Got the second Hamish MacBeth DVD today. Bit irritated to find it short one episode; ho hum. Watched Wee Jock's Lament; excellent episode. It mixes humour and death, killing and repentance, and throws in ghost sub-plot. In lesser hands, it could have been cheesy on a stick; but it's so lightly done that it worked; the ghost appearances really freaked me out, the pain of the loss touched me, and the laying of Wee Jock's stone had me in tears. Did the BBC really never repeat these?

I'd totally forgotten about the upcoming John MacLaughlin gig; in got tickets on the day of the gig. Glad I did. He was playing with Shakti — mellow, acoustic (well except for half the instruments), Indian.

If you'd only heard him recorded, you might feel that a John MacLaughlin gig is to be impressed, rather than entertained. The speed, fluency and virtuosity of the performance is astounding; but on record, you wonder whether there is more. This music needs performance, though; live, the flurry of notes blends, the music Star breathes; it's hypnotic, engrossing, compelling and, frankly, exhausting. I came out with knees hardly working.

I was slightly irritated by the formality of the setting of the music, though: the introductions were Hollywood-gushing; a 2 hour set with no interval was bladder-bursting.

I got the metro home; bought a ticket which I didn't need as the SAGE tickets count; took till two thirds of the way across the river toward Gateshead, before we realised we were heading in the wrong direction. Senility approachs

Yes, today, I have officially become middle aged; I have reached that time in life where I have had to buy my second can of WD40. For some people, WD40 is a passing thing; mechanics get through tons of the stuff. For most of us, though, it's that essentially accessory that you can't do with out, but rarely need. Losing the straw can be a highly traumatic experience, which can leave you scared for minutes afterwards. Your first independent can is a rite of passage, a move to adulthood.

It's, perhaps, a sobering reflection that at the current rate of usage, I will own two more cans before I leave this mortal coil, or have no further use for the stuff.

Still, bike's running better, so mustn't grumble, eh?

I've been trying to get the University to fill in a copyright disclaimer for the Free Software Foundation. This was painful at the Manchester and looks like it's going to be similarly so here. So far no one has any clue about who I should even email; I'm working on the business directorate who are supposed to be in charge of IP. So far, they are ignoring my email; soon, I am going to go and sit on their door in person, till I get a reply.

This doesn't bode well though. When I tried to get a login for submit.ac.uk, it took about a week and a paper chase of 6 people before I finally got to the one who knew.

Today, UNISON were on strike over changes to their pension rights. The comment above came from the BBC news website. It's an odd point of view; the private sector magically creates wealth, the public sector spends it. So, someone on tax exempt business lunches is creating wealth — at least if they are private sector. I, on the other hand, when researching new knowledge that enables biologists to do new things, am just a sponger, because I work in the public sector.

At least now I understand the PFI: while the NHS would previously have built hospitals using public sector workers, thereby consuming wealth, now they use private sector workers, thereby creating wealth; this is quite remarkable, given that they are doing the same work, paid from the same source, and achieving the same end. Whoever came up that idea must have been very clever indeed.

I'm a huge fan of Unison, the file synchroniser. I use it religiously; half of my system is based around it. It has a few quirks, however, and today I fell into one of them. I'm sure I've been here before, but I couldn't remember the cause.

Essentially, it gives a cryptic message about the transferred file disappearing. The basic reason is this; Unison can't cope with a path been included for synchronisiation twice; it twices to synch the file twice, and each time messes with the other.

Well, two gigs, and one night of extreme technqi-ness, had left me tired, so I spent the weekend doing very little; more vids.

I'm trying out online DVD rental and managed to get hold of a copy of the first season of Hamish Macbeth. I was a bit nervous: when this came out, I thought it was great, and I didn't want to find out that my memory decieved me. Sure enough, it was fabulous; funny, tightly plotted, closely observed, cynical and black.

The rest of the weekend has involved stupid quantities of Star Trek — also good, but continually spoiled by the tendancy for the script writers to want everything to turn out swimmingly. And, of course, Wesley Crusher who is as irritating now as he was then.

Simple meal today; onion, a suede and quorn mince, fried for a while (yes, with chili and garlic flakes), then simmered with tomato puree, and thicked with Oxo cubes and gravy granules. Add mashed potato, peas, beans and spinach. Thick, warm and filling. Pity, really, that I got around to this just as the weather is starting to get warm.

And, yes, it should have been a pie. I've clearly been scared by the pastry experience of last weekend.

