Mssv

I’ve just returned from a two day hike that wandered a scant few miles away from Cold Mountain (of book and movie fame). We arrived at the trailhead at about 4pm on Saturday, rather later than we’d intended, but made fine progress to camp at a place called Shining Rock. At Shining Rock itself, the [...]

The reason I went back home last weekend was to use a microlight voucher I received for my 21st birthday, a mere 10 months after I actually received it. The microlight centre (more accurately described as ‘a hangar in the middle of a field in the middle of nowhere’) was about an hour’s drive away [...]

Selected photos of my trip to Madrid are now online, along with some old (and more complete) photos of West Kirby Marine Lake. There’s not an awful lot to say about Madrid; our days centred around two things, food and drink, both of which were plentiful, good and cheap (just like pretty much everywhere else [...]

I’ve just set up some new gallery software which will let me automate the process of uploading and captioning photos, meaning that I’ll be displaying many more of my photos. You can see photos from my latest trip to Fort Lauderdale now, and I should be migrating photos over from my previous galleries this weekend.

Horribly jetlagged. Probably the price I have to pay for having a wonderful break and conference. Oh well.

Well, I’m flying off to Miami in a few hours for a vision research conference, so I won’t be posting here until Monday, unless I can get network access over there and feel sufficiently bored. See you all later.

There’s something undeniably romantic about a crescent moon in the clear evening sky, hovering over the rooftops in a scene straight from the cover of a ’50s ‘Amazing Stories’ magazine. Usually they have more than one moon, and the sky is pink, and the rooftops are either a barren wasteland or soaring, spiralling towers, [...]

I arrived back in the UK yesterday morning after a 24 hour journey from Sydney. Predictably, it was raining.
What I tried to do during the flights back home was to time my eating and sleeping so that I could reduce any jetlag I’d have caused by the ten hour time difference. The easiest way to [...]

Four times I’ve tried to go hang-gliding in Australia:
Wednesday: good windspeed, but in the wrong direction
Thursday: too windy
Friday: too windy
Saturday: too windy
The annoying thing is that the weather was perfect when I first got here. The even more annoying thing is that hang-gliding here is almost half the price of that in the UK, and [...]

For some reason, the term ’shuttle diplomacy’ comes to mind when I think about how I’ve been zipping between different cities on the Australian east/southeast coast, despite the fact that I haven’t been doing any diplomacy. It’s probably because it sounds so cool.
It’s all coming to an end now, unfortunately. I’m leaving Newcastle this afternoon [...]