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