Thursday night was Salsa Celtica at the SAGE. They're a large band which combine, obviously enough, Salsa and folk. They were absolutely amazing; the two forms of music blended naturally; perhaps, this is not so surprising as they are both hard core dance music. Rhythmically, the mix was better than melodically; I wasn't sure about the Northumbrian pipes which are difficult instruments. The chanters are nasty to tune at the best of times.

This was also the first time I've been in hall 2 of the Sage. Much nicer than hall 1; oddly, though, despite having a dance flour on the lowest level, they choose to lay out seats right at the front; get up and dance guys!

Was good to see some friends from Manchester up north. Michael Parkin and Dean Kuo came up and talked about a protocol that they are developing which is based around contract law; the idea is that this is a form of negotiation which they should just be able to lift and reapply to computer science.

It was a good talk which caused lots of interest. Indeed, I was surprised that they got through all their slides; there were so many questions; felt like much more of a discussion session.

Graham Coxon played the Newcastle Students Union last night. I felt nice and old; seemed terribly loud. Had a great time, though, bouncing up and down near the moshers at the front. Very talented guitarist, excellent band. I think he lacks as a front man: I always liked a bit of repartee, myself. Also, you have to wonder how long his disaffected youth lyrics are going to work. Noticed that James Taylor Quartet are coming up soon; I'll be there.

It was hard, tedious work, but, today, I finally dumped Outlook. Nearly six months of using it and it was driving me mad. No decent threading, slow interface, battery sapping processor requirement and a wrist-aching dependency on the mouse. Awful, truely awful.

So, it's back to Gnus.

The irony is, this is all unnecessary. Our local systems people, ISS, have a daft policy of actively trying to stop people using other clients. This is to reduce the amount of work they have to do, and to encourage the use of Outlooks shared calendars. So, they've switched the IMAP interface to Exchange off. Result, if you want the calenar, you have to use the Exchange email, and therefore, outlook; in my case, the cost of UI is such that it's not worth advantage of the shared calendar.

It's good to be back in the rapid environment of Gnus, though; I can move around quickly, I don't need the mouse and I can control what the email looks like. As a side effect, I'll be back in a programmable environment which will be great for returning coursework and the like.

Should we teach creationism in science? I have to say, I think, we should. I don't like the notion that you should separate out science from the rest of the world; is it alright to teach creationism outside science, but not in it; should we not be teaching, within science, the impact that science has on society?

I'm happy for science to stand up on its own merits; by attempting to protect it from creationism, we are also preventing from describing its strength.

Decided to do sausage rolls and beans after a hill walk on sunday. Nice idea, but I turned out to have no beans, no self-raising flour and forgot to put fat into the pastry. The pastry was solid. The sausage actually worked okay, though. Some dodgy Sosmix from down the road. Just add boiling water. I put in spinach and garlic flakes into the water first, and lots of pepper.

Pretty good, actually.

Future generations may call it a DVD session, but to me they are still vids. And I've watched quite a lot this weekend.

On Saturday, I went around to Dan's; he'd plugged his stereo in and projected the image on a wall, which worked well. We watched some Frazier, which I haven't seen for ages; it was good, the dialogue was fast and furious; sadly, for the authors, perhaps, the funniest thing was Daphne's old boyfriend, and his unfortunate attempt at an English accent. Only Dick Van Dyce ever said "lov-er-ly". After that, we watched Serenity. The cinematograph was good to watch, some reasonable fight scences and lots of very beautiful actors; ultimately, though, I didn't care about any of them.

The stand out vid, though, was today; I watched Sleepy Hollow. I didn't know it was a re-working of a fairy tale, Great film: Tim Burton's visuals were stunning, Miranda Richardson was outrageously evil and Johnny Depp's cheekbones were incisive as always.

Windows seems very confused; if you have two network interfaces, one with an internet connection and one without, windows seems unable to work it out; sometimes, it tries to access the world through the wrong one. Confusing. Answers on a post-card, please.

I've been using iTunes, recently, to play my music. It's quite a nice interface; it's sad, however, that it's crippleware. It doesn't include other peoples' shared music in its "recently played" or "most played" lists.

It also lacks a "watch directory" option; if you add music to a directory, you have to add all the files individually: add the directory, again, and everything becomes duplicated. Picasa has this, why not iTunes?

I've been listening to Groove Armarda a lot recently; their "Love Box" CD is phenomenal. The stand out track is "Think Twice". I was surprised to learn that the vocals where by Neneh Cherry. I remember when I first heard "Buffalo Stance" and, then, later "Manchild" a decade ago. It was great to hear her rich, sultry voice again. It draw you in; its warmth envelopes you; removes you from immediate.

