Monday, January 10, 2005

Carlisle a no go

Hi all. Sorry about the lack of postings for the month, I've been a busy man. Well that's not quite true I've just lacked anything to say other than the completely mundane. I suppose I could have passed comment on what I did over christmas and new year, but was too busy not doing anything to go on the computer and type out an entry.

This weekend was supposed to see me heading down to Cumbria to see my friend Mike, but was slghtly disrputed by the very bad weather. I was going to travel down on the coach only to find that Carlisle was a "no go area" as it seemed to have been completely submerged. Mike also informed me that he couldn't even get out of his village due to flooding and a fallen tree blocking the road. All the rain was a bit too much for me so I spent most of the rest of the day in bed.

Oh, I forgot to say about the workshop I went to in mid-December. I was in Annecy by the French Alps for a four day meeting. Annecy seems a nice place although I really didn't get to see much of it as we were there for the meeting and no more. These meeting are normally times when I'd give a blog entry every day whilst sitting through the more boring of talks, but the internet connection was so frustratingly slow that doing anything on the web was a huge hassle. This was caused by about 120 people being routed through one socket and all trying to access the internet at once. Other than the talks (of which I had to give one) the food and wine were pretty good (as long as you weren't vegetarian). I was disappointed at the lack of snow on the mountains though. It just wasn't picturesque enough without the snow.

A bit of space news - the Huygens probe should be hitting Saturn's moon Titan on the 15th so watch out for that in the news. Also we are now in the World Year of Physics also known as Einstein Year so look out for all those physics related events which should be happening near you.