meetings

Meetings. Meetings. Meetings.

Working in a university you can't avoid them. So this morning, when I'm usually having a relaxing lie-in around this time of day, I'm up, showered, breakfasted, coffeed and about to leave for work. To go to a meeting.

It's a preliminary Team Planning Meeting. The proper full-blown thing is in February. When I asked how long today's would last I was told to be there for 9.30 and we'd break at 12 for lunch...

Meetings don't interest me at the best of times. Unfortunately, universities seem full of people that absolutely thrive on them. I was told that, a few years ago when concern was expressed about the number of meetings staff were attending, a group was set up... to have a meeting about it.

They decided there weren't too many meetings after all... but I guess they had to reconvene on a regular basis just to keep a constant check.

At least they're providing a free lunch...

benefits

Ten benefits of a recession...

• It causes you to get more creative
• It forces you to make the tough decisions
• It thins out the competition
• It makes you realize you can’t take anything for granted
• It reminds you that real wealth isn’t about the stuff you own
• It fosters out-of-the-box thinking
• It makes it easier to abandon business-as-usual
• It brings you back to the basics
• It accelerates change
• It causes you to be less wasteful

via From Where I Sit

prepared

Living uncomfortably sometimes makes for a more prepared life.

via Howies Brainfood

sharing

Given this blog's links with the two cities here are a couple of new programmes coming soon to BBC Three:

Three princes share a house in Brighton...
A vampire, werewolf and ghost share a house in Bristol...

HDMI

Over Christmas I finally got around to ordering an HDMI cable to connect my PlayStation3 with M's HD-enabled TV. At the time I wasn't even aware of what HDMI was but it only cost £1 on Amazon. Couldn't go wrong...

So this afternoon I finally got around to connecting it - and was immediately blown away by the difference in image quality. HDMI stands for High-Definition Multimedia Interface. Whereas my former SCART connection was analogue, HDMI is digital. The difference is akin to looking at a TV screen through a pair of filthy, frosted-up outdated-prescription specs and then ditching them in favour of a brand new pair.

Best £1 I ever spent...

Christmas walks #2

During a brief stay at my parents in Eastbourne we took the dogs for a walk on the South Downs surrounding the town. Much of this trek was through woodland with slippery muddy paths to navigate. At the end, with the day's sunlight quickly disappearing, I grabbed a handful of silhouette shots like the one here. I'm quite pleased with these and have to acknowledge the fact that I should take more photos of people... they're far more interesting...

Christmas walks #1

Over Christmas, and away from the city, I went on a couple of countryside walks. The first was on Christmas Day - a pre-dinner wander through the Somerset lanes around M's parents' cottage - just to make us feel better about the amount of food we were about to consume. Then on Boxing Day a 45 minute road trip took us to the village of Kilve and a 3 mile stroll through the Quantocks and the West Somerset Coastal Path. Being a bright sunny day meant we could see down to Minehead in the west, the power station at Hinkley Point in the east and the towns of the south Wales coast northwards from the clifftop. It was bitterly cold but this didn't prevent us from sitting outside at a picnic table for some stollen and a hot flask of coffee at the end.

back on board

This morning M borrowed her mum's bike, I grabbed my longboard and we went for a leisurely ride around the country lanes of Somerset. It's not really the time of year for longboarding but yesterday, as we packed the car, I figured the opportunity might arise. It being rather cold I wrapped up but was soon getting a bit warm from the effort involved (a handful of walks to work should get me back in shape!). This was my first time on the board since leaving Brighton - a combination of poor weather, time, laziness and the need to find some nice quiet roads in Bristol to practice on...