Still 250 miles from Durham

Well my original misgivings about driving to Durham today were well founded. I've had three e-mails from the powers that be basically saying if you live outside Durham give up and work from home. You can't get much more outside Durham than Cambridge I guess.

I wouldn't have had much to do today even if I had managed to drive up. Turns out that most of the rest of my group are stranded on La Palma due to bad weather shutting down the airport there.

We shall have to see what tomorrow brings.

- Posted from my phone (please excuse grammar and spelling. Well more than usual anyway)

Last week as an academic

Well my last week as an academic isn't off to a promising start. I'm down here in Cambridge, job is up there in Durham and it's started snowing.




This is probably going to make getting to work fun today :-(

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

A Few Telescopes

After Nearly a Decade in the University Sector...

We'll after nearly a decade working in the University Sector I'm about to call it a day. I'm just basically fed up of the way things are done and also getting 'possibly you're going to be made redundant' letters from HR in my pigeon hole (I get one about every three months because funding is that tight).

So, I'm going back to Cambridge to work in the high-tech sector. I reckon if Cambridge goes pear-shaped, economically speaking, there'll be nowhere left in the country to run to and we'll all be in trouble.

I could rant on about lack of investment in education, collation government policy for universities (terrible at best and I think you can trace the problem back to the last time the Tories messed with the University/Polytechnic System but that would be ranting) but I'd sound like a broken record.

Suffice to say that all those years ago when I came back to University I had a couple of aims:

1) To get a PhD because it would be fun (yes, I am that perverse).
2) Use the PhD to get a teaching job lecturing in Software Engineering.

Well, aim one achieved and after a fashion it was fun (I highly recommend it if you have the time and money).

As for aim two, well you find things out along the way when it comes to University.

My rose tinted (undergraduate shaped) notion of lecturing was that you are actually there to teach. Not quite so, at least not these days. True, as a lecturer you do have to teach undergraduate courses but in most universities that's not the main reason you're there. You're there to obtain research funding and manage research (you don't even get to do the actual research yourself!), so in effect you're middle management. That's quite apart from the terrible rates of pay you're expected to start on.

OK, I though, I'll try being a Teaching Fellow. Basically just there to teach which is what I wanted to do. Great, except that even if you can get a job doing it you're seen as a second class citizen by most departments and you're paid accordingly.

After that it was a slippery slope really. Try and bit of research for few years, get to the point where a lectureship is a really possibility and then you're back to problem number one.

So, go for a purely engineering based role in a university (great fun) but eventually self defeating because you end up doing the exact same work as in industry, for half the money with, less resources and less organisation.

Hum! On the whole, since I value my sanity and I have a wife and two children to support I think I'll go back to industry if it's all the same to you.

Well done government spending/education policy (no government in particular, just government in general)

A Long Overdue Update

At long last I'm finally getting round to posting some of the results of my trip to La Palma and the WHT (which was about two months ago now).

This is me (probably) breaking health and safety regulations and a risk assessment by not wearing an long sleeved shirt or a hat out in the sun, not to mention standing on the top of a rather unstable sandy cliff top with a 20ft drop to get this picture. Oh well.

That's GranTeCan in the background which (at the moment) is the world's largest telescope. I got to go inside last year and it is huge!

I'm rather proud of this one even if I did just take it on my iPhone and then stick the individual pictures together. On the left you can see the WHT (the larger dome) then moving right you see the Isaac Newton Telescope and finally the Jacobus Kapteyn Telescope.

The conditions were abysmal for astronomy while I was on the island. There was dust in the upper atmosphere which was being blown across from large sandstorms in Africa and there was quite a lot of high cloud (which doesn't happen that often at La Palma). Saying that, it did make for some impressive pictures when the dust cleared a bit.

This was about the third day I was on La Palma and the dust had cleared just enough so you can see across to Tenerife. This was taken on a little walk I had around part of the caldera rim near the Isaac Newton Telescope.

I also rather like this one. It's got a bit of telephoto on it to try and catch some of the detail but I don't often see cloud spilling over ridges. The last time I saw something even vaguely like this was in Oxford on Port Meadow down by the river. I'd gotten up early to walk the dogs for some reason and it was fairly cold. Mist was boiling up off the river, rising up in the air and then falling back about 20 ft from the river bank so it was forming a tunnel by the river. It didn't last for long and I wish I'd had a camera with me.