in the day by which point part of the symbol had been disrupted a little, but you get the idea):



I was handed my conference pack and ushered into the Special Guests reception with the other overseas guests - from Brazil, Alaska, Turkey and Sweden... although of all of the countries of origin I think that only one person (one of the Swedes) wasn't an ex-pat. We then had the opening ceremony, during which the organisers and the two VIPs gave light to the event. This is an Indian tradition at the start of any new undertaking (such as a conference, opening a shop or moving house) where lamps are lit to bring light (and therefore good fortune) on the undertaking. I rather like this custom. The lamp in this case was a large brass thing over a metre high which supported five separate flames and a curious brass bird:



The conference was then officially open, and we began with a set of keynote speeches before hi tea - elevenses with added parathas - and then we were into the first session. This was the one in which I gave my presentation (slides and original paper), that went down very well, particularly as I could confirm that it was all primary data (most of the other papers were based on the analysis of other researchers' data). The editor of one of the US-based peer-reviewed marketing journals wants to put it in his next issue - woo-hoo!

This was also the first of the two sessions I chaired (Challenges and opportunities in e-marketing), and I was rather surprised at the beginning of the session to be presented with a bunch of flowers, and even more surprised at the end of the session to be presented with this:



I've seen how they make these on How It Works but I'd never thought I'd actually own one. After a light lunch I chaired my second session (Internet banking and CRM in banking(, which resulted in a lot of lively discussion about the role of internet banking in rural India, plus more flowers and this:



So I now have not one, but two acrylic awards for my office and a couple of bunches of flowers (now sitting in glasses of water in the corner of the hotel room - they won't survive the trip back to Iceland (nor, I suspect, count as legal imports) but I did at least photograph them:



Next came lunch, during which I was invited to join the editorial team of a peer-reviewed cross-disciplinary journal. That's (probably) fine by me - it helps the journal to have European names associated with it and gets me points on my stigamat (ah, the tyranny of the academic review board!). Then it was off to the final technical panel of the day, two papers and something of a rant on the topic of innovation from the session chairman; nothing two strenuous other than that. Unfortunately the two papers I was looking forward to in that session weren't presented (thus giving time for the chairman's rant) but one of them on wifi mesh networks was quite interesting.

There was then a bit of a breather, during which people wandered away for a rest and I wrote a question for my Java programming exam paper. :) We then reconvened for drinks and dinner - although as we were running over an hour late and my taxiwallah was waiting I didn't actually get to eat more than the pre-meal chicken nibbles. No worries; the hotel has a 24 hour coffee shop. :)

Even at ten o'clock in the evening the roads were packed and filled with the peep peeeeeep of car horns. It's now almost midnight local time (18:30 Zulu) so I'm still quite awake and jet-lagged. This may be a problem, given that I have an 07:30 departure tomorrow to get up to Agra. I must remember to pack the ibuprofen, as although I seldom get travel sick the chaotic nature of car travel here did leave me feeling a little queasy on the way back this evening. I shall attempt to go to sleep anyway. Maybe the after-effects of this morning's 06:30 rising will kick in soon.

Labels: India

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I've just had a quite surreal meal in The Chakras, the hotel restaurant.

This being a big 5-star hotel it offers exotic cuisine in its main restaurant - in this case Mediterranean and Oriental. I started off with a rather good sea food bisque, followed by beef tenderloin in a very piquant randang sauce. Quite delicious, and clearly 'exotic' for Delhi.

The most surreal thing was the music. Clearly, being an exotic restaurant it had to have the appropriate exotic western music to go with it - in this case a marvellously cheesy mix of disco and glam rock. It has completely changed my view of Indian restaurants - is all of that exotic sitar music that accompanies your chicken tikka masala just the equivalent of Ra Ra Rasputin, Night Fever or Go West?

It was so good that I had to order a second Whoo-whoo and then a coffee just to give myself an excuse to sit and listen. :)
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The heat hit me as I stepped off the plane.

