I drove passed a crash on the A1 yesterday. One car was facing in the wrong direction along side the central reservation. It's pretty depressing really. Everyone was very measured about it, with all the traffic slowing down and moving passed in an organised way; this was before the police had got there. But no one stopped. Once one person has done it, we all follow along, without any though of even offering help to those in distress. It's a sad reflection on the isolation of modern life, sitting in steal boxes.

Still, the road afterwards was really clear for quite a few miles, so it's not all bad.

A new James Bond has happened. Hard to have avoided this with vast amounts of plugging going on; the BBC News appeared to turn into the advertising wing of the Bond machine for a week.

Went to see the film in the Vue cinema in Worcester. Fairly horrible place, lets be frank. When you come in through the door, you are assaulted by a wave of fat smells from the popcorn and ice cream. The foyer is actually quite tatty now, despite the fact that it's relatively new.

An initial feeling of relief, sitting comfortably in the cinema seats (the Vue has got this bit right), is soon blown away by the assault of the 30 minute pre-film advertising and "Copyright is theft" propaganda. Finally, the film starts. Sadly the advertising doesn't. James Bond driving his Form, using his Vaio, phoning on his Sony Ericsson. It's got to the point where it totally disrupts the flow. Combining it with the new, darker, more serious Bond makes it even worse — the new film has a sense of self-importance about it, which is totally punctured by the adverts.

It's not all bad, though. John Cleese is no longer in it, which is one hell of a relief.

At a workshop in NESC, looking at data integration in the Neurosciences.

Very interesting talk from Maryann Martone. She showed a slightly depressing slide describing the aims of the various eScience projects which is basically interchangable between all projects — data heterogeneity, distribution, autonomy. Like other medical research projects that I have heard off, they spent nearly three years getting the data through the various ethical approval committees before they could even think about hosting the data. The requirement for anonymity is important, of course, but the cost is enormous. It's a pity that this effort can't be shared for different projects.

Neurobase presented an interesting architecture which looks very like ComparaGRID — they have a set of wrappers mapping into a common relational datamode; essentially ComparGRID does the same thing but with an OWL based model.

What a weekend of culture! Simon and Rina came up from Friday, with the plan of going to see something called "Cairo Nights" or the Farha Tour (I was quite sure of the relationship between the two names). Basically, an evening of belly dancing. Rina's idea and I'm game for anything.

There were some delays on the way (Simon and Rina got stuck on the road, and I walked round in circles for a bit, as I'd not been to Northumbria Students Union before), so we got there a bit late. Rather disappointingly, instead of belly dancing when we arrived, there was a fat guy with a belt-line over his belly button and finger cymbals on stage; clearly, Newcastle is the place for middle-aged, post-op, transexual belly-dancers, I thought. The rest of the evening was pretty good, though. Nothing I haven't seen before — we did get belly dancing later on, and men-in-skirts rotating very quickly, and the bloke in a two men wrestling costume. And the fat bloke with fingers cymbals again. But it was actually a really good night. Most of the seats had long gone, so we just stayed at the bar cause there was lots of floor space there (like anyone is going to believe this), watching and dancing to the music. Highly recommended.

Saturday, we went to the Baltic which, I admit, is becoming a bit of a traditional thing when people come up to visit. I've seen this exhibition before: some of it very strong — the John Lennon tribute in the stairwell; some of it less so — the cartoon of the guy having sex with a dog (or sheep, there was some disaggrement on this topic).

I've been to that particular exhibit before. In general, I go to the Baltic often enough to see most of the exhibits, but not often enough to see things twice. I actually enjoyed seeing things twice.

Finally, this afternoon, I went for a bike ride and was feeling a bit pooped afterwards, so I watched Goodbye Lenin, which I've had for a while but not watched. Marvellous film. Very funny, poigniant, and set against German reunification. Humour, sadness and history — well, I was always going to be a sucker for this film, but it was put together very neatly, nicely directed and with lots of internal references which reward the audience for its attention. Always useful when you are tired after a bike ride.

There were two strange things about the film though. Firstly, I have a clear memory of Barry Norman reviewing it on the Film programme — but I can't have because it came out in 2003 well after he left. Was it another similar film I wonder. The music drove me mad as well, as I recognised it, but didn't know where from. Actually, it was the same composer as Amelie, and it's very similar. It worked well, but the sense of recognition was a bit distracting.

Did a Spicy Tofu in Pitta as Simon and Rina were coming up. I thought they might be late, and we'd be in a hurry (they were, we were), so I wanted something easy to eat of the move.

This is incredible simple. I cut the tofu into blocks about 1cm x 1cm x 2cm. This goes into a frying pan with some rice vinegar, soy, and chilli sauce. This is all fried in, on a low heat for, well as long as you can be bothered to wait. Within reason, the longer the better, but an hour is a reasonable time. This is then served in pitta with salad. I added some felalal as wel, as I had it in the freezer.

We only had time for a quick bite each. However, we left the gig at 11 and the curse of Newcastle hit us, with all the food places closed and we scoffed the rest when we got back.

Been watching season two of teachers. Entertaining, funny, slightly bizarre and with lots of jokes about sex. Hardly a surprise it was such a success, although I never even heard about it at the time it came out.

Not sure watching a programme about a bunch of malcontent, alcholic obsessives worried about the pointlessness of their own lifes was such a great idea though, not at the weekend anyway.

For the life of me, I can't get google calendar to use the correct reply-to address when sending calendar events. This is a pain. Once you let an alternative email out there, people will start using it whether you want them to or not.

Nothing ever works exactly as planned.

Well, the calendar move seems to have gone okay. I have a slightly baroque mechanism set up. Pulling down the ical files from google every night should give me offline access, in a read-only way using sunbird. I've then got an export caledar in sunbird which, by hook or crook, will eventually work it's way back to my website, from where google can pick it up. Then I can copy it to my main calendar and, finally, delete it when it works it way back to sunbird. I was going to give Calgoo a go, but I didn't like the look of their license.

I've been using Planner mode for the last few months, to keep track of appointments. I like it because it integrates well with Emacs, which is my main environment. But I've decided it just doesn't cut the mustard. It lacks two main things. Firstly, it can't do ICAL based mail negotiation of meetings. Secondly, it lacks a nice overviewer. I developed something which addresses the latter, but it's not enough. So I keep on missing early meetings, because I didn't see them coming up the day before.

In the end, I've decided to go for Google calendar. It generally integrates nicely with mail, although I'll have to check my gmail account periodically, which is a pain as I don't use it for anything else. The AJAX interface of the calendar is quite nice; I don't need to use it as rapidly as email, so that it's a bit clunky is not a huge problem. Pity that right clicks don't work.

Moving current events is going to be a pain, though. I think I shall keep planner, though, as a task manager. It's pretty good at that.

Well, I was a little bit worried about my talk, as the last time I tried it, it wasn't that good. But in the end, it went reasonably well, which was nice.

The Ontogenesis meeting was a good meeting — and only partly because I was enjoying doing research so much. There was lots of discussion on the softer aspects of ontology building. What metadata do we store about ontologies, how do we get information about of domain scientists and so on.

One slightly embarrasing thing happened — Andy Gibson refered to my talk during his, and then asked me a question about it. But I hadn't been listening, having written email most of the way through his talk. I have a good excuse: first, I'd trieda to rearrange the timetable and that had gone horribly wrong, as none of the students heard about it in time; and second I'd arranged for Keith to cover my practical session, but he ran over a dog and his bike and knocked himself about a bit. Even when I get let out for a bit, it seems teaching still has a hold on my attention.