Into the Summer Break

The Leeds Met Headingley Campus has become quiet now. The final year students had their Graduation Ceremonies last week and have now left the university. Many members of staff are taking their holidays now in summer, so the buzzing in front of the James Graham Building has come to a halt. Instead, the dismantling crews have begun to take the white Marquee apart which stood here on the Acre the past few weeks.

In September, the annual Staff Development Festival will be mostly in the new Rose Bowl, so there is no need anymore for the Marquee.

The Headingley Caedmon Webcam which I set up, has been featured on the Latest News page, and I have recorded for every day a set of image sequences which could be made into a time-lapse video. Now the camera will record an image series of the dismantling and the following recultivation of the Acre.

I am making the executable of the image capture software freely available for download/installation. In addition to the image capture, I have written a small utility for automatically placing an image from a webserver onto the Windows Desktop - is also available online. In the future I will release the source code of these projects as OpenSource, but I have to do a bit of code cleaning before.

"Cigarettes, Whisky, and Wild Wild Women"

The above headline was the motto of Henry Allingham and he claimed that this was the reason for his longevity. He was 113 years old when he died this Saturday, and for one month he was the oldest man on Earth. Born in 1896, he was one of the last witnesses of the whole 20th century, linking the Victorian Empire with our current times. It must be fascinating to talk to people like him and hear the accounts of historical events from someone who lived through them. May he rest in peace after his long life.

His motto shows a very positive and humorous attitude. I myself do not smoke and very rarely drink Whisky, so that leaves only one thing... and that is all I am going to write about it.

Graduation Week 2009

The Leeds Met Graduation 2009 was held this past week at the Headingley Campus, in the white Marquee on the Acre. Each day another faculty had their celebration, and on Friday it was the turn of our Faculty Innovation North. In two celebrations, our students and the students from the Regional University Network were handed their award. Two honorary degrees were also conferred: to entrepreneur James Caan and to the CEO and Founder of MOBO, Kanya King. Later that afternoon, a reception was held to honour our former Dean Cath Orange who is leaving the university in a few months.

Away Day

Today our faculty had an "Away Day". From my work in Germany I associate this kind of day with "a day out", a "Betriebsausflug" with picnic and barbecue. But in the UK this appears to be different: the away-day is actually a day of work, just slightly away from the usual offices. Ours was in the Leeds Met Old School Board. There were actually very interesting discussions about the past year in the faculty, improving the student experience, and planning forward for the coming academic year. Was a good opportunity for all the academics in the faculty to talk about what worked and what did not work. Next week will be another such away-days, this time only for the Professional Group.

Graduation Week

This week there are the Leeds Met Graduation ceremonies, held at the Headingley Campus in the Marquee. I have set up the Leeds Met Caedmon Webcam to record an image every 30 seconds during the day. Friday will be our Graduation of Innovation North, followed by a celebration of our former Dean Cath Orange.

Visitors from India

Since my return from the US, I have been busy at work, catching up with things that were waiting for me. But the main activity was that our friends Falguni, Mitali, and Kiran from Anand in Gujarat, India had arrived on 22.June here in Leeds. We had visited them last November, and now they completed the visit exchange. Brian had taken care of them for the first week, and right when I returned they were on a visit in Stratford-upon-Avon. I picked them all up from there. On the weekend of 4.July Jane had organised a conference at the Northern College Barnsley about "Global Perspectives in Adult Learning", in which I took part on two days. Then this Wednesday the group went to Malham in the Yorkshire Dales for an excursion, and on Thursday I had organised a meeting at Leeds Met with them and a few people at Leeds Met with an interest in Climate Change. On Friday evening our friends left back to India.