I'd forgotten just how warmth felt, having endured nothing higher than about 25 C for over three years. Thankfully it was a dry heat, its effects alleviated by water. The airport itself is undergoing a lot of rebuilding, so it's not really much different to Heathrow or Manchester in many respects other than size. Passport control is also more efficient than either of these two, with separate channels for Indian and foreign nationals, but this time the foreign line was the longer of the two. I was impressed by the reaction of the staff - once the Indian nationals had worked their way through the system they opened up that line to the foreigners as well. And, of course, great excitement - I now have a more interesting Indian stamp in my passport to go with the very boring Hungarian one I picked up in 2001.

B met me at the airport to take me to my hotel. He's the brother-in-law of S, who came back over to Akureyri to teach the networking course earlier this month. B works for the Bank of America, and quite often finds himself ferrying visitors between the airport and the hotel - it's thanks to his recommendation that I'm staying here in the Hotel Samrat.

The journey to the hotel was... something different. Indian traffic is an astounding thing, where all signals seem to be made by honking the horn rather than using indicators, so it seems quite haphazard and positively dangerous. The 'peep' of car horns is clearly a major element in the soundscape of an Indian city. I haven't seen any cows wandering about yet although there are plenty of rickshaws and little yellow and green motorised rickshaws. The moped count is also very high. It was quite strange to drive past makeshift tents on the roadside which are clearly home to quite large families.

Hotel Samrat is the oldest of the big hotels and is state-run rather than being part of one of the big international chains. My room is quite large, with industrial-strength air conditioning - so much so that I had to turn it down. I turned the television on to find it playing Liverpool v. Blackburn on ESPN, which was a little surreal.

After a travel-induced snooze I wandered downstairs to have a look around. I'm not going to have any time to do any real shopping, so I was delighted to discover a jewellers and a textiles shop within the hotel itself. I was very good and went in to have a look around without buying anything. Yet. :) Then I ventured outside.

The heat hit me again about two steps outside the door, and within a couple of minutes I was 'glowing' quite brightly (as the old saying goes: horses sweat, gentlemen perspire but ladies glow). Down to the right of the hotel is a large roundabout, upon which a group of boys were playing cricket using three empty bottles for each wicket. As I paused to watch them I was accosted by my first beggar, a tiny girl who looked about seven. She was completely unfazed when I waved her away.

In the other direction I walked past the entrance to the staff quarters for the nearby Hotel Ashok, outside which were several people selling fruit and vegetables from barrows. More interesting was the milk bar to and from which people were walking carrying small (maybe 1.5 litre) milk churns (not, O my droogs, the other sort of milk bar). Clearly this is the equivalent of popping down to the supermarket to pick up a carton of moo juice.

I left it until sunset before wandering outside, conscious of the fact that I didn't have time at Heathrow to pick up a sunhat. It was quite impressive how quickly the change from light to dark occurred. Sunset seems to have brought out the mosquitos, which are the length of houseflies and seem to find me delicious in spite of the 'jungle-strength' repellent I bought at Boots.

My solution to the hat problem was to pop back into the textile shop, where I've picked up a rather nice pale burgundy silk shawl for a couple of quid. I also caved in and went into the jewellers to order my gift to me from the trip - a Tudor-style pendant of an emerald-cut garnet surrounded by small pearls and with three hanging tear-drop pearls all set in silver. I drew a sketch of what I wanted, we sat and selected the stones which the jeweller then weighed and gave me what is , from a northern European perspective, a quite stunning price. It will be ready for me on Saturday.

It's now 21:00 local time (16:30 UK time) so I'm going to go down for dinner and try to have an 'early' night before the conference tomorrow.
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I made it onto the flight.

22:30, London time This may not sound like an achievement, but believe me it was. You see, there was a slight security problem in that the tickets had been booked for me under the name Nik. My passport is under the name Nicola Jayne. The net result was that I had to buy a new ticket. I can, it seems, return the unusued one to the travel agent and be reimbursed for it, but that's not the point.

