My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree.

Just got back from Cambridge, where I spent an all too brief time with many wonderful people, such as the Collaborans, and Katie, and ghoti and family. I'm very glad of all of you.

I found Fin's twenty-four hour comic from 2006 again today. Worth re-reading.

Also, what Maemo 5 needs is robotfindskitten. Definitely.

Many Cambridge conversations fail the Turing-Bechdel test:

1) Two humans
2) Who talk to one another
3) About something other than a computer.

On Saturday morning Emily dropped by for a visit, and we went shopping in the town. Here's a photo of us outside Great St Mary's:



She drove us down to the town centre, but the traffic was terrible. When there, we went to the market and bought presents and a pack of what turned out to be the least effective AA batteries ever for my camera; they failed after the first photo.

We went into the porter's lodge. "I'd like to hire a BA gown for Commemoration, please," I said. "Certainly," said the porter, "that'll be ten pounds." I'd somehow expected it to cost rather more. He handed over the gown, and my room key and the programme for the evening, while Emily chatted to him. I looked up and said, "Um, this is a master's gown." "Never mind," he said, "nobody'll know and you can keep a bottle of wine in the sleeves."

Emily drove me home; the traffic was even worse. Tea on the college lawn began at four and it was almost five by the time we'd reached my house. She dropped me off, and I got changed into soberer clothes (not evening dress yet), and caught the bus back into college. A few members were still there and the staff in their college livery were still serving coffee; I thought nobody would still be around, but I ran into a former housemate of mine straight away.



When we'd chatted for a while I went up to my room in Hobson Court, and found I had everything except the key. It was back at Kirsten and Colin's house. I went back down to the porter's lodge and explained.
"We do make a charge for lost keys."
"Oh dear."
"It goes to Rag."
"Oh good."
"It's a pound."
"Oh, right."
"Thurman, isn't it? You're the one with the attractive sister?" Emily, be proud.

I ran back down and then gingerly paced into the chapel. I'd missed the part where the Master reads the list of all the dead benefactors, but there was a choir there who were singing Latin anthems in tight harmony. I sat and listened and thought about how much I'd forgotten I'd missed the chapel and even the smell of it. It amused me a little that even though this service is the official reason for the whole reunion, only about a dozen people were in the chapel out of around a hundred attending the reunion. This is often the way, that an unimportant part of something becomes the main part and the old centre begins to vanish away.

After chapel I had to get batteries. I ran out into the street and across to Sainsbury's. Stop staring at me, for heaven's sake, you've seen a bloke in academic dress in a supermarket before. I found a pack of AAs and then queued for a rather long time before I could get back up into the Master's lodge and try to find all the old classmates I hadn't seen for so long. Most of them have now become programmers, I think, and "Are you on Facebook?" is the question everyone's asking one another.

The dinner was wonderful, and large, and I met many old friends.


I am too tired to post a lot of details about it now, but I might later. I don't have pictures of the loving cup ceremony, because both my hands were occupied with an enormous silver cup. However, I know the person opposite and he will email me the photos.

After many last hugs and kisses I trail into the airport with my luggage and my laptop, but the flight is rather uneventful, though I get almost no work and almost no sleeping done. At Heathrow I wait for a coach which is late and driven by an apparently surly Scot who sees me waiting and explains, "It'll take half an hour to get this lot unloaded!" Later I see it's a façade when he adds as we leave the airport, "Why are you so quiet back there? Is my driving that good? Good God, I'll have to get a licence!"

As soon as we cross the Cambridge city boundary it obligingly begins to rain for the first time. The coach drops me on Parker's Piece where I stop to take the obligatory photo of myself next to Reality Checkpoint, and then phone Kirsten. She says Colin is out looking for me, but it happens that we somehow miss one another, so I tell them I'll take a bus. I go to do so, and get lost, but the staff at the Maypole explain which bus to catch and wave away my offer of buying a drink to pay them back. You should therefore all go to drink at the Maypole.

The bus driver looks at my tenner and tells me it's too old, and so is the fiver, and I can only change them at a bank. In the end, though, he turns out to be a member of the helpful species of bus driver and takes them anyway.

And so I was at Colin and Kirsten's house! They made me very welcome, and later we went to see Jon (source of the joke in the title here) and then they took me out for dinner at a tapas place, which was lovely, and then we talked until I was almost falling asleep, which was unsurprising.

The next day, I woke up far later than I'd intended: on balance, it was probably a really good thing to get over the jetlag. I went into town and met the Collaborans, who are a fascinating bunch with whom I can foresee a fair amount of beer being drunk, and then went to the town in which I grew up to meet my aged grandparents. I was going to see them next Sunday but then they decided to go out for lunch during the time I was going to see them, so I'm going tonight. On the way I passed the butterfly bush growing wild; I took some photos for Fin who loves them. They don't grow wild in America.






