Tuesday, April 16

Today was a nonstop whirligig that mostly consisted of responding rapidly to bad news and turning it into exciting opportunities.

I realised that my plans for the XML session in the morning simply wouldn’t work, because of the ways that the timetables had been shifted, and so I expanded upon an issue we discovered in the previous session and improvised a workshop around that. It was a genuine problem – how to make fully fluid covers for ebooks – and it generated some interest and activity, but it meant that I spent the morning in constant alert.

Before this I had had a flurry of “final” activity concerning the two theses that I am supervising and that will be presented next week. I had to persuade Jutta to be the examiner for one of them, then arrange times and places, and then get the paperwork in order. Fortunately Jutta and I had done it yesterday for another set, so it was fresh in my mind. Nonetheless it was time and brain consuming.

In the afternoon I had to prepare a final statement for the unconference we are organising in May, partly to celebrate the success of our first social media game. I had to meet Pixelache’s newsletter deadlines which I did only because Nathalie and Andrew made sure that they were generously elastic. I then found out that the game itself may not happen on schedule because the students doing the programming may have to jump ship tp complete several maths courses in record time in order to complete their studies in time for their graduation.

Oh, what an opportunity to develop a newer and more innovative strategy, I thought.

At 15:00 I took an hour out to play the part of a dying patient in a film that the Irish exchange students are shooting. I did my best to steal the scene in a final desperate bid for film stardom.

Now I am at home The girls are at photography and I am looking at how much the snow has melted while I was away. I am doing some ironing and nursing a splitting headache.

At 20:00 I will have a Skype talk with Reidar about the session we will be leading together on Saturday. The conversation will end when his phone battery dies. This will be at the exact moment when we have exchanged all the information that we need to exchange.

If I was superstitious I would probably have something superstitious to say about that.