Had a slightly daft conversation in the pub last night, covering science, industry and economics. As is inevitable from such a conversation, this failed to reach any big conclusions.

Thinking about it later, though, I've decided that research and teaching have fundamental economics. Thinking back into the past, my educational experiences have all been valuable to me; just not that valuable, at least not for a given piece of teaching. Teaching, then, seems to pay off, in that it's for a given course you chances of getting some return are high, but the return is likely to be small: anything you learn you are going to use, just not that often.

Science and research in general are very different; most of the research done in the world, more or less by definition, comes to nothing at all. Some of it, however, pays off in a huge way. Occasionally, a small piece of research changes the world. So, the chances of getting a return are small, but the potential return is huge.

It's odd that two such different activities have been combined in the education sector. From a practical point of view, the combination seems natural to me; my research provides the foundation to my teaching. But from an economic point of view, is the combination of the two sustainable?

I used to think that aduki beans were a joke from the Beano. When I was a kid, Baby Face Finlayson used to eat them after coming up with some dastardly scheme.

More recently, I discovered that they were real. So I tried cooking them last night. Rather nice, as it happens.

The meal was this:

• tofu
• red onion
• garlic flakes
• rice vinegar
• soy sauce

All of this was fried in garlic flavoured olive oil, tofu first with the soy and vinegar till brown and then all the rest dumped in. This was eaten with rice, with peas and broad beans, with a light drizzle of liquidizied chilli.

Very nice as it happens. The aduki beans taste like a cross between baked and kidney beans, but didn't overwhelm the rest of the meal.

I don't like the bike lanes that I ride on every day to work; it has to be said that there are many worse ones around. The BBC News site had a great set of photos of these today. It's a pity; bikes lanes are normally put into to fulfil government targets, but not actually to be useful. A little more care would improve the network's usability enormously.

Decided to try the curry house from a few nights ago, as I was on the Quayside last night. I think it's called "the Rasa" but I forgot to write it down. Sadly, it was suffering from the Newcastle disease — it was fully booked. I don't understand why this is such a common problem here, but there you go.

Instead, we ended up next door at Vujon. It was okay. The seafood angle was well covered, but the veggie options were poor. I ended up with the set of side dishes option, which were adequate.

Interesting story on the news about the first commercial wave power system. This is happening in Portugal, despite the technology being developed in this country because Portugal gives preferential treatment to energy from renewable sources.

It's great to hear that this is happening, regardless of where it is happening. It fits quite nicely with stories earlier in the week about gas prices. Currently, the problem with all renewable energy supplies is there high, up-front costs. But, energy supplies are getting less dependable and more expensive with time, and renewable technologies are getting cheaper as they are moving toward mass production.

The quote is from a listener to the radio. I'm not sure it makes sense. The system was a pelamis system (pipes which hinges, which pump hydraulic fluid, while they bend). As most waves occur as a result of the wind, rather than tidal movements, the pelamis system would be susceptible to becalming; just not very often.

Started to have a look at Darcs today. It's one of the first distributed version control systems that I've looked at in detail; I couldn't see how they worked myself, but it's not that difficult. Everything is a branch and you pass patches around; obvious — at least, once you think of it.

Spent about an hour trying to work out why the aforementioned NAS box was totally failing. The ftp server seemed to be working, the machine seemed to be identifying itself.

Turned out to be the firewall. Windows can cope without a call-back it seems. It looks rather like this was also the cause of poor performance on small files. I've managed to get my network card up to 30% utilisation; saturday it was rarely more than 2%.

Finally got around to buying some garlic flakes that I saw being used in t a resturant a short while back. Combined with a bit of chilli, as well as being garlic flavoured, this are actually quite hot.

Cooked them with some potato, tofu, red onion and bulgar wheat. Very nice indeed.

The image of a fat man in a sauna is a bit of stereotype. This never made a lot of sense to me. Surely, thin men are as likely to go to a sauna? Think I finally solved this conundrum today: fat men have a good layer of insulation around them; so, they will heat up more slowly than otherwise; which means that they will be in the sauna for longer. Which means that, at any one time, there will be an over-representation of fat men.

Finished teaching today for year; well, ignoring the research projects, which might be a mistake. I don't understand exactly why I find the teaching so tiring; probably the main reason is getting on top of so much background material. Still, it's been a good thing; I've needed to get on top of MIAME for quite a while.

The lecture actually went okay. Rather than go through the data model, which would have been dull, I think, I did a "clustering exercise", which I learnt at last weeks LSI meeting: everybody wrote down terms on post-it notes; then, they get arranged on the board, into related clusters. In the end, we got clusters which fell neatly into the six points from the MIAME checklist. Fairly pleasing, really.

