For the first time in almost a month, I did my prodigal act and returned to Glasgow for the weekend. The occasion was the NME Rock'n Roll Riot tour, which visited the Carling Academy on Saturday night. Since the bill included The Cribs and the Kaiser Chiefs (alongside Maxïmo Park), there was no way that I was going to miss it. The perennial problem, though, with attending a Kaiser Chiefs gig is that they tend to be filled with Kaiser Chiefs fans, falling into one of three categories:

1. Fresh-faced, apple-cheeked fourteen year-old tourists, bussed in from somewhere like Fife by their parents who circle the venue for four hours whilst their offspring take photographs on their permanently-aloft camera phones.
2. Me.
3. Carling Academy regulars, grizzled thickheads, the type of people who think that I Predict A Riot is less social commentary, more a self-fulfilling prophecy, and that the way to fulfill it is to throw cups of lager with one hand whilst waving their other, cigarette-wielding hand in my face.

Needless to say, by the end of the encore, I was more concerned with compiling a list of vitriolic adjectives than listening to another chorus of Oh My God.

As I trudged back to the family house to catch a late episode of Law & Order, there was a sound like Ray Von attempting to MC over Sweet Caroline for a crowd that didn't so much as groan when he cut the music for them to provide the whoah-oh-ohs. Of course, our pagan neighbours were having their annual bonfire on the occasion of Hallowe'en. It's a particularly damning indictment of the lack of neighbourliness in our corner of south Glasgow that our neighbours are not the "Smiths", the "Joneses" or whatever their name is, but rather "the pagans at the bottom of the garden who like to light a potentially-hazardous bonfire every Hallowe'en". Or, sometimes, "the people with the seven-foot-tall cave painting of a naked woman on their living room wall."

Hallowe'en is, as Chris has artistically pointed out, today. In my new home in Edinburgh, I am left with numerous questions. Now that I'm a tenant in my own right, am I expected to keep a bowl of sweets and nuts by the door for any guisers? Bear in mind that I barely keep enough food in the flat to feed me from day-to-day. In fact, how does guising work in a tenement? I know that, in our case, a canny ghoul could simply force the outer door, but otherwise is the correct etiquette to use the intercom? And, living in close proximity to the University, how many so-called "guisers" are going to be poor students who have pissed away the last of their loan cheques and are looking for enough food to subsist on until the next installment in January?

Pertinent questions all; now go out and have a good Hallowe'en!

Cheers,

Derek.

If you had told me six weeks ago that I would be going on a whisky-drinking holiday, I would have slapped you silly, insulted your parentage, and berated you for wasting my time. It was thus that I returned on Sunday from a weekend in Sutherland with the Edinburgh University Water of Life Society. If you don't count my August bank holiday in Crawley last year, this was my first holiday since summer 2001, and the two couldn't have been more different. Herewith a potted description of a great weekend!

We left on Friday afternoon from the inauspicious foot of Appleton Tower in the pouring rain. We stopped for a brief-as-possible toilet break in Birnam-of-Macbeth-fame, and made excellent time to Inverness, where we ate dinner in the friendliest kebab shop in the north (decent pakora, but not really a patch on the Woodlands Road shop) and stocked up on provisions from Morrison's (including the biggest box of Cadbury's Fingers ever!). Once out of the city, the minibus careened off the A9 at Munlochy, and—just as I was about to take issue with the seeming loss of direction—we arrived at the Clootie Well. Full of false confidence, and ignoring the mystery car that was also sitting in the pitch-black car park, I joined the advance party into the woods. The sight of a forest with rags tied to every tree was at first a bit creepy, but ultimately rather impressive. I wouldn't go there alone, though, especially not when you consider this. Onwards it was then to Carbisdale Castle, our palatial home for the weekend, and a couple of wee drams to get settled in.

After a negligible amount of sleep, it was up at eight on the Saturday, for a long day of activities. Apparently, there was a rumour of the showers being haunted, but I found the impending threat of public nudity to be far scarier than any posited ghost. We ate a hearty cooked breakfast, before setting out for the Clynelish Distillery in Brora. The tour included a tasting of two single malts, and marks a nadir for me as the first pre-midday dram that I've consumed. Lunchtime followed, and I can say emphatically that Brora is home to the finest chips in all Scotland. Yum. Subsequent activities were a visit to the abandoned Clearance Village at Badbea, a stone broch at Carn Liath, and the contentious statue of the Duke of Sutherland that dominates the area from atop Ben Bhraggie.

