Ten Word Poem

"Bugger" thought the mugger,
"It seems this guy plays rugger"

Private Investigator For Hire

I've been looking at all the yellow notices that have suddenly appeared in our stairwells at work. They warn about things which have been there for ages, but are suddenly so dangerous that we have to be told about them. It ocurrs to me that "Trip Hazard" would be a great name for a Private Investigator. I'm thinking seventies style here, wearing a black roll neck sweater, houndstooth pattern jacket, crimplene slacks and loafers. He would drive his open topped red Ford Mustang around the mean streets of California solving mysteries and tracking down bad guys for shootouts in old warehouses by the docks.

If you have a mystery that you want Trip Hazard to investigate on your behalf, let me know.

Plate Spinning

I seem to have a lot on at the moment. I spent half an hour this morning just trying to remember all the things that I'm supposed to do and making up delivery dates for them so that I can enter them into my task list. Number one task is still "make a proper task list".

I feel a bit like those plate spinner people, where they have a bunch of plates spinning on sticks and they have to dash from one to another to keep them all going. I fire off a bunch of emails to people to move projects along and then have to respond to the ones that come back, and so on.

I'm kind of worrying that I'm going to turn my back for a second and hear an enormous crash as all the best crockery comes down to earth....

Don't Let It Go Flat

Wonderful things pocket computers. I've got one, number one son has an even better one and my mate Chris has a super special Sony one. But they all have one major problem. If you leave them alone for more than a couple of weeks they forget everything you ever told them. And I mean everything. It is rather fortunate that books are not like this. It would be a bit of a pain to pick out my copy of "A History of Mr Polly" by HG Wells (a wonderful book by the way) and find that all the pages had suddenly gone blank.

Chris used to have a navigation program on his pocket computer. He has spent the last month trying to find it, when it vanished into silicon oblivion around eight weeks ago. I've put all the programs and stuff back onto it and left him with instructions to charge at all costs.

Staring at the ceiling

We had our final, final Admissions Open Day today. This was a large one, where all the departments on campus are open and I get a free lunch. Since it was the last talk of the year I thought I'd try to video tape it. I reckoned that if the thing came out OK it would be a nice way of giving people the "Hull Experience" without them having to come here and get it. One reason why I'm was tempted is that videos of my lecture in rhyme have been flying off the web site like nobody's business.

So I got out my little tripod, set the camera on it and left it running. As I gave my talk I noticed that the camera was slowly tipping backwards until, at the end, it was pointing nearly straight up. I watched it through, and it is quite funny to see me gradually slide out of the frame, as if the place is sinking. The last part, where you can stare at a ceiling tile to the accompaniment of a disembodied voice talking about the great employment record of our graduates, is a particular highlight.