Preparations are going quite quickly for our move to London. We've now booked a date to sign the tenancy agreement and for removal of our stuff from Norwich. Unfortunately they're not the same date, so we'll be paying a few days overlapping rent.

Moving the utilities is all straightforward except for the phone/internet. We have Postoffice phone and ADSL and they're fine about transferring our contract, but their address database and what we think our address is don't quite marry up. It's a Victorian conversion with four (I think) flats in it. The Royal Mail website tells me there are two addresses in the building, the PO Telecomms' database says there are three, each with names that don't even remotely describe our flat (top floor). I'm not quite sure what data they're using if it's not the Postcode Address File. I think I may need to get in touch with Lewisham council.

National Express are having strikes * at the moment. They're on Thursdays and Fridays, last week, next week, and the following week. So I didn't make it into the lab yesterday. Though by the week after next I should be living in London anyway.

We went to see the new Harry Potter film on Wednesday. They seem to get better each time. They're different directors which obviously makes a difference, but also the music isn't John Williams anymore, it's now Nicholas Hooper and, in my opinion, works quite a bit better.

Our new(ish) neighbours organised a house warming party last night so we went along. It was good to meet them, and all the other neighbours who we've never go around to meeting before. Got quite drunk. Went to bed very late. I remember now why I don't like doing that

Nonetheless, we did manage to get up today and planned a day trip to Cromer. When we got off the train, though, we found the place swarming...with ladybirds. They were all over the place, especially on flat surfaces, near rubbish bins, and dead ones piled up in drifts in the gutters. We got as far as the sea front while being constantly bombarded by them and gave up. We got back on the next train and got off in a place call Gunton. So in the end we had a nice country walk (sans ladybirds) to Southrepps and a pub lunch. Apparently a bumper population of aphids brought about by lack of rainfall has caused a sharp increase in the ladybird population. Whatever the reason, it was very unpleasant, almost like something out of a horror film.

The DRHA conference is getting close. I've registered and need to get my paper in order. It's basically about the Purcell Plus task of integrating text data into music datasets. So we're working on methods of asserting relationships between music representations and textual commentaries describing the music, and thinking up some interesting applications of being able to do so. Such as, VREs for musicologists, or automated analyses of musicological vocabularies.