All of which suggests a busy day, but it was far from over. Once back at the hostel, it remained to cook dinner for 31 people. For whatever reason, my own abject lack of cookery experience was enlisted to help with the preparation of a monster spaghetti bolognese. Amazingly, people seemed to like it, and even went back for seconds and thirds. The sauce would later make a cameo appearance in Tristan's bolognese sandwiches, about which you probably don't want to ask.

After dinner, and a brief bout of late-onset onion fatigue, there was the tasting to end all tastings. It included the most expensive bottle yet bought by the society (coming in at £65), and two of Diageo's classic malts. Afterwards, we retired to the TV Lounge and had our very own Withnail and I moment when we had a run in with a local whisky-hater.

On, then, to Sunday, and the day of our return. In the morning, after another hearty (and even deliciouser) breakfast, our half of the party set out on a walk through Carbisdale Forest and enjoyed some spectacular views and weather. From there, we went to the Dalmore Distillery overlooking the Cromarty Firth, for an excellent tour that was preceded by the funniest promotional DVD that any of us had ever seen. The tour was more hands-on than at Clynelish, and we got to taste more than just the bottled product. There was also more alcoholic victimisation than a particularly-vindictive round of one of Gary's drinking games. After the tour, we headed back into Inverness to visit the Whisky Shop for a tasting of some more malts. Although water was provided for the purpose of cutting the whisky, you would have needed to be a master-titrator in order to avoid washing the micro-drams away. Much heeing and hawing led to a surprisingly pleasant dinner in the local Bella Italia, then we hit the road back to Edinburgh. Surprisingly good time was made from Inverness to Edinburgh—so much so that I don't remember stopping en route, but I did nod off for a while.

Once we were back in the city, there was only one sensible course of action: to Cloisters for an end-of-trip dram! After a whole weekend, my insufferable perkiness couldn't last, and promptly came to an end when I K.O.'d at two in the morning. Just as well it's reading* week, then….

Cheers,

Derek.

PS. To see more photos of the trip, so far there are mine, Tamara's and Leo's.

* recovering.

Two things that are typically absent from this blog are (i) consumer advice, and (ii) a rat's arse given about web standards. For one night only, then!

Yesterday afternoon was spent not watching The O.C. then aggravating my full-time-employed friends by emailing them to tell them about it, but rather spending a couple of hours setting up a wireless network for one of my friends. For once, it wasn't Bulldog that was the problem (in fact, they were helpful in providing all of the necessary configuration details over the phone, although these should probably have been provided with the installation, but go figure). In fact, within ten minutes, it was possible to set up the ADSL gateway and surf the web through an Ethernet cable, all using my friend's iBook.

Next step, obviously, was to get WiFi working. The web interface to the router was not especially friendly, but the steps were straightforward enough:

1. Click on "Wireless".
2. Click on "Setup".
3. Click on the check box next to "Enable AP".
4. Click on "Apply".
5. Reset the router.

Steps one through three went swimmingly. Then we clicked on "Apply", and nothing happened. Thinking perhaps that it was employing some subtle AJAX cleverness, we navigated away from the page, then back. And the change didn't persist.

"Confound it!" I might have said if my vocabulary weren't so vulgar. Thinking a change of browser might do the trick, we downloaded Firefox, washed, rinsed and repeated. The exact same problem was exhibited, only this time I could call up a Javascript console to see that a Javascript error was being raised every time I clicked on the Apply button.

"Blast!" I had no option but to download IE for Mac. (An aside: how come every other Mac application seems to come as a single file which you can drag to your Applications folder (admittedly nice UI, there), but IE comes with an installer (and no apparent uninstaller)?) To cut a not-especially-interesting story short, it plainly didn't work.

"Darn!" I was running out of options: when there was no apparent firmware update available, I came perilously close to hacking the Javascript in the web interface page or maybe hand-crafting the request using curl. Fortunately, we were able to borrow a Windows laptop, fire up IE for Windows, log on to the router and apply the changes. In short, it Just Worked.

With wireless working, all that remained was to set up WEP, which had to be done twice, as the router didn't appear to persist all of its settings across being switched off at the mains, but that's practically beside the point.

Therefore, dear consumer, if you do not possess some means or will to use IE for Windows, I would suggest that you steer clear of wireless routers based on Texas Instruments firmware (specifically the SOHOspeed ADSL Ethernet/Wireless Gateway (PDF)). Let this be a warning to you.

Cheers,

Derek.

I have always been sensitive about my accent. The defining moment came when I was working in Guildford last summer, and I was asked by a superior where in Edinburgh I lived. This slight was so major that not only did I decide not to work for Detica, but actually never to work for any company ever. As such, it saw me continue the academic progression from a remarkably studious first year to an absurdly sociable Master's course.

