On the way to London

I really do not like getting up so early, but I had no other choice: in order to be in time at the meeting in Granary Wharf at 9:30, I had to take the 6:05 train leaving from Leeds. What an ungodly hour in the morning!

Contrary to what many people say, trains in the UK are very punctual. At least I had no contrary experience, all trains I had ever travelled on here, left spot on time. This one is no exception: exactly at 6:05 it began to roll out. Slight rain, which cleared after a driving south for a while.

The "National Express" train has free WiFi, giving me an opportunity to post this blog entry here.

The meeting today is a workshop, organised by EPSRC on the topic "Maths of Life". The participants were invited, after submitting a one-page summary about experience and ideas. My area of interest which I pitched here is the "mathematics of music". I hope that this topic will attract some interest by others, and that thiw might lead to joint projects.

The meeting will end late afternoon. I reserved for a later train, so that I will be able to walk a bit around London and visit places where I have not yet been.

Railway Weekend

On Saturday I visited the Middleton Railway here in Leeds. This is the "World's Oldest Working Railway", in operation since 1758. A little gem, somewhat hidden away. Volunteers operate it on weekends. running either diesel (on Saturday) or steam engines (Sunday). There is parking at Moor Road Station.




On Sunday I went to the North Yorkshire Moors Railway, to see the newly built Tornado A1 steam engine. It would run there from Friday through Monday, and again on the next weekend. Unfortunately the Tornado had developed a problem on Saturday evening and was now being repaired. Many people who had come specifically to this event, were quite disappointed. The morning train which was supposed to be hauled by the Tornado, was instead hauled by the "Sir Nigel Gresley", the fastest UK steam locomotive. I took a few pictures from it at Pickering Station, then went out into the countryside to take videos from steam trains driving by.



Later I visited the Pickering Model Railroad Exhibition, where I found a rare specimen: Stephenson's Liverpool-Manchester train, with the "Rocket".

Busy schedule at work

On Thursday I drove to Grimsby, for a meeting regarding a potential project. Very interesting area, with a mix of industry (oil refineries and formerly fishing) and rural landscape. The motorway was empty, this part of UK appears to be somewhat "off the beaten track".

Later the day more meetings at work. In the evening I attended once again the Creative Networks event. An interesting speaker: Ajaz Ahmed, founder of FreeServe presented "Lessons Learned" about being successful in the IT sector.

And on Friday again two scheduled meetings. Fortunately these are all quite interesting, related to projects that I am working on or intend to. There is good potential for software development on mobile phones.

The Rain is back

Yesterday the good weather period ended: it began to rain here in Leeds. Today this continued, with some calm periods, but then some showers fell (as can be seen on the Leeds Met webcam).

Busy week, some rescheduling of meetings. Interesting meetings still ahead: about the development of possible applications for mobile phones with GPS.

An Excursion to Hebden Bridge

Today was again a very sunny Sunday. Brian wanted to visit once again Hebden Bridge. We had been there 2 weeks ago, but he had suddenly to leave. At that time, we had visited the Alternative Technology Centre in Hebden Bridge, which is located right next to the canal.

This time we started in Heptonstall, a small village above the valleys. Visited the grave of the poet Sylvia Plath who is buried up here.


Then explored one of the valleys where remains of the Lumb Mills. Trees have taken back the nature in that valley which 100 years ago must have been a busy industrial place. It is a strange site to see huge chimneys in the middle of a forest...



All pictures from this excursion are on Flickr in this set.

Open Day at Leeds Met

This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, Leeds Metropolitan University is organising an Open Day, for prospective students to visit the campus, talk to lecturers, and inform themselves about studying.

For the first time, the main venue was the newly opened Rose Bowl near the Civic Quarter, across form Civic Hall. For this weekend, Innovation North has their information stands in room 317 and 320. A good dozen of members of staff were present today and will be tomorrow as well. We had quite a good turnout of visitors, despite the weather which was tempting for some outdoor activities, although in the afternoon there was a brief drizzle.

Brief Travel to Germany

Back in Leeds, after a brief travel to Germany. I left Leeds on Sunday evening, returned on Wednesday evening. The weather was nice and sunny. Like here in Leeds actually. The usual end-of-April warm weather period has arrived about a week ago and has warmed Europe up, after the long winter.


