Travelling to Athens

The taxi is waiting on time - 4am. At Leeds Bradford I have breakfast. Slightly pathetic ambience. The flight to AMS leave on time, I arrive 25 minutes earlier than scheduled in Schiphol. Not much time for browsing around, have to go to Gate C9, to the Schengen area. Sitting in the next plane, I see my suitcase as it moves into the plane on the conveyor belt.

Flying over Germany - it is snowy down there. I sleep a bit. When I wake up I see the Alps: Inntal, Oberaudorf, Scheffau, Wilder Kaiser. I identify Kitzbuehel, then the Grossglockner. A warm roll is served, together with a box of small things, among them a salad. I wanted to read more, but fall again asleep. Snow also above the Macedonian mountains. Then preparing for landing.

Islands, costs, towns, olive trees. Some archaeological digs. Landing at the Athens airport. Quite modern, just opened a few years ago. My suitcase comes almost last. The directions towards the train station are unclear: the Greek wording for "to Metro" is crossed out, but the English version "To Trains" still stands, so I follow the signs. A bright sun hits the eye, blue sky. But not warm.

Indeed, the Metro is not going since a few days, due to construction work, but the "Suburban Train" is. I had not read about that suburban train anywhere on the web, but on my map printout I see it as the dashed line.

The first sight outside of the airport: the big blue/yellow IKEA. As always, this is comforting and worrying at the same time: comforting, because in case I would ever move to here, I could get inexpensive decent furniture. Discomforting, because this globalisation removes the individual experience of regions in the world. The IKEA store was also one of the first things I had seen in Beijing in summer 2007. There were three IKEAs in Los Angeles. There is one in Leeds. One in Munich. They are everywhere. Ok, the world is growing together, and some common standards are getting accepted. But it is also a bit sad, to see these blue box buildings in every corner of the world. I had not seen one in India...

The suburban train goes quite fast: my GPS shows 176 km/h. Get off at the station Nepatziotissa, then change to the metro green line. Quite a long distance into town still. One more change of trains, to the red line, then I walk out of the subway station exit. As I am trying to locate my hotel, I realise that I forgot to print the map. I vaguely remember that it is two blocks north of the station, so I begin to walk in the direction. It is sunny, so I do not mind. Soon I realise that I am in the wrong street - need to be one parallel. Finally arrive at the hotel "Titania".

Twestival Tonight

Today in the evening, 18:00, there will be a Twestival here in Leeds, organised by the NTI of Leeds Met at the Old Broadcasting House. This is a meeting of all the Twitterers who use the online service Twitter.

Btw, my Twitter ID is "rbehringer" - anyone who wants to "follow" me there, is welcome!

Sonic Spatial Perspectives

On Friday and Saturday, the conference "Sonic Spatial Perspectives" was held in Gandhi Hall at Leeds Metropolitan University. Our Nikos Stavropoulos had invited Jonti Harrison from University of Birmingham to set up the BEAST (Birmingham ElectroAcoustic Sound Theatre) here. 72 loudspeakers were distributed across Gandhi Hall, allowing the creation of an incredible sound space. Derek Hales from University Huddersfield opened the conference as the Director of C3KE, who funded this event. Then Jonti Harrison gave the keynote talk to introduce the system. During these two days, there were 3 concerts with acousmatic music, two workshops, and a round table discussion. Basically, the playing of a pre-recorded spatialised piece still requires an performance by someone who is "diffusing" the sound at the mixer console, operating an array of sliders which can be mapped to speakers or speaker groups. One point of the discussions was how that interface could be improved: instead of controlling the speaker output, one might imagine an interface which allows to control the sound sources directly.

"Worst" Snow in 18 Years - UK is in Crisis

A nice snowfall started on Sunday evening, with big flakes falling down. Today in the morning, the streets were covered with a few cm of snow. And as it happened in December, also this time the traffic broke down.
One of the reasons is of course that there is very rarely true snowfall here in the UK - winters are usually mild, and the temperature rarely falls below 0 C. But when it does, and when then a few snowflakes fall down, the country cannot cope with it because it is not as prepared as for example Canada, or the Northern US. There are too few "critters" (these are the vehicles which spay sand and salt). So many of the side roads remain snowy.
Also, nobody here ever puts winter tires onto their vehicles; I am not sure if they even exist here. So I experienced today when driving, what it means to drive uphill on a road full of snow sleet just with regular summer tires, and to feel the sliding to the side etc.
Snow kept intermittently falling today, sometimes just a bit of flurry, sometimes thick heavy flakes.
The weather report says we will get more snow through the night.

