Das Dual Boot

Ubuntu is so sweet :)
The idea that a thousand nerds at a thousands Sun workstations could produce an OS that plays nice in a dual boot with a shared data partition, with Windows friggin XP...beggars belief. Yet they have. And it only continues to get better.
As long as nothing ever goes wrong...ugh, terminal :(

Back in the saddle

So having given the old site a facelift, and blown a tiny fanfare, I find myself in the embarrassing position of having even less time to write than before. I've put up nothing but unintended publishings of old draft material and that has to change - but I'm a bit blocked. Thus, I'm going to give a bulletin update of news and hope to get my regular posting back on track within the month.

• There is one PhD thesis in the bag, and one viva defence still to come. That was a long haul, but never got out of hand, I think. It becomes more like a job of work than a Bachelor or Masters degree, since its sooo long and sooo precise that you can't really just throw manic energy at it and expect to get anywhere. Then, there's still the viva, and I haven't even thought about what that entails. More research required!
• Job secured. Uh oh, I'm going back to the World of Work! A mystical place where work disappears into a gaping void of 'what exactly have we achieved?', and money appears out of the great blue yonder of 'whyyyy?' I'm going to be working on a couple of EU projects as a post-doc researcher, with the Centre for Knowledge and Innovation Research, Helsinki School of Economics, Suomi. All very grand sounding, although I admit I'm not yet quite sure what I'll be doing there. Being wonderful as usual, I suppose :S
• Moving time! Moving house is a logistics fetishists dream, and moving house between countries, especially one with a (very) different language, is just value-added complexity. So great fun for me...
• Finland, Finland, Finland. The place where I want to be. Will be. Officially bi-lingual, practically tri-lingual, the most and least Scandinavian country, depending on perspective. Problems with Russia. I wonder if Finland is a good place to weather the coming storm. I know Ireland and the UK are not good places, more like epi-centres, but I'm unsure of Finland's exposure. They have masses of potable water, but in Helsinki they have water charges. They have a huge land-to-population ratio, but most of it is under snow. They have a great economy, but its heavily service-biased. They have a great standard of living, but I expect it costs a fair bit to keep it through those winters.

Watch this space!