The result of this was that checking in took over an hour and left me practically running to get to the gate before it closed. So much for picking up a book or two and some water at duty free.

08:30ish, Delhi time I've managed to crash my plane seat. Strictly speaking I've crashed the seat in front of me, but it's the in-flight entertainment system that I'm watching that has gone down. That's down as in telling me it's having a kernel panic. What fun! Does this mean it's going nuts? :)

Fortunately it has rebooted, although I suspect that never mind a kernel panic, it might have caused a passenger panic had the passenger in question been less computer-savvy. I was trying to look at the interactive map at the time. We've just entered what I suspect is Coalition Airspace and will pass somewhere a little to the west of Kabul. I imagine that the military ATC folks like to keep the civilian planes out of their 'local' space. I've never flown over an active war zone before; unlike the USAF in the early 1990s, I didn't think of Northern Ireland as being such. Unfortunately I've got an inner seat so I can't see out of the window - I hope to remedy that on the way back... although I can't guarantee that photographs of Afghanistan from 12000m will be worth printing.

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Today's adventure was the acquisition of a visa.

11:00 This is, in theory, simple - go to India House, collect a ticket saying when you should turn up to be processed, go to the nearby post office to get a couple of passport photos, return to India House, fill in the necessary forms, hand over forms, photos, £30 and a letter of invitation from the conference organisers.

But there's the rub - no letter of invitation. So it's back to the hotel to fire off a couple of emergency emails and to await a faxed letter of invitation before I can return to India House this afternoon to finish the process. Fortunately the staff here are very pleasant and helpful (particularly Arnold, the Hungarian junior hall porter) so I'm managing not to get too stressed by this. If you need a good hotel in London I can definitely recommend the Grange Rochester - £80 a night for one of their small 'cabin' singles is not at all bad given that it's a 4-star hotel not far from Buck House, Whitehall and so forth.

16:45 I now have a conference visa. I didn't get the fax, but I did receive a scan of the faxed letter. With this in hand I headed back off to the HCIL, at which point the process was just to hand over the form, the two photos, the letter and the thirty quid. About fifteen minutes later my number (1066, as it happens) was called and there was my passport with a nice new shiny (literally) Indian visa within it. I was, as you can imagine, quite relieved.

The HCIL is on the Strand, a part of London I don't know well (i.e. it's not the British Museum nor the Science Museum, nor even the Imperial War Museum), I had noticed during the several taxi rides that it was quite close to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. I must admit that I hadn't actually done the National before so this seemed the perfect time to remedy that oversight.

I didn't do the whole thing, just the pre-1900 galleries, concentrating on the pre-1700 with the exception of the Turner section. I was one of those people who voted The Fighting Temeraire into place as Britain's best painting (thank you Radio 4). I love the way that Turner could capture extremes of sea and sunlight. Naturally I also had to have a look at the Arnolfini Marriage (even though it's not actually a marriage portrait, according to the blurb) and the Wilton Diptych. The latter amused me greatly, as although I'm familiar with the piece from photographs it was only when examining the original that I realised how bored some of the angels look - yeah, yeah, another king... hurry up, I've got better things to do than to stand here all day... I deemed it appropriate to buy myself a postcard of that one.

I would have bought postcards of several portraits of Big Women by Titian and Reubens, but the ones I liked are clearly not popular enough to be in the postcard series. They've also got some rather nice canvas bags with big bold prints from about six post-1700 works. Unfortunately they don't do Temeraire or I'd have bought one; those skyscape colours would look great on them.

Now I'm back at the hotel again, drinking coffee, about to write an exam paper and waiting for the transfer bus to the airport.
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I now have two white cotton shirts.