Tan Dun: Internet Symphony "Eroica"

A few weeks ago, in our Leeds Met VC's daily reflection he pointed to the project Internet Symphony, where composer Tan Dun invited musicians to upload a video of themselves playing an instrument as part of a virtual performance of that symphony, with the instrumentalists participating through their video. I found that idea very interesting and planned to do my own contribution there, using computer instruments and synthesizers for this performance. This would not be eligible for the competition, as they only want solo instruments. But I could always extract a solo instrument from the whole score.

The deadline for submissions was this Wednesday. I had somehow thought that it would be Friday, 30.1. but since my entry would not be eligible anyway, it did not matter. And today in the morning I completed the MIDI rendition and recorded a few videos. Stitched them together, not a really creative or original video... I tried to record myself when editing, but that proved not feasible, as I made many "typos" and mistakes on the music keyboard. So I only recorded the PC screen, with different parts of info showing. Surely one could have done a better job...

Well, here it is, my first music video:

In Newcastle

This Thursday an event took place in Newcastle, organised by the Yorkshire Universities organisation: we visited the Technology Centre of Procter and Gamble, to see how they deal with innovation and academic relations.

I drove up with the car. It was foggy, but the visibility was quite good - several 100 m, and traffic was ok. It took me about 2 1/2 hours each way. The landscape along the motorway looked very mysterious, the bare trees disappearing in the fog.

Event: IgniteNorth

On Thursday evening, the first IgniteNorth event took place at the Old Broadcasting House in Leeds. Short presentations (nl more than 5 minutes each) were given by speakers from a wide variety of tehcnology backgrounds - very interesting!

Travel: Vorarlberg - Student PhD Conformation Vivas

On Sunday, I left for a short travel to Austria: The Leeds Met International Faculty has PhD students in Austria who have enrolled in the new "European PhD" program. In this program, their thesis will be supervised by people from both the UK and their home country. My contribuytion to this supervision is to provide "German language", as these students can write their thesis in their mother language.

Unfortunately the hotel had no internet, so I was not able to send updates However, I have tried something new: TwitPic which allows to send pictures to Twitter. On the left side of this blog here is an automatically updatd list of the latest pictures. I learned about TwitPic after the reports on the news about last week's airplane water landing in NY.

The travel was ok. I went with KLM from Leeds through Amsterdam, then further on to Zurich. The train ride to Dornbirn was easy: a fast train (EC) to Bregenz, then a local train to Dornbirn. On the way back it was more complicated: There were many small segments, as at the time when I wanted to be at the airport, no direct train was scheduled. The fastest route to Zurich Airport (Kloten) goes close to Lake Konstanz. But I chose a more southern route: through Buchs and Sargans. I had hoped to see a few nice mountains in snow. However, it rained on Tuesday, and the clouds were hanging very low, so I had no mountain visibility. But the ride was still enjoyable: very scenic railway along the Walensee and the Zurichsee.

Our Leeds Met VC, Prof. Simon Lee, resigns

Today in the daily reflection of our Vice-Chancellor, Professor Simon Lee, he placed a news bomb in the last sentence of the first paragraph: "... I have decided, as the chair of governors, Ninian Watt, announces today, that this is to be my last academic year here." I was hired here at Leeds Met under his leadership, and I will surely miss him. He has brought great momentum and dynamism to the university and has initiated the transformation of Leeds Met into Leeds Carnegie University. His departure now feels like the end of an era.

I wish him very well in whatever new endeavour he will be engaged in!

(It is very interesting to see the kind of anonymous backstabbing that some members of staff display in their replies to the Times Higher Education article on this...)

Happy New Year 2009!

The new year is already a few days old... I started the year off with a cold. On 1. January my voice was completely gone, probably an effect from the quite chilly weather. I had spent the christmas holidays with my family in Germany, but came back before the New Year.

Now I had to skip the first few days of work, due to slight temperature. I even went to the GP (for non-UK people: this is the General Practitioner, my "Hausarzt") who recommended me to get a good rest and avoid making other people sick.

But tomorrow, Thursday, I will go back to work. I had many plans for things to be done during those days off, but I was unfortunately unable to do them. Maybe I will find some time during the ntext months.

To all of you who read this blog: best wishes for a happy, healthy, and successful New Year 2009!