Quite a few new things.

I've moved out of my room and London and I'm back in Norwich for the summer. This'll be my last few weeks in Norwich, though, as I'm looking for a flat in London permanently from the end of August. It'll be a shame to leave, but London has it's good sides: St. Paul's, ENO, and it's where my job is.

We went on holiday to Kos (a Greek island) last month. It was very, very hot and sunny. All the time. The island is mostly quite commercialised, which is a shame. But we had a good time. The food was often a bit disappointing. It seems that everything comes with chips. I assume this is to appeal to the hoards of English tourists (which, yes, I understand we were merely adding to). We went for a bike ride one day, forgetting that we were on a small island, which means we're surrounded by sea, which in turn means that the wind never really stops. So that was quite an adventure. We hired a car another day and found some really unspoiled bits in the mountainous region at the north of the island. We also saw the Esklepion (sic) which was Hippocrates's hospital.

We had a good meeting with some of the Purcell Plus consultants at the end of June. One of the aims of the project is to assess the impact of e-Science of musicology. To that end, we're liaising with one of our consultants to produce an online questionnaire which we hope to use to be able to make some empirically credible claims about this impact. I drafted some questions this week.

Related to this, the workshop I organised on e-Science for Musicology took place in Edinburgh last week. I thought it went well. I had 13 speakers altogether including J. Stephen Downie from Illinois and Ichiro Fujinaga from McGill as well as some European and UK speakers. It was hosted at the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh which I've been to before.

The idea was to try to attract an audience of musicologists who don't currently use technology to support their research beyond library catalogues and online journal access. In the event, after advertising widely to UK university music departments, only a handful of "proper" musicologists were there. However, they did raise some good discussions and I think we came away with a feeling that there may still be scope for promoting e-Science methods in musicological research.

We might try and get a D-Lib publication out of it.

I've ditched Cocoon from the Britten Thematic Catalogue project. Which is good. It's now running all in CherryPy. Which is even better. It still uses XSLT to generate the HTML, RDF, etc. views. But now all the URL pattern matching and XSLT processing is done in Python with CherryPy and it seems like a more coherent application for it.

We went for a day trip to Ely on Sunday. We heard the girls choir sing the Langlais Messe Solemnelle in the morning and Howells in B minor in the afternoon. They weren't bad. But what was really good was that there was a free concert at lunch time in the Lady Chapel (quite possibly one of the best reverberant acoustics in the country) given by the mixed choral forces of James Maddison University (Virginia). They were amazing. Like most things in America, they take it all really seriously, they put on a proper performance which they expect to go well and it really pays off. They did some fantastic pieces and just performed them stunningly well. Quite possibly the best concert I've been to for a long time. Even better than Philip Glass!

I've started learning to use org-mode properly. I used to use it mainly just for note taking, and marking some notes as TODO in one of my project files. Now I'm trying to implement David Allen's Getting Things Done in it. This is a good idea in itself, but I've also been asked to give a presentation on doing it for staff and research students in Computing at Goldsmiths on Tuesday, so I kind of need to learn to use it.

Anyway, my train is just arriving at Norwich. C-c C-c. C-x b todos RET C-c C-t d RET C-x C-c

Quite a busy week this week.

On Tuesday I gave my presentation on using Emacs and org-mode for Getting Things Done. This was intended for staff and research students in Computing. In the end, only a few people turned up, but they were a good audience; a mixture of Emacs power users and newbies. I think the idea is that this series of tutorials may serve as practice ones and we'll give them again during a busier time of year.

The DRHA (Digital Resources for the Humanities and Arts) paper has been accepted. So hopefully I'll be going to Dublin in September.

I've bought a new keyboard. It's a nice, light touch, flat, laptop-style keyboard and, but for missing an insert key (which I'm used to using with Shift for paste, avoiding Ctrl+v), it's very nice (though Gtk Emacs will yank from the clipboard anyway). Much more comfortable than my old sluggish, full-size wireless one.

