A return to blog delinquency

I just got my weekly email from OUCS detailing the hits to my various pages over the last week. Each time I receive this bulletin and see people have been looking here and discovering that nothing must have happened to me since December 27th I feel a little bit guilty. So here’s a shot at filling in the gaps.

I think my last posting must have been just before I went to France with my parents after Christmas. That trip was somewhat rustic as we got totally and utterly snowed in to our house – which is on a small and very steep hill in rather remote countryside. In order to get to the house we ended up in a big skid, and were then stuck there for several days. As an indicator of how slippy it was, the kids up the hill were using the road outside our front door for tobogganing. It was an opportunity to take some cool pictures, and it was very rustic cooking food and boiling water on the fire when we lost electricity. Incidentally, there are some additional family Christmas photos here.

Just after the New Year I returned to Oxford so I could get some research done before all the fun and distractions of term time. Most of my work since then has been towards a paper for a medical, signal and information processing conference in July. Unfortunately the exotic location for this one is Glasgow, so no free holidays for me this year. There will, however, be a (not-so-free) break that should prove more exotic than Glasgow. Last week I bought some flights to Melbourne via Hong Kong so I can go and visit the Australian branch of the family. It will be the first time I’ve got to meet Thea, so I’m pretty excited about it all. Plus generally it will be a lot warmer and sunnier in Australia than it is in Oxford at the moment.

Somehow it is already seventh week which means there are only two weeks left this term, a rather scary thought. Although it does mean my days will no longer be taken up with teaching and Spanish and Mandarin lessons, so I will be able to get more research done. Next term I’m going to be MCR IT Officer – I did stand for President but I only managed to get 40% of the vote (which isn’t enough if the other guy gets 60%! ;) ). Still it’s probably for the best if I intend on finishing my DPhil at some stage in the near future – which is definitely something I want to do, not because I necessarily want to stop working on what I am, but because if just means I have more options open to me.

I would feel silly if I made yet another vacuous promise to be more attentive to my blog, although I hope that once I am on the road again I will use this as a travel diary like I used to.

Over and out,


Ali