Thursday, February 18

The snow was hard on the ground when I left and the bus was late. I didn’t mind. I was late too, and so I caught it.

I spent a final morning with the first year and XML transformations. Some of them were almost screaming by the time the class ended, and so I ended it fifteen minutes early, promising them that the next blocks would be enjoyable and ever so much easier. This is true: from now on we will be looking at epub and designing ebooks.

I had cheese and biscuits for lunch while having a tutorial with a student who intends graduating soon and is being frustrated by the fact that the eye-tracker seems to be not working a lot more than it seems to be working.

I have a second brief and totally unexpected tutorial with another student who turns up “because he is passing”. I try to pin him down to some definite dates for submitting a draft thesis, and he tries resisting. I win, and we agree to meet again in three weeks with a draft thesis in front of us.

I then have a skype call with Jutta and while I am doing this I am also moving my iPad in readiness to load an e-book into it for this afternoon’s session. By the magic of clumsiness the iPad takes a series of rapid photographs on its own. It appears to be very interested in my leads and cables and I have a set of suitably artistic photographic impressions of them.

I will spend the afternoon arguing about the theoretical mapping of games and the best way to do it. We will debate for hours about the difference between single player games and multiplayer games with a single player mode. This will seem extremely important at the time.

Naa will spend the evening at Kamppi and will read, talk and have a shower.