Not, perhaps, the most elegant of shirts, but they should do well for the days without air conditioning. I'm going to have to resort to my normal shirts and a light shawl to protect my arms for the other days... unless I see something at Heathrow, or in Delhi on the Thursday. My only real concern is that I've got just under two hours to change flight at Heathrow, and Icelandair are not particularly punctual. One of my Icelandic friends up here gives me a 50% chance of making it to India on time.

I think I've got everything organised - flights, other travel, hotels - now all I have to do is print off a bit more information, pack and tidy the flat. Oh, and make a bag for all of my electrical cables (my normal one is still full of money for TAFF after Orbital). Fortunately my first flight isn't until 12:25 tomorrow, so I've got several hours for this in the morning.Time to write the final checklist, I think, and then have an earlier-than-normal-for-the-last-fortnight night.
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There are days when even I, cynical singleton that I am, just give up and wallow in a romantic novel. Or two.

Today, when I should have been making cotton shirts but lacked the oomph, I worked my way through both Shards of Honour and Barrayar by Lois McMaster-Bujold. I know that these are dangerous books - especially the second one - and once I've opened them that I am condemned to do little else until I've finished it, but I desperately needed some quality time after the last week.

While working on the two cotton shirts I'm supposed to have made today I have been frustrated by the fabric being 110cm rather than 140cm in width, which has caused all sorts of problems. This means that I'm going to have to add gussets to the sleeves, undoing side seams in order to do so. I can scrape together the fabric for the gussets so it's an annoyance. As I don't actually own any other long-sleeved cotton shirts I'm just going to have to get on with it tomorrow. I have a revision lecture tomorrow morning but I think I'll take the afternoon off to finish getting things ready to travel. Assuming, that is, I don't have any last-minute meetings dumped on me.

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Or possibly a herb.

This was the final opinion over our pot-luck dinner this evening. Dinner itself started off as a sausage-making session until we ran out of sausage skins and had to improvise, leading to a very good meatballs in (admittedly tomato) sauce with pasta and naan bread. After all, sugar comes from either sugar beet (a vegetable) or sugar cane (a herb). In spite of this revelation I managed to restrain from adding vegetable/herb matter to my strawberries and cream. :)

I had a very productive A&S session this afternoon too. I now have two full-length linen skirts, one navy, one dark olive green, which just have to be pressed to within an inch of their lives before I put them into a suitcase. That leaves me with just the cotton shirts to make tomorrow and half an example Java exam to write tonight.

Wish me luck. :)

Update 22:45 The example exam paper is now completed and even uploaded to WebCT. Sometimes I amaze even myself.
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It's the end of a long - so very long - week.

I've dealt with two visiting lecturers - great fun but a bit stressful at times, not due to anything they did but rather due to other things that I've had to handle in parallel. Several varieties of academic excrement have hit several varieties of administrative ventilation systems. The organisers of the Indian conference have managed to severely annoy me by a) not replying to any of my emails about accommodation (for over six weeks), b) sending me no information about the conference (but sending it all to my co-author who isn't attending) and c) still expecting me to chair two sessions. They are so going to get negative feedback when they ask for comments on the organisation of the conference.

I've been so busy I haven't even been able to go shopping this week. Fortunately I have stuff in that will see me through until I brave the weekend shopping crowds tomorrow.

Tonight I rounded the week off by doing a fencing demo for the student society DATA. We only had three of them turn up but two of them might even come along to practices in future, which would be super. This, of course, had to be recorded for the DATA records:



And thinking of photographs, I got a reply this morning from Gunnar at the Met Office. There are no geysers in the Mývatn area but there are several old boreholes. Yesterday's photo is probably steam escaping from one of these. Although there was no seismic activity in the region yesterday it's possible that new boreholes in Bjarnarflag on the west side of the mountain may have affected the the old boreholes to the east.

I'm glad that's sorted. It's good to have an explanation for why strange things happen. :)
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Not according to the Met Office.

