Tuesday, October 13

Tuesday had a morning of many parts.

I began by cycling through the coldest day so far. Then I experimented quickly with some Foundation-based layout, to answer a few fundamental questions. The answer to all of them was yes. At 9:30 I had a tutorial with Marcus and Mats to look at a mobile site they are building with WordPress. It looks convincingly like a mobile app and nothing at all like a WordPress site.

At 10:00 I had a long meeting with Michael to discuss what research grants I should apply for. We looked at my interests, the issues raised by my thesis, the needs of the department, and the requirements of the various funding agencies. In the end it became clear that the first thing I should do is seek a reasonably large sum of money to complete the Snowcastle Valley project that Auo and I started when she was eight. This will be a practical project, which I would rather like. It will feed directly back into the department’s curriculum, and it will be cross-departmental because Riita will be interested in joining in. And, in the long term, it has all sorts of start-up possibilities.

I left that meeting for a Skype meeting with Andrea, our advisor at Lynda.com. She wants through our reports and our use is exemplary. I asked some questions about the interface, and then it was time for lunch.

The afternoon was a session with the CMS class who had all avoided doing their assignment. That meant we had nothing to talk about and so I asked them to continue with the project for Jutta’s class, because that is going to provide the material for the second half of this course. If they don’t have that done in time we will be in a whole pile of trouble.

The session finished with a sudden burst of server problems involving a project where two databases had been crushed together in a totally unworkable way. By the time I had fixed that I had missed John’s second cabaret session, and the start of the following Pixelache meeting.

I am hurrying there and as I walk over the temporary bridge I am looking at the start of the sunset. When I get to the meeting I will join in the arguing with gusto, because that is the kind of mood crushed databases put me in.

When I get home I will calm down in the shower.