Graham Robinson

It’s 10pm at night and we’re just waiting for a coach to pick us up from the reception we are currently in. I’m boiling hot.

To make that sentence a little more accurate… the BBC says that the night time minimum temperature is 23 degrees celsius. A perspective on that is that the maximum temperature in London tomorrow will be 19 degrees. I’m sweating buckets.

Anyway, over the next couple of days I’ll explain what I’ve been doing and will be putting up some photos on Flickr when I can get the GPS software downloaded and my photos geotagged. Probably Sunday.

I’m looking forward to posting some of the photos from this holiday, but although there is internet there aren’t the cables to connect the camera up. So far we have some excellent ones of Rhodes old town walls, the roman acropolis and some dolphins that decided to turn up on our boat trip. A lot of people didn’t even see the dolphins, but I managed a quick picture!

Karen is now a mother and I’m an Uncle. I’m looking forward to those pictures too.

(Password protected as I don’t annouce when I’m on holiday publicly)

After working in Humanities at Avenue Campus in one way or another since 2003, tomorrow is my last day.

Another ISS person is down at Avenue, I’m going up to the main campus and hopefully everyone will miss me

It’s hard to work out which place is the best to be. They both have a lot of good points.

Avenue is quiet, air conditioned, independent (as managers are at highfield) and there is a very personal touch with everything with most people knowing me by name (and vice versa).

Highfield however has lots of things in it (Gym, shops, bars). Advice is closer and I’d meet more people within the team. Hopefully it would also be the first stage of better career progression.

But we’ll see how it goes. Nice drink tomorrow with some of the Avenue people, looking forward to it.

Even if I wanted an iPhone it was always worth watiing. Now with announcements like http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/09/iphone-3g-is-finally-official it shows it’s worth it

I’ve been having a play with photo maps in the last couple of days, playing with applications and website widgets that show maps. I’ve tried trippermap on www.mediaguy.co.uk/map.

The biggest problem I’ve found is that the best photo site bar none is Flickr, that’s where all my photos are and just about everyone else in the world. Flickr is owned by Yahoo and Yahoo maps are rubbish; you just can’t zoom in at all.

Example: Best quality Yahoo map | Best quality Google map

So Google Maps (and Google Earth) are the best mapping sites on the interweb, but I’m going to use Flickr. I’m obviously not the only person with this problem so other people have combined the two! Yipee!

I’ve got into the tagging / geotagging lark. Hopefully tomorrow my datalogger will turn up. It’s a very small GPS that simply records where you’ve been. Once you have taken some pictures you download the photos to the computer, download the datalogger information and then some software looks at the date and time of the photo and where you are. Magically every photo knows where it is on the map.

When we go to Greece hopefully we will have a proper map, and I’m really looking forward to showing it off.

Colleagues may have noticed yesterday’s publication by the Guardian of league tables for particular disciplines.

Particular congratulations go to Film Studies, who figure at the top of the table for Media, Communications and Librarianship. Southampton appears as third in Modern Languages, behind Oxford and Cambridge. Archaeology (10) and Music (14) also appear in the top twenty for their subject area.

Congratulations to all concerned.

Best

Mike

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Professor Michael Kelly
Head of School

1. Teeth roots are long
2. Dentists should not show you anything covered in blood
3. Local anaesthetic doesn’t last long
4. Neurophen is amazing
5. My mouth hurts

After my dentist trip was cancelled yesterday the drilling out of my upper left wisdom is in 30 minutes.

Not looking forward to it. The one up side of a Wednesday appointment was the 2 days off work, now I get my Saturday spoilt.

If you take the figures here, and presume that every copy was sold at £40, Grand Theft Auto made the UK government £6,482,000 in 5 days.

That’s 926,000 copies of GTA sold in the UK between April 29th and May 3rd times £40 times 0.175 (UK Tax rate).

There are a lot of things to complain about in this world. There are the easy ones like ‘why do dentists charge too much’ and ‘why haven’t I won the lottery yet’, and hard ones like ‘how do I complain that another blog I read is so very wrong without looking like an idiot’. We’ll start easy.

My dentist appointment is tomorrow, I have arranged for 2 days off work with some programming to do while I’m bored. I look forward to eating soup and dribbling out of the side of my mouth.

My entertainment this week has been from Grand Theft Auto 4. There’s only one thing better than playing this game and that’s reading about how much other people hate it. Apparently mothers against drunk drivers were the latest people to complain (an argument that is flawed mainly by the fact that drunk driving either a) gets you killed because you can’t drive straight or b) makes you take a taxi because you learnt quickly from option a)).

Also of interest was that someone got robbed queuing for the game (the person didn’t get the game and neither had played it, it wasn’t even out) and that children might get hold of the game. I don’t see them banning alcohol and cinema, so that argument is mute as far as I’m concerned.

My biggest scientific observation is that psychopaths are likely to buy the game, not that people who buy the game will become psychopaths.

The last thing that has bothered me recently is a blog by Amy’s Friend James.

http://preview.tinyurl.com/6epe8d and http://preview.tinyurl.com/6jj2u4

They are very good people and have strong religious views. Now I’m sure that they can write far better blog posts than I can on the subject of abortion, but lets just say that my opinion is the exact opposite of whatever they write.

I blog to you on behalf of Fr. Frank Pavone and Priests for Life. Fr. Pavone recently posted two videos on You Tube in which he describes and demonstrates the two most common abortion techniques, using the actual instruments of abortion and the words found in medical textbooks and court testimony.

I had the quite unfortunate pleasure of watching an abortian the other day. It was on a Channel 4 documentary that work recorded. It had strong warnings on the program but my job was to cut out all the adverts and put the video on the streaming server. I wasn’t expecting what I saw and I had strong words about warning people.

On the subject, however, I think that what I saw were cells. I also don’t like watching videos of liposuction, appendix removal, heart surgery, etc. All those are where a surgeon cuts away living cells from a human that has consented and has decided, correctly or incorrectly, that this was the road they wanted to go down. Nothing should remove a woman’s right to choose. Nothing.