After several different varieties of excrement interfaced with faculty ventilation system at lunchtime today, I escaped the building to take M, our visiting lecturer from Brussels, on the Tour For Foreigners (as B calls it). This is the classic Ljósvatn - Goðafoss - Mývatn - Nánafjall - Jarðböðin tour of about 200 km as a round trip, highlighting the natural marvels of northern Iceland.

I will freely admit that my favourite parts of this tour are the final two sites - the blue mud zone and the geothermal pool. I've even now got the hang of packing plastic shopping bags for my visitors so that they can cover their shoes and wander around the blue mud without ruining their footwear.

Today, though, there was an unexpected extra. 16:51 Zulu:

You can clearly see the plastic bags on my companion's feet. :) More interestingly though, note the heart-shaped patch of snow in the centre of the photograph. Nothing strange there.

Next photo - 16:54 Zulu:


The heart-shaped snow formation is now to the right of the shot but there is now a very obvious geyser in front of it. I'd estimate it to reach approximately 10m in height and what was particularly surprising was that it continued to erupt for over 10 minutes (we watched it for that long before leaving). It was clear that the material being ejected was water, not just steam.

As far as I know geysers are not common up at this end of the mid-Atlantic fault zone. I wondered if there had been an earth tremor that we'd missed which had opened up a vent. According to the Met Office there have been no earthquakes in that area during the last 48 hours although the tremor traces do show a little activity at 2-4Hz... which could be tidal or wind-related (and believe me, the wind was something fierce out there today).

I think I might contact the Met Office and ask their opinion on the matter. It was all rather exciting. If I get any response I shall continue the story in a future post.
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I've just come back from a very enjoyable evening meal in excellent company at one of the better local restaurants to be met with something of an Internet disaster.

My ISP, Beeb.net, is closing down. This is part of the recent decision that the BBC was told to cut its internet services - websites and so on - and it's going to disappear on June 30th. This is a bit of a blow as I've been with them for about 5 years and have been quite happy with them.

It means, of course, that I have to move my main website somewhere else. That's not a major problem and it will now be available from www.beeblebear.net; I suppose this is an appropriate time to do a bit of a redesign on the site. What is annoying is that a) I'm about to lose my beeb.net email address, and b) I'm going to have to sort out a new service for Dad, change his email address and so on. This second point is going to be by far the most stressful part of the action.

On the email front the old stormbird at beeb dot net email will be defunct (which means that I'm going to have to change a number of subscriptions, unfortunately). If you need my new address please just contact me through the link on the left. I may have to generate a new generic email address - possibly just a forwarding address through beeblebear.net

Grr... I don't need this right now. Come to think of it, I don't need it any time. Such is life.
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I'm getting a bit worried about this conference.

Six weeks ago I asked them to book accommodation for me. I've heard nothing about it from them and have just given up and booked a hotel in New Delhi. They send all of the emails to my co-author, asking him to ask me to do things - even when he passes them on to me and I then reply directly to them. They have asked me to chair not only one but two sessions - both of which are running at the same time.

I am getting the distinct impression that the organisers of ICTIM 2008 couldn't organise a party in a pub (to put it politely). It doesn't help that I am a slightly nervous traveller, mainly because I've got used to flights being delayed and so forth, and the fact that I'm travelling to India on my own (something I pointed out to the organisers) is rather daunting. The bank has already told me that they can't provide rupees and that I'll have to get them at Heathrow.

My response to all of this is to tell myself that doughty Englishwomen have been travelling to India alone for several hundred years, and if they could do it then so can I. So I shall pull myself together, stiffen my upper lip and make myself a couple of good long linen travelling skirts.

Today I take my first dose of anti-malarials. S tells me that the temperature is likely to be too hot for mosquitos but understands my taking extra precautions. He's been an absolute treasure providing ideas and information for me - being from India (although from Kashmir) he's familiar with how things work. I have instructions to take bottled water with me, plus I now know which of the local bottled waters to buy.
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It is now the final week of lectures.

