a_cubed | Apr. 5th, 2005

European research projects are all very well, but the travel is a killer. I'm not as bad as my colleague James who's hardly spent a week without going off somewhere in Europe this calendar year, but I've done way too much travel recently and it's not looking like getting much easier any time soon. I'm off to a conference in Belfast this afternoon, then to Madrid early next week, with the possibility of another trip to Italy at the end of the week. Add in convention going and I seem to spend large portions of my life travelling.

tony Blair has just called the general election in the background and Andrew Marr of the BC just complimented Bliar again on his "excellent public speaking" talents. You know, I don't understand why anyone thinks that Bliar is good at this. his delivery is terrible, even when he's reading a prepared speech. he's got no "feel" for the language he's speaking at all, and his grammatical constructions are just inelegant. if this was a pure oratory contest he'd be coming in third behind a neck-and-neck Howard and Kennedy, both of whom are decent (though not spectacular) public speakers.

So, I've arrived at this conference at Queen's University Belfast. The student self-catering accommodation I'm in isn't bad actually. En suite single rooms. I've been in worse. They have ethernet connections in the room, so I try and connect when I arrive, but it's "bluesocket" and I haven't an ID. The reception at the site tells me that the conference organisers have arranged web access via the library for conference attendees. Even though it's the first night before things get going tomorrow morning I go in to the University library and they will indeed let me get a temporary pass to the library (has to be renewed daily) and give me a temporary logon (also must be renewed daily). So I obtain these, along with a colleague attending the conference that I met at the residence. One thing we're planning to do is use their floppy drives to transfer a copy of her talk off a floppy and onto my memory stick (she's had a rotten day including the airline losing her luggage so she needs access to the floppy to sort out her talk). So we gain access to the library computers, which do indeed have both floppy drive and USB ports. Unfortunately, along with disabling all software except internet explorer to guests, the library computers have disabled access to the external drives, both USB and floppy. So we'll have to get one of the conference organisers to arrange things for us tomorrow morning and I can lend Christine my laptop for a couple of hours. No problem. After a very nice dinner at Villa Italia (just down the road from Queens, Belfast and a very nice Italian restaurant) I head back to the residence while most of the other early arrivals for the conference head to a pub. I decide to give te bluesocket a try with the temporary library userid I've been issued. Since I'm entering this into LJ from my room at the residence it obviously works. Wonderful really heavy security on some things (can't even access the USB port on the library computers) and then it's a valid login for bluesocket. Isn't consistency wonderful? Still, I shouldn't complain since it means I can access the web from my room. Other ports than http ones seem blocked so I can't actually download my email, unfortunately, but webmail will do I suppose, or I could mess around with ssh and see if I can tunnel out.