All of which brings us up to the present day. When meeting people, there's proved to be a standard list of questions: what's your name, what are you studying, where did you come from? I figured, if I was going to be apologising for anything, it would be the middle of these—an assumption that has largely been borne out by eye-glazings, derisive chuckles or outright fear when I've spoken the words "High Performance Computing". Anyone who sticks around long enough to discover what that entails gets a breezy, "It's like Computing, but worse," and a sharp change of subject.

Four years as a computer scientist was adequate preparation for that. However, twenty years of living in Glasgow hasn't prepared me for people's reaction upon learning my home-town:

• "Really? Gosh, you don't have a very strong accent."
• "But I can understand every word you're saying!"
• "You can't be from Glasgow—you don't sound that bad!"

I think the conclusion is plain to see. A Glaswegian in Edinburgh is a member of a downtrodden ethnic minority. In a subconscious play for acceptance, I've clearly changed so much that on my trips to the City Restaurant, I'm no longer offered the auslander condiment of vinegar on my chips.

Clearly, then, a very grave situation. This post is a call out to other exiled weegies at Edinburgh to form a support group forthwith! We'll go to the pub, drink to excess, stop our glottals and start knife fights. If we can rally enough members, we'll move on to internecine rivalry in the second semester.

Takers?

Cheers,

Derek.

One week on, and Freshers Week is now over. It seems that all of the false confidence I spraffed on that last post was merited, because I had a great time and met a bunch of great people. (In fact, compared to the people I met during my first Freshers Week, I reckon a far smaller proportion will turn out to be mentally unstable!)

Since I was basing the preview on almost pure bravado, it's no surprise that the week turned out rather differently. I joined neither the Indie nor the Computing Societies, endearing as they both sounded (in their different ways). In fact, it was interesting to see that a large proportion of the events were targeted solely at bands of marauding seventeen year-olds. Hence the word "undergraduate" became a pejorative for us world-weary postgrads.

The first event I attended was a "Coffee Crawl": aimed at those who didn't fancy drinking alcohol, or who weren't living in Uni accommodation and wanted to meet others in the same boat. That hardly makes a coherent purpose, and I fell squarely into the latter camp. It's a good thing the coffee shops were licensed…. Afterwards, I went with some of the postgrads I met there to Pizza Express. Sitting opposite a Pizza Hut on the other side of North Bridge, it was the perfect metaphor for the two kinds of fresher.

The following night was a Postgraduate Social in the Pleasance Cabaret Bar. It's at events like this where you realise how many things you must remember when you meet someone for the first time. There's name and face (obviously), but also their subject area, where they come from, where they're living in Edinburgh, etc. Considering short term memory is good for about seven things, I think I'm going to start carrying a notepad.

Tuesday afternoon saw a huge welcome meeting for postgraduates in the magnificent McEwan Hall, where I'll hopefully be graduating in fourteen months or so. In the evening, I attended the International Students pub night and revelled in the irony of being the least international person there. One of the afternoon's presentations indicated that over half of the postgraduate student body is Scottish, but this isn't borne out by my Freshers Week experience. Compared to Glasgow, Edinburgh feels a far more cosmopolitan place, and I think I'm going to enjoy the contrast.

After all the socialising, I attended induction meetings of my Masters class on Wednesday and Thursday. The activities were various, ranging from getting set up on the computers (Sun Ray 150 terminals with smartcard log-on running Solaris 9, for the Stu amongst you) to posing for photographs. The free buffet lunches were appreciated; the 45-minute talk on plagiarism was utterly extraneous. I'm looking forward to getting started working on the parallel machines they've got lying about, and programming Fortran, naturally.

Wednesday night was a ceilidh back in McEwan Hall. The first half of the ceilidh was spent in the Teviot bar building up courage and boasting about how I know all of the dances from school. Carefully overlooking the fact that it's been five years since I last attended a ceilidh, and I remember about as much of the dances as I do Standard Grade German. Nevertheless, it was great fun, and I wish I'd been there from the start.

If you've read this far, here's your payoff. On Thursday night, I went to a dance class and signed up for a year's worth of swing dancing lessons. I know exactly what you're thinking, and you're probably quite right. The taster session was a great laugh, and a few of us signed up (the mutual support probably did have a lot to do with it). Just wait til you see my moves!

At long last, Friday was Jazz Night at the Pleasance, and we took in a performance by the Edinburgh Uni jazz orchestra. It was grrrrreat. We rounded the week off at two o'clock on a freezing Edinburgh morning, sitting on a bench outside the Surgeons' Hall, and eating chips slathered with salt and sauce. Perfection!

Cheers,

Derek.

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