Good food - in Germany is now the season for asparagus. In many countries, the green asparagus is popular. But in Germany, the white asparagus is the most widespread. The green one is harder and has a "heartier" taste, whereas the white one is softer, can sometimes have a bitter off taste, but can be exquisitely delicious - especially the thick ones!







(disclaimer: the above pictures were not all taken at one single meal :) )

Resuming Blog Posting

These past few weeks I have been posting nothing on this blog, although I would have some things to post: a heavy flu, a small bump received by my Smart car from the driver behind me (no damage), a few weekend excursions, riding on the footplate of a steam locomotive, taking pictures and videos, and being very busy at work with both the regular routine activities (marking of student work) and trying to get funding for my research and development work. I have resumed active software development for Windows Mobile, .NET, C#, video capture, network access. I also visited a highschool career event and represented our uni there. A group of our PhD students from Austria visited us in March for a Mini-Symposium.

Lately I did a statistics: I looked at the work emails from about 3 days and collected the ones that relate to actual tasks for me: there were about 20 different task strands, linking to a variety of immediate actions to be done. And that were only things related to immediate work - none of my other projects were included there (e.g. my music activities, the impeding web presence update, the work on my book, ...). Usual, what a person can handle simultaneously is about 7 parallel things. So it appears that I do have to do one important thing: prioritise my activities. Well, that is what I did, so I was quite slow in responding to personal emails, in updating this blog, and in getting my photos sorted on Flickr. I hope to have more time in the next few weeks for more frequent updates and for staying in contact.

Desctruction of the Cologne City Archive

It has been briefly in the news on TV here in the UK that on 4.March in Cologne a house crashed down as a consequence of subway construction, but I only found out more details when reading Spiegel Online: The building which had collapsed was the city archive of Cologne. Two people died. The archive had contained the complete documentation of the city, starting from the 12th century. Many 10,000 of documents, books, historic materials are lost. The legacy of nobel laureate Heinrich Boell which just had been moved recently into the archive, is lost. The cultural damage is immeasurable.

This leads to the question why such documents were not stored appropriately in safe-like conditions, in metal containers, or something that would prevent damage. It also raises the question about the subway construction in Cologne which is highly controversial. Maybe it should have been built deeper, or not underneath the historic centre of Cologne. Now a lot of protest against completing this subway line is starting to appear.

New types of blogs

In December 2007, I had thought about the possibility to create a modification of the usual "web log = blog": the "news log = slog". It has not yet caught on... a google search did not reveal any deep insight, except that slog is a term in cricket sports. Interestingly, one site defines slog (among other very interesting definitions) as a boring blog (like this one here...). So it might not be a good idea to call anything related to news logging "slogging".

There are actually already other derivations from the usual blog out there: a "plog" is derived from a variety of meanings: Poem blog, project blog, portfolio blog, private blog, according to Wikipedia. One could also add another version: "past log = plog". This would be a unique use of blogging: to use post-dating (editing posting dates to represent a much earlier posting time than the actual post is made) to write now about events in the past. Somehow this would of course defeat the real purpose of blogs, to be a true log of current events. But it sometimes is necessary to change the date, as the entry into the blog can sometimes not be made immediately, but only later (e.g. because of unavailability of online access). In that case, the blog entry would rightfully have the date of the event itself, not the date of the posting. I do this here sometimes, when on travel: write a blog entry offline and just store it on my laptop, then post it later when back home.

But this could be even taken further: Blogger here allows to put posting dates starting from 1.1.1970. One could now create blogs from old journals, or could even make completely fictional blogs. This would truly be a new literary form, as the blog author can now, at this time, write and post as if (s)he is in the past. And this could actually be a form to tell a story, completely fictional. It would be interesting if writers would start to experiment with this and write stories that are told as blogs. This would have two audiences: the people who would follow this blog, live as it is being written and posted, and others who would read the whole blog, once it is finished, as a kind of narrated story, based solely on the blog entries. One could envision developing stories that are followed and read, even as they are not yet completed - really a new way of accessing literature!

Anyone aware of such efforts by someone? If I had some writing talent, I would try this myself...
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Just found out that these kind of blogs actually exist: "Fictional blog = flog". There are quite a few of those out.