Went out for a curry tonight, with an old friend of mine. Fortunately, he knows lots of nice places to eat in Newcastle; this is good, because, currently, I don't.

I can't remember the name of the place, but it's near the Quayside, and rather pink. But the food was excellent. We had a daal, a strange pancake bread, a cabbage dish, dosa and some vedna. I've been a fan of dosa for ages, since discovering them in the Punjab Tandoori in Manchester. I've only had then in one other place, so it's great to find another resturant cooking them. I even tried making them for myself once, using some of the wonderously named "Mr Git's Dosa Mix". It never worked.

As well as his dosa mix, Mr Git also makes vedna mix. I did buy some, but never tried it. So, this was the first time I've actually got to eat them. They were great. A light donut made out of lentils.

Afterwards, we went back to the pub and I almost fell asleep. I hadn't realised how tired I was.

I thought, last night, that I had seen the clear winner for my weekly "Most Surreal Experience" competition. While sitting in the pub, looking out of the window, two blokes walked passed carrying between them a 6ft, blue, plastic swordfish.

However, today, this was defeated: the swordfish was robbed. During our strike action, we had the traditional rally, where people stand in front of a microphone and talk at other people who are feeling cold. For some strange, ill-conceived reason, someone came up with the idea of bring along entertainment in the form of a left-wing accordionist singing, among other things, a strange rendition of the "Teddy Bear's picnic". The middle part involved a Freudian analysis of his childhood, during which he swore and almost got arrested for a public order offence.

Strange. Very strange.

Went to Bob Trollope's today. It's a veggie pub, near the quayside. Went there before, but got confused — I ended up looking at the menu of the pub next door.

Wasn't bad at all. Had a pretty good menu. As I'd been standing outside in the cold for most of the day, I went for the mixed grill. Was alright, but I think they need to make it a bit different from the meat version — it was too dry. I couple of pots of dips (a light chilli sauce, some brown sauce and something a little sweet, perhaps) would have been perfect.

Still, it's a pleasure to be in a veggie place, with lots of choice on the menu. It's not been that easy in Newcastle.

This quote was from the local student newspaper.

It's perhaps not surprising that students (like most of the population) are unaware of what academics actually do. Teaching, itself, takes a lot of effort, time and thought. Few students wonder where the knowledge that we try to teach actually comes from; it's in the creation of this knowledge that we spend the rest of our time on. It's the reason that we don't go on holiday, when the students go home.

There is a lot of cynicism among academics; when you feel part of the degree awarding, paper writing, grant applying treadmill, it's not that surprising. But academics are hamstrung in their industrial dispute not by their cynicism, but their naivety; most of us still get a thrill and excitement out of our subjects; the pleasure in the knowledge that we teach, the excitement of extending it palpable. It's for this reason that most of us work silly hours. It's the reason that most of us will spend the time on strike working at home.

We find it hard to withhold our labour, because in doing so we hurt ourselves as much as we hurt others.In our market driven society, the value we put on the process of science subtracts from the value that society puts on us. Despite this, I will go on strike tomorrow; perhaps I am naive, but perhaps I like it this way.

Been a bit strange, recently. I'm an occasionally emacs hacker. My last big package, pabbrev however was first released about three years ago, and hasn't had a new version out for at least a year.

In the last week or so, though, I've had a flurry of fixes for it, even added a new feature. More over, a new package called "predictive" which is similar but more powerful (good!), but more complex (bad!)o has been released. Added to the work done on muse mode which I use to publish this journal, I've been deeply embroiled in lisp.

I never understood this sort of synchronicity.

Listening to a special edition of the News Quiz being played as a tribute to Linda Smith, who died earlier in the week. A sad loss — I loved her rambling style, her ear for the bizarre, her inventiveness, while she still managed to be incisive about the issues of the day.

Having dug out my old recipe for bulgar wheat, I've been going all cereal. So I bought some polenta. I've never tried this before. It's like cous-cous, but a bit finer. You cook it for a while, then it goes solid.

It's relatively tasteless, but is spices up well. I did it with parsnips and potatoes that I'd lightly fried with lots of spices.

It was alright, but I need quite a bit more work on the polenta. Less water, I think, more spices.

There has been an interesting discussion on data standards for systems biology. This theme seems to repeat itself again and again. Despite the obvious difficulties in getting scientists to work together, slow, steady, building of standards with as broad a consensus as possible has to be the best way of doing things.