Category: Miscellaneous

Odds and ends that don't fit into the main categories usually holidays, photography and personal stuff

Apr 05 2014

San Sebastian, aka Donostia

Once again I travel for work, more specifically to a NewsReader project meeting in San Sebastian, or in the Basque language, Donostia.

My trip there was mildly stressful, Easyjet fly direct Manchester-Bilbao but only on three days of the week – the wrong days for my meeting. Therefore I travelled via Charles De Gaulle Airport, which made a 1.5 hour transfer rather tight and led to me being obviously irritated with an immigration official. I should add that Charles De Gaulle Airport was the only stressful part of my trip.

Once at Bilbao it is a little over an hour on an express bus to reach Donostia. And it’s a rather odd experience. I’ve only visited Spain once in the past, to Barcelona and the rest of my knowledge of the country is from trashy TV about Brits on holiday and art house films (and books). The Basque country reminded me of the transfers from the airport to the ski resort I’ve made across the Alps. Steep-wooded valleys, chalet-style buildings scattered across hillsides with orchards and hay-meadows. Small towns wedged into the bottoms of valleys, apartment blocks creeping up the hillsides in the manner of the French rather than Austrian Alps. The only oddity is the occasional palm tree.

There is a fair amount of geology on display, I didn’t catch any photos from the bus but you get a hint of it from this photo of the bay at Donostia.

San Sebastian, the bay

It was unseasonably warm whilst I was in Donostia, I remarked that I’d consider the temperature normal for Spain to one of my hosts, who replied; “You’ve made two mistakes there: (1) you’re not in Spain…”.

Once in Donostia, it is strikingly reminiscent of the North Wales coast and Llandudno! Fine buildings along a bay with a steep promontory looking down on the town.

Panorama

The quality of the street furniture is rather better, and the buildings have a rather more wealthy feel. The local vegetation also reminds you that you’re not in Llandudno.

1-IMG_20140331_175424

Apparently the Spanish royal family used to holiday in Donostia at the Miramar Palace, not really that palatial but it has fine views over the bay and the grounds reach down to the sea:

Miramar Palace

I wonder whether they used this rather ornate beach house:

Bathing hut on the sea front

The town hall is pretty impressive too:

1-IMG_20140331_175540

I failed a bit on local cuisine only making it out one night of three, to the Cider House. Apparently a typically Basque thing. The dining room is reached past large barrels of cider, which are the main event. The cider drinking scheme is as follows: at regular intervals the patron shouted something, and the willing and able followed him to a selected barrel. He opened a small tap producing a two metre or so stream of cider, projected horizontally. The assembled drinkers catch a an inch or so of cider each in large plastic beakers. Points are awarded for catching the stream as far from the barrel as possible, and once started the drinker moves up the stream. The next drinker aligns themselves to catch the stream when the previous drinker moves out of the way. The result is quite splashy.

Between drinks there is a fixed menu of bread, cod omelette, cod and greens, the largest barbeque steaks I’ve ever seen, finishing with walnuts, quince jelly and cheese.

Aside from this my colleagues were keen on pintxos, the local take on the more widely known tapas.

I stayed at the NH Aranzazu which was very nice, not particularly expensive and very convenient for the university but not so much for the town centre.

Jan 25 2014

Trainspotting

eurostar-logoI am something of a trainspotter.

That’s not to say I have ever stood at the end of a platform writing down the numbers of the trains that go by, rather that have an interest in things of a railway nature. So obviously I was very excited to get the opportunity to go to Paris on the train.

I’ve been to Paris on the train before. Fifteen years or so ago HappyMouffetard and I travelled from Cambridge to Paris for the odd weekend. In fact that’s where HappyMouffetard picked up her twitter handle. In those days the terminus for the Eurostar was at Waterloo, so the trip meant crossing London from Kings Cross where the Cambridge train came in. Once on the Eurostar you pottered through Kent to the Dover end of the tunnel at what seemed like barely more than walking pace. After passing through the tunnel to France the train accelerated for a while before the guard told us we were travelling at some unimaginable velocity. He sounded a bit smug. The Eurostar would then whine rapidly through northern France to arrive at Gare du Nord.

Things have changed. Now the Eurostar terminus is at St Pancras which is next door to Kings Cross and a short step down the road from Euston, the station I arrive at from Chester. St Pancras International is a rather fine station, particularly when compared to the competition: airports. Not only does it offer a long bank of charging points but also free Wifi! The trip to Dover is transformed, the train plunges underground for the first few miles but then whizzes along at positively unBritish speeds to the Channel. A little over two hours after leaving London, you are in Paris. Pick the right trains and there are just two scheduled stops between Chester and Paris (at Crewe and in London)!