Not the final week of teaching - next week will be revision lectures - but the final week of new material. I managed to get the multi-threading lecture finished on Friday, which was good, so now I just have to finish the networking basics lecture before Wednesday and all will be well. Apart from the exam papers and the marking of coursework, that is... :)

I collected L from his hotel this morning and took him into the office. I managed to find an office for him complete with computer - which is more than S has, even though I requested one for him several weeks before his arrival. I imagine it'll arrive next Monday, given that he's leaving on Friday.

After work L had a bit of a wander around town before I collected him to bring him back here for dinner. The evening light was quite striking so we did a quick detour up to Hlíðarfjall for the view down onto the town. I'm quite surprised that the ski slopes weren't open, as there was certainly a lot of snow up there. Maybe it's just open at weekends at present .

We've had a very pleasant evening discussing computing, music, mathematics and, of course, our respective academic institutions and the countries and systems within which they sit. The evening also involved quite a lot of Icelandic pastries such as vinarbrauð and kleinurhringur. Oh, and Icelandic beer, one of which - Víking - has won medals at Belgian beer festivals.

Over the next couple of days we'll do the normal departmental dinner and a run out to Mývatn. Any excuse to go off to the blue mud zone and the geothermal pool.
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I'm back from the bus station after collecting our visiting lecturer.

He'd arrived in Iceland a couple of days ago and has spent his first days here investigating the Reykjavík region, then got the bus up here today. The bus journey takes about six hours, although it does stop several times for comfort breaks and meals. If you can stand six hours in a coach it's not a bad way to see some of the intervening landscape, something you don't see from the much speedier air shuttle.

I was a little concerned for a few minutes, as I wasn't entirely sure where the bus would arrive. At this time last year only the SBA buses stopped at the main bus station - well, more of a car park with a tourist information centre than a bus station - while the TREX buses stopped down near the docks. When I drove down to the old TREX station there was nothing left, which was a bit worrying so I headed up to the main bus station and phoned a friend just to check. It didn't help, of course, that the bus was late, as usual.

The bus station is about 90 seconds walk from the hotel where L is staying. That's 90 seconds on foot, or about 3 minutes by car as one of the town's few one-way streets separate the two requiring you to go around to the traffic lights.
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I'm getting annoyed at my latest linguistic acquisition.

This is the 'Talk Now!' basic Icelandic disc, which is indeed MacOS X friendly but seems to have an annoying problem in its 'hard game'.

Actually there are two problems - one is a software problem, the other is a design problem. The game in question is a memory game, where you're shown a number of cards that are then turned face-down and you have to pick the card representing the appropriate Icelandic word or phrase. It increases in difficulty from two to six items in this manner, then from seven to eleven items it doesn't turn the cards face-down. The problem is, of course, that for the first half of the game you're expending a lot of effort attempting to remember the positions of the cards - which you're likely to do by repetition in your native language - rather than concentrating on the words themselves. Once you get to the 'open' cards you can focus on the language, but I'm not convinced that the first approach is a good way to do it.

The second problem is that once you've got about half-way through the categories in the hard memory game, the system starts reacting to non-existant mouse-clicks and crashing you out of the game back to the game selection page. This is particularly annoying as I'd initially kept on at each section until I got 100% before going on to the next. This is, of course, impossible when the program continually crashes in the later stages of the game.

In spite of this (and only having completed about 75% of the materials as a result) I've reached gold medal standard. :) This DVD is fairly basic stuff, much of which I'd already covered in the mostly useless Icelandic course I did here a couple of years ago. It'll be interesting to see how more complex the next two DVDs become.
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Memo to self: count the little victories.

It's been a long day, which can best be described in terms of the things I did and didn't do, in chronological order:

• Gave the rest of the network basics lecture in the computer architecture course. This was the hardware side rather than how the hardware links up to the software - that's next week.
  
• Gave my seminar, which was quite well attended by both staff and students and went reasonably well. I need to condense it quite a lot to turn it into a 10-minute conference presentation though.
  
