Observations on a showery Thursday

The view from the common room two floors up, where the half-decent-coffee machine is, is quite amazing, stretching from the Manpower Services building (now the Department for Work and Pensions, but names stick) on the west of the city centre to the cooling-towers of Tinsley, where the regional mall is, on the east, taking in the town hall and the cathedral on the way.

There's a used bookstore in the student union! A small one, admittedly, run by Oxfam, but with the authentic used-bookstore smell. I didn't actually buy anything -- at this point I'm more likely to add to their stock -- but I'm comforted to know it's there. The real university bookstore is somewhere down the road towards town, and so far this trip I haven't even managed to spot it from the tram as I go by.

Sigh

It turns out my laptop hard drive is dying. At least it's given me fair warning, and I'm frantically pulling off files onto the nice empty 60G disk on the linux box they lent me here. This is, however, a pain, particularly as my extended warranty service and recovery disks are all in Tucson and I'm here for another two weeks. (All the photos are safely on CD and/or in Tucson.)

The really annoying bit is that using vnc over the net was the easiest way to access my desktop back in the Tucson office, and because of ssh things (or my incompetence therewith) I don't seem to be able to do that on the Linux box. So I'll be working half-blind or really slowly for the rest of my stay, at least for the bits that require super-memory and expensive compilers. And I'd just discovered some of the delights of Photoshop, too ...

Also, I'm going to be late getting home for tea.