This makes the whole journey rather more of a practical proposition, even if you are travelling from northern England. Chester to London is currently a little over two hours travel time, it would take me an hour and a bit to reach Manchester airport. Check-in for Eurostar is an hour or so, and then a couple of hours to Paris and you end up at Gare du Nord in the centre of Paris rather than Charles de Gaulle Airport – some distance away. Once at Gare du Nord you walk straight off the train onto the street. Similarly on my return trip, I walk straight off the train and I’m on the platform at Euston in 15 minutes.

I’ve rarely found airports relaxing, they seem hellholes of “duty-free” shopping, stressed travellers, over-crowding, bad food, building works to insert more shopping opportunities, suffused with baseline low-level dread that the implausibility of powered flight invokes. The only exceptions I’ve found are when I’ve been able to travel business class and take refuge in the business lounge. In fact, I’m not bothered about the business class flying experience – it’s the lounge I’d pay for myself! And once you’re on the plane it’s cheek by jowl with your fellow man, and air hostesses trying to force plastic food upon you, hand luggage woes as there is insufficient space for the hand luggage everyone now carries since you get gouged for hold luggage.

Cost wise things aren’t so happy, a train to London is expensive unless you travel “off peak”, a small window in the middle of the day and later in the evening.

In summary, from Chester to Paris:

Flying: 1 hour 30 minutes + 2hours check-in + 1 hour 30 minutes flight + 1 hour to Paris + airport hell = nasty 6 hours

Train: 2 hours + 1 hour check-in + 2 hours + shiny nice things = nice 5 hours

Dec 29 2013

Review of the year: 2013

Liverpool Metropolitan CathedralMy blogging is much reduced this year, at least on my own blog. This is a result of my new job with ScraperWiki and child care, Thomas is now nearly two years old.

I started the year with a couple of posts on my shiny new laptop; working for a startup I’ve escaped from the corporate Dell. One post was on the beast itself – a Sony VAIO, and Windows 8 – Microsoft’s somewhat confusing new operating system offering. The other post was on running Ubuntu on the VAIO. In the past this was a case of setting up dual boot but various innovations make this difficult and there is, in my view, a better solution: a virtual machine.

There wasn’t much ranting this year: I only managed one little one about higher education, and the reluctance amongst lecturers to take any teaching qualifications. The only other marginally opinion piece was on electronic books, where I muttered about DRM limiting the functionality of ebooks.

I managed to read a few books which ended up on my own blog: The Eighth Day of Creation, about the unravelling of the genetic code was a dense, heroic read. The Dinosaur Hunters was light and fluffy. Empire of the Clouds and The Backroom Boys were largely wistful rememberings of Britain’s former greatness in jet aeroplanes and in technology more generally. Chasing Venus and a History of the World in 12 Maps returned to the themes of geodesy and mapping which I’ve explored in the past. Finally, a bit of London history with The Subterranean Railway and Lucy Inglis’ Georgian London. I’ve been following Lucy on twitter since Georgian London was a twinkle in her eye. It’s difficult to choose a favourite amongst these, it’s either History of the World in 12 Maps or Georgian London.

Over on ScraperWiki’s blog I’ve been knocking out blog posts at a great rate, you can see them all here. I did a good deal of book reviewing over there too, my commute into work on the train means I get an hour or so of reading every day – which quickly adds up to a lot of reading! I read about machine learning, data visualisation (this and this), Tableau (this and this), natural language processing, R, Javascript and software engineering. I’m currently ploughing my way through Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques. I think my favourite of these was Natural Language Processing with Python. I’m beginning to see the value of the more expensive, better established publishing houses in terms of book quality.

Alongside this I did a few blog posts on new tools for my trade. I’ve long programmed to do scientific analysis but ScraperWiki is a company which sells software, and the discipline of writing software for others to use is different from writing software for yourself, particularly important are testing and source control.

I spoke at a couple of events: Data Science London, and Strata London where I gave an Ignite talk. Ignite talks follow a special format, they are five minutes long and you get 20 slides which advance automatically at the rate of one every 15 seconds – a somewhat frantic experience. My talk is captured on video.

I also did some bits of data analysis; #InspiringWomen was a look at a response to the online bullying and abuse of women. A place in the country was about data on house prices which we had collected for a campaign by Shelter.

Back on my own blog I managed to do a couple of photographic posts, one on Liverpool. The rail loop under Liverpool was closed which meant I had to walk across town to work, and I suddenly realised that Liverpool is rather spectacular architecturally. This led me on to getting the Pevsner Guide to Liverpool. The ScraperWiki office might be a bit unusual in that a quarter of the company owns this book! I also went on a business trip to Trento, which turns out to be a very attractive city, unfortunately I only had my phone with me to take photos.