• Worked my way out of a third-level interrupt to print, sign, scan and email a research agreement back to JPL. As the dean is away I'm standing in for him this week, and someone had to sign the faculty's agreement to collaborate on a research programme looking at primitive life forms in the local hot water vents. I did, I admit, get a momentary thrill at signing the institutional partnership form and sending it off to NASA (the NASA factor, not the vice-dean factor).
  
• Came to the rescue to two non-CS students who were giving their presentations using Macs. There were issues with the projector but between A and myself we managed to sort it out for them.
  
• Wandered down to have a look at all of the student presentations... and felt quite smug because my group had really excelled themselves and done a wonderful job of organising and setting up their 'stall'.
  
• Managed to lose about 6 slides worth of lecture whilst working my way out of another third-level interrupt, but did at least get the lecture finished and printed out even if I did eventually leave out the Sierpinski gasket problem.

Right now I feel the need for a lot of comfort food. And maybe a large gin and tonic.
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For the first time in what seems an age, I've finished almost everything I planned to do today.

I probably get more done than I feel I get done, but sometimes I need to count the little victories, the quanta of progress that I'm making through the week. Today, for instance, I ran a lab, wrote the powerpoints for my seminar tomorrow, did the initial changes to turn that powerpoint into the conference powerpoint, and wrote a problem sheet for tomorrow's lab. This is all good, although I'm becoming quite paranoid about things as I'm beginning to make mistakes due to the stress and workload. :( The only thing I didn't manage to finish was the final 10% of a lecture on recursion - I'm having one or two problems with a minimalist Sierpinski gasket program. All being well I'll finish that tomorrow.

After work I went shopping and made my first foray into the new Rúmfatalagerinn. It opened a fortnight ago as an extension of the old one. It's a little soulless compared to the older version - much larger and rather more like the one near Smáralind down south. Naturally there's more stock, but the sadly the fabric section hasn't expanded. This is unfortunate, as last week one of the other two fabric sellers closed down. I eventually picked up some of the patterned white quilting cotton to make shirts to take to India. Natural fabrics are essential, I'm told. These may well end up as kaftan-like rather than classic shirts.
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That's sad in the manner of a sad SF geek.

This morning I went to one of the big high-level university management meetings. It was in Icelandic, of course, so I gave myself a rather unfriendly stress headache as I tried to follow the proceedings and the resulting discussions. It's so much easier to follow the presentations because I can generally get the gist of the things, but I do have something of a problem following the spoken versions.

This was sad, but not amusing - and sad in another sense of the word. The thing that amused me was the act of signing into the meeting. It was the standard name and affiliation business, so I naturally complied. Unfortunately I cannot yet spell the name of my department - cue copy and paste from the university website - Viðskipta- og raunvísindadeild. I'd just about got the hand of upplýsingarteiknideild when we were merged, and with this one I get about as far as Við-something og raun-something. Fortunately this is a mouthful even for the locals, so the name is often abbreviated.

There I was, then, signing into this meeting as Nik Whitehead, Vor.

As a fan of Lois McMaster Bujold's novels I had to smile. :)
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I think we've acquired another two fencers.

This takes the total up to twelve local fencers, which would (I believe) be a good number for a well-established shire, let alone one which is still incipient. I've gone back to the hour lesson plus hour sparring system so tonight I did the introduction to tempo and measure. It took a little time for folks to settle back down into drilling at slow speeds (rather than just sparring at full speed) but by the end of the hour they were definitely getting the hang of it again.

Another nice point was that S and D stopped by, and although D was very skeptical about the whole fencing business S pulled on mask and gloves and picked up an epée. He even managed to get a couple of good hits on B. I'm very pleased, not only that S had a chance to try this out but also that my fencers are safe enough and civilised enough to be let loose on complete beginners.

We didn't actually have all twelve present tonight, but even so the seven of us who went for post-practice chocolate cake at Bláa Kannan filled our usual circular table. We may well have to start sitting at a larger table. :)
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