We did lots of baking and cleaning over the weekend in preparation for both sets of parents coming to visit on Wednesday, staying till today. They were here because Zoe and I both graduated on Wednesday, Zoe with a BA in music, and me with an MMus. I was the only person with a bright pink hood. The ceremony seemed to be shorter and a lot less boring than my BA one several years ago. I think then Music was with Biology and we had a guest lecture on calcium. Anyway, the bread and brownies were lovely.

We took the parents on a City Boats tour of Norwich on Thursday which was really nice. It went from Elm Hill all the way down to the Yare with the customary (but still interesting) commentary of local anecdotes. For instance, the original Nosey Parker (Rev'd Thomas Parker) was a Norwich resident. (Incidentally, Google does not verify this; such is boat tour operator sourced information.) Also, when we got to the Colman's factory, there was a fantastic smell of mint (not mustard). We also went on the Bure Valley railway, narrow gauge steam.

We're busy trying to find flats near New Cross. There seems to be quite a lot of choice which I guess is the state of the market at the moment; properties are staying on for a bit longer which allows us a bit more time to look and choose.

So quite a lot of leisure and not much work this week.

Oh yes, and I also got round to confirming that I'm allowed to publish my MMus thesis online. So here it is:

http://www.richard-lewis.me.uk/publications.html

My sister was visiting my cousin (who has been living in Norwich for the last year or so) last weekend. So we met up for a day out at Colchester Zoo. The giraffe's were my favourite, closely followed by the orang utans; you can almost see the intelligence in their eyes.

We still haven't seen the new Harry Potter film. We booked tickets for last Saturday night at Vue. But we got there to find that the air conditioning was broken. It was completely unbearable so we got our money back and went back home. Instead, we've planned to watch all the DVDs (borrowed from the library) over the next several days and go and see the new one another time.

The big thing this week was flat hunting. I went to London on Tuesday for another skills session in the morning (the same series as my org-mode presentation last week) about LaTeX graphics, fonts, and making your own classes and commands. And in the afternoon I met Zoe to start viewing some flats. Here is a piece of advice: don't choose all the flats you want to see and try and book viewings of each of them at specific times. This is what I tried to do and it was a near disaster. Instead, book a slot of time (maybe an hour) with the agent offering each of the flats you're interested in and get them to take you round that one and a few others. That way you get to see plenty of flats and you don't have to worry about getting around them yourself. Another thing I found out (and this is pretty obvious now I think about it) is that agents within the same company are in competition with each other. So we went in to one agent and just said we've booked a viewing of such-and-such, and one of them offered to take us to see it. On the way I had a call from one of his colleagues who was outraged that we'd gone to see it with someone else! I didn't think that it would make any difference who we went to see it with, so I didn't bother making any note of who I'd arranged the viewing with on the phone.

Anyway, we did manage to see quite a few in the end. And we found one we liked which we've put a holding deposit on. It's in Lewisham, so handy for shopping and swimming and running and even for College. The next hurdle is getting a removal company. I've been in touch with one who asked me to do my own survey of the furniture, in the hope that he might be able to give us an sooner slot. So measuring the sofa, tables, bookshelves, etc. was actually quite fun.

I went in to the lab again on Thursday to hear Sebastian Ewert's talk on his work on chroma-invariant audio alignment. And also went in to the agent's office to complete the tenancy agreement application form. And I tested the walk from the flat to the lab: 40 minutes, including some green bits.

While I was there, I also tried to convince one of my colleagues to try ElScreen and Wanderlust. I say tried, in fact he's already a keen Emacs user, and was looking for a good Emacs window manager and an Emacs-based mail client, so he didn't really need much convincing.

I definitely think Emacs is the way forward for an all-purpose, desktop environment-like system. I plan to learn to integrate the Emacs Multimedia System into my "work"flow. It'd be nice to be able to rely more on Emacs for Web browsing. Currently, with w3m etc. you miss out on JavaScript and images. I'd also be interested in finding a presence manager which abstracts over jabber.el and ERC (and the like). I currently have some basic elisp functions which I can use to mark myself as away etc. but they're specific to my case, and not very extensible.

I need to settle down to some proper work next week. Especially working on the DRHA paper and my literature review.

Oh yes, and today is the anniversary of my interview at Goldsmiths.