Nick Gibbins

I have nothing further to add.

Off to Heathrow, and thence to NYC, in a little under ten minutes. I should not be trying to write a newsletter article that has been dumped on me by our Glorious Leader, and that I’ve been failing to write for the last week due to all the other stuff that was dumped on me. Bah. Going to write it on the plane and send it in tomorrow. The deadline was only yesterday…

Edinburgh finally got back to me to say that I didn’t get the lectureship there, thus scuppering any plans that and I might have had for raising Scots any time soon. Just sent an application in for a lectureship in my department. My ex-supervisor (and head of department) has already told me that I won’t get it, but has encouraged me to apply nonetheless; if I perform well at interview, they might be able to scrape together a two year teaching fellowship as an intermediate step before a (probationary) junior lectureship. Ah, the great taste of Jam Tomorrow…

Probably only of interest to the and other like-minded individuals, What Fools These Mortals presents a radically different take to Nethack. An extremely rewarding experience all round, and possibly my favourite text-based game since Zork: A Troll’s Eye View.

I was supposed to give a double lecture at lunchtime today (on the Semantic Web, natch) as part of the final year compsci course on Knowledge Based Systems. Today is the hand-in day for final year compsci projects. How many students did I get to the lecture? One, making the total audience a grand two, if I include the course organiser. The lecture has now been rescheduled for next week, when there will hopefully be a few more bodies in the audience. As revenge, I’ve just finished writing my new first slide, which consists of a page of upside-down As,… Read More »And then there was one: how I spent my lunch hour

Not going to Tun tonight, but will be in Swindon at the world premiere of the audience participation version of Richard III (abridged). Should be at the Tun next month, if all goes well.

Not being a London resident, and not customarily an Evening Standard reader, I completely missed this article when it was first published last June. I wonder how much the mindset has changed in the intervening ten months. “You can’t distinguish between who’s trying to kill you and who’s not […] Like, the only way to get through s*** like that was to concentrate on getting through it by killing as many people as you can, people you know are trying to kill you. Killing them first and getting home.”

Interview and seminar in Edinburgh seemed to go well last Thursday/Friday, but judging from the ominous silence from my phone, I think that it’s safe to assume that someone else was offered the job. Time to start digging a tunnel, now that the guards have found the glider, perhaps? Saturday was spent at and ‘s wedding in Bath (St Mary’s in Lansdown, followed by the Assembly Rooms), which was an all-round good affair. Spent a while bemoaning the state of academia with and Smitty (WISNOLJ, despite smitty_get_a_lj), which was most enjoyable. The only downside to the evening was that was… Read More »General life update

I’ve got my job interview for the lectureship in Edinburgh on Friday, and I’m giving a seminar at the department tomorrow, so I’m flying up from Bristol this evening. Unfortunately, I’m probably not going to be able to meet up with folk, since I’m going to be going over my presentation this evening, and I’m being wined and dined by the department on Thursday night. Nuts. Maybe next time. * * * I’ve been getting some odd dreams over the past few nights. Not my usual fare of anxiety dreams, but the sort that make you wake up and think… Read More »Edinburgh / Dreams

Sadly, however, we had no napalm to spare when it came to clearing the garden of the encroaching brambles and bindweed, so I had to go in and do it by hand. Since we moved to our current house on campus, the garden has come on in leaps and bounds, mainly due to the ministrations of fair hands. The lawn is free of thistles, the beds are tidy, the contents of the compost bin are starting to look like compost, the herb patches are looking glorious, and the russian vine is finally dead (it has produced one shoot so far… Read More »I love the smell of napalm in the morning…