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.

Scorching Heat here in UK!

The summer has arrived here in England. This weekend had been plain blue sky, without any cloud. The heat reached unbearable dimensions: the thermometer climbed up and might have even exceeded 25 C (75F) - unbelievable!

But I had to work: deadline for marking students' work was today, and I could not use the nice weather but had instead to read reports. My bad mood about this is of course reflected in the marks!

(just kidding)

Here is a picture of our Leeds Met campus in Headingley: the Caedmon Building. My office is the room right above the entrance door.

A few days off - Excursions in East Yorkshire

The weather back in Leeds is nice. Finally summer seems to be here, after 3 months of rainfall. But in Yorkshire, the temperature is always about 5 deg C colder than in the south of England. London almost seems tropical, seen from here in the North. I take a few days off, to do a few trips in the countryside and to the East Coast. Walking along the cliffs near Bridlington, going with the bicycle through York and towards Selby. A nice cherry tree near the bikeway (apparently without any owners) provides excellent refreshment fruit!


There are a few farms where you can pick your own fruit, for example the Balloon Tree Farm.



Excellent black and red currants grow there!




The coast north of Bridlington appears to bne very remote. Not many tourists, just quiet countryside, abruptly ending at the white chalk cliffs.

... and it is raining again!

Headingley Campus


Near the City Campus


Along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal

Torrential Rain

The weather forecast looked bleak - more rain coming. And it came today. Lots of flooding in East Yorkshire. 900 people trapped at their work places in Sheffield.
A man dies due to the flood.

Here in Leeds, some parts of the areas near the docks in the vicinity of the city centre (south of the train station) are flooded. Fortunately, our cottage is at the side of a hill, where the water can flow down... but there is some water seeping through the old walls.

This June had the most rainfall since they kept metreorological records.

Lots of rain lately...

View from my office on Caedmon Hall.

The month of April has been extrodinarily warm and sunny. But May and now June have been much wetter, with many days of rainfall and generally cool temperatures. Last week was basically constant rain, and on the night from Thursday to Friday there was such a downpour that the whole Yorkshire region suffered a lot of flooding. Many houses had their cellars under water, and people said that they had not seen such rain in the last 30 years, or even since the 1950s. This means there was some rain like this already at that time in the past...

Only on Sunday there was some sun which we used for a short hike in Ilkley Moor. Yesterday night was some thunder and flashes of lightning, something that is relatively rare here up north - at least during the last year I had not seen many thunderstorms here in Leeds.