The last year has highlighted to me what a privilege it was to have so much time to spend on my blogging, photography and garden shed fiddling in the past. It’s what got me my new job but for many, equally able, people this investment of time simply isn’t possible with the other responsibilities they have. Something to consider the next time you’re recruiting, and so highly rating that extra-curricular activity.

Also I realise I have a great deal of theoretical knowledge about a whole pile of technologies but I have spent rather less time on actually doing anything with them, so maybe this coming year there’ll be less reading and more coding on the train.

Happy New Year to you all!

Oct 06 2013

Trento

Normally travel for work is a less than enjoyable experience but this week I’ve been to Trento*, and it was very pleasant. Sadly I only had my mobile phone to take photos.

Trento is in the north of Italy, the bit that is positively Germanic. The second language appears to be German and the cuisine is more alpine than pizza. It’s a small town with a substantial university. It sits  in a broad, bottomed steep-sided valley an hour on the train from Verona on the line that heads up to Bolzano, the Brenner Pass and Austria. I’d not heard of Trento before, I’d heard of the Council of Trent (which refers to the Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church which was held in Trent between 1545 and 1563).

View on the walk down from Povo

A short walk from the railway station and you are in the heart of the old city, narrow streets with marble pavements faced with buildings which in large part seem to date from the 16th century. The majority of the shops, restaurants and bars embedded in the lower floors are rather swish and classy looking.

Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore

The heart of the old town is the Piazza del Duomo, featuring the city’s cathedral, the fountain of Neptune and other fine buildings.

Piazza del Duomo

The cathedral seems to date to some time around the start of the 13th century. It’s been well conserved and the square itself is largely in character. The most similar British cities I know in terms of old architecture are probably Wells and Canterbury most other British cities either never had substantial buildings of such age, or they were replaced at some point since.

The fontana del nettune is quite blingy:

Fontana del Nettuno

Next door to my hotel, Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore:

Chiesa di Santa Maria Maggiore

Alongside the ecclesiastical buildings are some fine townhouses. Romeo and Juliet was set in Verona, an hour down the railway line – I wonder if this is how the balcony Juliet stood in looked:

Palazzo Quetta Alberti-Colico

This is the Palazzo Quetta Alberti-Colico. There’s also the rather nice Palazzo Geremia (pdf)

Palazzo Geremia

 

On the edge of town, close to the bridge over the river, the Torre Vanga, erected originally in 1210, is palimpsest of masonry and brick.

Torre Vanga

And as well as that there are some impressive entrances:

Duomo di TrentoChiesa della Santissima Trinità39 Via Rodolfo Belenzani

 

Definitely worth a day trip if you are in the area, and great if you have business as the university!

*Unsurprisingly the Italian wikipedia entry is much more extensive.

Aug 29 2013

More rant on higher education

It’s been quite a while since I’ve had a rant on my blog. I’ve been muted by the responsibilities of child care and a new job, but the drought is over!

My ire has been raised by this article in the TES where university academics are bemoaning the fact that they may actually be compelled to hold qualifications in teaching.

The core information in the piece is that the Higher Education Statistics Agency is compelling universities to provide anonymised data on the teaching qualifications of their staff. Academics fear the data will be used for “foolish” ends and may make such qualifications compulsory.

Oh the humanity!

It isn’t like I have no working knowledge in this area – I worked in universities for 10 years: as a PhD student, a postdoc, a weird intermediate state at Cambridge and finally as a lecturer. In all that time I received approximately 4 days training on how to teach. I taught students in small groups, practical classes and lectures.

Teaching well is a skill and it is ironic that, in institutions which award qualifications to people, the idea that qualifications in your profession might be useful is a radical idea and a thing which must be opposed.

An interviewee for the piece lets the cat out of the bag, he says: “If you want to maintain an active research life, you need to devote… 24 hours in the day towards your research. These [teaching] qualifications take time and effort to obtain, and anything that takes away from research time makes it more difficult to stay in the research excellence framework”.

Remember this when you or your offspring are planning on spending £9k per year to attend a university because the view that any teaching effort is a distraction from research is common.

Outside academia qualifications are seen as something of a benefit, if I had a teaching qualification it would be on my linkedin profile in a flash!

Imagine buying a rather expensive car and being told “None of the designers or engineers who made this car had any qualifications in making cars but they’ve been doing it for years”. It’s the very core of teaching: learning stuff you wouldn’t learn by experience.

So, there is my rant.