Malaga - Ronda - Sevilla

Dear All,

I have lost this post from Sevilla twice now, so I´m probably not going to be very lyrical. Ironically each time I lost it was when I tried to copy it to the clipboard so I didn´t have to worry about losing it! This time I´m using notepad, which will hopefully be more reliable...

I got to Malaga just fine despite the worry of delays at UK airports due to increased security. I met Hilary in Malaga who had made it up from Morocco with no problems. It was a good time to be in Malaga (asside of a lack of hotel availability, that meant we ended up staying somewhere a bit nicer than our means) as it was the ´feria de malaga´an annual festival that we had a great time at.

The next day we managed to arrive at the bus station and step on to the most scenic bus route to Ronda, our next stop. Ronda is one of the ´white towns´beautiful towns situated on tops of hills in stunning countryside. Often fortified by the Moors. The bus stopped at many which meant we could check them out on the way to the main one, Ronda.

From Ronda we head to Sevilla where we have been for three days. Generally the weather has been warm and sunny but there was absolutely torrential rain on Thursday morning, which was vey random and caught us (and Sevilla) off-guard. There´s plenty more cool stuff to see here (cathedral, palace, towers, and the roman ruins at ITallica that we visited this afternoon).
Tomorrow we´re off to Cordoba on the high speed train. Then it´s villages in the Sierra Nevada and finally Granada.

Cheers,

Ali

Off to Spain! (and finally some decent software for stitching panoramas)

Hi,

I'm off to Spain for ten days on Sunday, after Tim and Alex's wedding on Saturday. I have spent quite some time planning the itinerary for the tour of Andalusia. We will go to Malaga, Ronda, Sevilla, Cordoba, Granada and the Sierra Nevada mountains. There are lots of palaces, mosques, forts, and ruins to explore so it should be great. It will also be a chance to practice the Spanish I have been learning for the last two years...

One good thing about taking photos this holiday is that I will no longer have to worry about taking panoramas and never finding the time to stitch them. In the past I have complained about the failings of stitching software, such as that included in adobe photoshop (which produced the panorama above). You have to align the images manually, the joins are obvious, and sometimes it fails altogether. Well I'm really pleased to have found autostitch. You just tell the software which files to turn into a panorama and it arranges them all for you and assembles them in a really good seamless panorama. No human intervention at all. Great stuff, as you can see from the panorama below taken in Mount Cook National Park -


OK, must finish packing and then go to bed. I'll try to write a little bit during my travels if I can.

Ali

2006 Norrington Table Puts New College in Third Place

I see that The University now officially publishes the Norrington table on it's website. The Norrington table was devised by Sir Arthur Norrington, president of Trinity College in 1962. The table ranks and rates Oxford colleges on the exam results of undergraduate students taking their finals. Publication of the table on the university website is a big change in policy as the university apparently used to try to prevent the list's publication, but it published a table for the first time in 2005 due to large inaccuracies in the unofficial table drawn up by a team of students and newspapers.

It's always good fun to look at: this year first place is taken by Merton, followed by Balliol, and third place is shared between New College and Magdalen. Somerville managed to come mid-table and St Catz was only a little lower. I'm very surprised by Keble which has fallen from tenth to twenty-sixth - unfortunately the university doesn't list last years ranking on the page, although I'm sure that will be in the tables in tomorrow's press reports (in the meantime, data for 2000-2005 can be found here).

Time to get back to my research...


Ali