Thursday, December 7

 

 

I walked down to Alepa in a clear morning and got the 95 to Itäkeskus.

The morning passed by quickly in a blur of emails and rearranging. I dealt with the students who had not succeeded in forming teams last Friday, and then I wrote some comments on a thesis. Later I had conversations with Nathalie about applications, Jutta about student progress, and Mats about next year’s MA courses.

I went downstairs for vegetable chilli con carne because the queue looked non-existent, and had a talk with Micke about the progress of the Nobanet e-learning course. My topic has fallen behind schedule, but since two other topics appear not to exist at all, my promise to have mine uploaded in a final form before we leave for India seemed fine.

In the afternoon I ran a final session for the CMS course. I went through the current state of the Buddyschool website with the three IT students. It looks excellent, and works very efficiently. I also helped Jessica and Jolanda with some of their issues. They have worked well together and their problems had the advantage of clarity and intelligence. They knew why they had a problem, they could describe it clearly, and they only needed some careful prodding to come up with solutions themselves.

In fact, they needed coaching, which seemed exactly what they should need.

Oliver sent me a message to say that Discourse had stopped working. I checked and it had. I spent much of the afternoon reinstalling it all. After three hours I knew exactly where the problem lay, but I had no idea how to solve it. Discourse thinks something else has Port 80 under its control – but “something else” does not exist. To soothe my frustrations I installed bbPress on the Convivial Mechanics website. This took approximately three minutes, after which it just worked.

At 17:10 I left for the centre and met Naa at Finnkino in Käisäniemi at 18:00. She bought a huge tub of popcorn and we got ready to see Thor: Ragnorak. While she goes downstairs to load up on snacks I stand upstairs looking down the passageway to the metro station. I like the way that the various different lines and angles meet each other.

The movie will prove so exciting and interesting that Naa will have almost all her popcorn left at the end. She had forgotten to eat it.

Marvel seem to have developed an interesting and successful style that can combine action, verbal humour and slapstick in the same scene. The interactions between Thor and Doctor Strange, and later between Thor and the Hulk, all combined these in rapid succession. So long as you don’t require a movie to make sense, this seemed like perfect entertainment. It also had plenty of strong female characters and, arguably, Valkyrie had as strong a role as Thor.