Update

I got the job application in, finally: here's the revised (or rather, totally re-written) research proposal, and here's the summary for laymen. You will notice the point where I thought "Speculative? Ha! I'll show you speculative!" I'd really appreciate feedback, especially on the one-page summary: the two or three formulae in there should be helpful to some, but can safely be ignored if they make your eyes glaze over. The proposal got mailed off at about 5am on Wednesday morning: I then went to bed for a couple of hours before getting up to catch the bus down to Sheffield at 9.15. We missed the bus, but we were only round the block from the railway station, so we caught the train as far as Edinburgh and joined our bus there. The train journey gave me time to write most of the one-page summary: just as well, really, as I found it impossible to type on the bus.

( Panto! )

( Monads! )

Then wormwood_pearl and I got on our respective trains, she back to Glasgow and I on to Oxford, to see our respective families for Christmas. Christmas chez Vlak has been pretty good, though marred by the need to put up endless amounts of flat-pack furniture: my Dad is building a new workshop, and needs cupboards and drawers and so on to put his stuff in. Now, I'm no great craftsman, but I'm not a complete incompetent: but these units have been a total nightmare. The instructions are unclear and barely-legible, everything's bizarrely sized so measurement is that little bit harder (the door handles are 12.8 cm from centre-hole to centre-hole - or 5 and a sixteenth inches, if you prefer), I'm 99% certain they've replaced a small but crucial bit with a new design that invalidates the bundled instructions, and no matter how paranoid I am, no matter how careful I am to measure everything three times and clamp everything as tightly as I can and drill everything as straight as I can, nothing ever fits right the first time. A single drawer unit took us nearly three hours to assemble the other day.

Other than that, Christmas has been pretty good. It's always nice to see my family, and I managed to meet up with mrkgnao and necaris the other day. My last-minute Christmas presents to the parents* seem to have been appreciated (as were theirs to me - yay for books, head-torches and Hustle on DVD!). And now wormwood_pearl has arrived down South, so we can spend New Year together :-)

In entirely unrelated, but sad news, Oscar Peterson, arguably the greatest jazz pianist of all time - screw that, arguably the greatest pianist of any kind of all time - died a few days ago, at the age of 82. If you don't know his work, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. Start with his recording of Porgy and Bess, which completely transformed my understanding of the piece, but frankly it's all good.

* Literally last-minute: they were about to close Blackwell's on Christmas Eve as I bought them. Fortunately, they were also marking everything down to half-price rather than £2 or £3 off :-)