I was expecting a great amount of reverse culture shock. Instead, there's been almost none: I feel as though a badly-tuned channel had just snapped back into clarity. Without thinking, I am actually looking the correct way as I cross the road. I love all the little quirks I'd missed about this country, and this town. I love wandering around the town and hearing conversations about philosophy and conversations in languages I can't even identify and people walking past in evening dress as though this was something not to be remarked on. For all its almost insufferable inequalities it's a thing of great beauty. But much as I like it here, I miss my family back in Pennsylvania an awful lot, too. I'm phoning them every day and keeping up with all their news, but it's not the same as seeing them in person all the time.

Oh, and I also passed the Chronophage, so I took a photo for sabotabby's benefit; it's actually set into the street wall of the college, not inside as I'd imagined.

The Mill Road Social Centre is being evicted at this moment. Anyone closer than I am who wants to go down and mourn it?

(Backstory.)

(Tesco didn't get permission last night to put in refrigeration equipment, though.)

is on now.

(I'm still thinking of my Christmas message last year. I have nothing better to say than that.)

I've been busy fixing things, particularly testing right-to-left language support in Metacity. (I clearly need to learn Arabic or Hebrew now so that I can test it properly.) Things are generally good here and getting better.

Sometimes I think I should have this journal for writing about my life, and then another blog where I write how-to type articles about free software (and other things). Maybe I'll do that.

I just wanted to mention, though, that although in some towns it's a big deal when a woman becomes mayor, when I see that my home town's new mayor is not only a woman, but that also she's married to (and is raising a family with) another woman who also used to be a city councillor, and also that they're both transsexual, and that none of this stopped her becoming mayor, I have to say how proud I am to be part of such a city. What a great start to the 800th anniversary of the Cambridge mayoralty!

h/t Sarah Brown.

One of the most happy parts about being at Cambridge is formal hall. People sit down to a formal dinner, all wearing gowns, and you get to have really interesting conversations with the person next to you, who probably comes from some quite different discipline, and you'd probably never have talked to them otherwise.

Once I was sitting next to an man in his late fifties or early sixties, from Tit Hall, obviously a priest from his dress. It came out in conversation that he had only recently been ordained. I asked him why he became a priest, and he said that he'd practised as a lawyer until he retired. Then he realised that as a lawyer his primary motivation had been as a help to people to live their lives wherever he could, and he thought that the best way to carry on doing that would be as a priest. So off he went to college.

I learned again how untrue it was that you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

A story I was just telling a coworker:

When I was a postgrad, I had a keycard to (some of) the Computer Laboratory. This was in the days before Bill Gates gave the CL a pot of money and they built a new site out on the edge of the town. In those days, the CL was in the New Museums site. Now, the New Museums site is right in the middle of town, where space is tight and expensive, and it's packed. It has buildings on top of other buildings. It's like an ant farm. There are the weirdest pairs of departments sharing space: when you walk in from Pembroke Street, the first thing you see is the skeleton of a whale hanging over the way, which belongs to the zoology department or someone-- I never actually went to check it out. The Computer Lab was in the Cockcroft tower, which was one of those towers which stand on stilts, and then they actually went and put new floors in underneath to try to squeeze out the last bit of room.

One of the upshots of the crampedness is that the CL was half in the tower and half in a building across the way. They'd built a bridge on about the fourth floor between the two. Now, undergrads had keycards to some parts of the CL, and master's students like me had keycards which let you into a few more places. But only PhD students (and, I assume, staff) had the cards which let you onto the bridge at nighttime. Everyone below PhD level had to walk downstairs, across the courtyard in the rain, and back up inside the other building, and that was what was so great about doing a doctorate.

"It's a problem like the one we had a few years ago when I was in grad school and they wouldn't let us run Netscape on the dev servers because of the load. We were allowed Mosaic though.... Ohmygosh, I am so old."

(09:56:00) firinel: what's the movie about cambridge and gay sex?
(09:56:08) firinel: er, the one we've watched.
(09:56:16) firinel: not ALL those other ones we haven't watched.
(09:56:16) marnaneltaranen: errrrrrrr, Maurice?
(09:56:22) firinel: yeah, that's it. thanks!
(09:57:04) marnaneltaranen: There was also Hot Man-Sex In Jesus College Chapel
(09:57:16) firinel: O_o
(09:57:34) marnaneltaranen: :)
(09:58:13) firinel: seriously?
(09:58:17) firinel: *feels niave*
(09:58:43) marnaneltaranen: nooooo
(09:58:45) marnaneltaranen: nooooooooooooooooooooooooo
(09:58:54) firinel: oh. okay
(09:59:02) firinel: see, thing is, it IS Cambridge.
(09:59:07) firinel: so you never really can tell.
(09:59:07) marnaneltaranen: well, true