I've been a bit busy for the past two weeks - so apologies for the lack of updates for those people e-stalking me. The last two weeks have been concentrated around me getting ready for a big workshop/meeting for the project I'm working on. The conference actually happened last week, and I spent my time kicking around the intellectual powerhouses of Oxford and Cambridge. Unfortunately, I didn't get much time to run around being the tourist - I saw Oxford for about 2 hours all up, and I didn't even get into Cambridge proper. This excuses me for the complete lack of pictures that I took - there was no real time to find the really cool offbeat parts of the towns which contain all the good photo opportunities. The vast majority of my last week was spent in Hinxton, which is pretty much in the middle of nowhere - a theme for EMBL it seems. Meetings there started early, and ended late, meaning that I was pretty much involved in work all day long. On the upside, the food was pretty good there, and I'm a little sad that I'm back to eating my less extravagant foods now. One thing I won't be running out of any time soon is tea supplies, as I brought back a kilo of tea, and enough chai masala to last me for at least half a year. When it comes to tea, I don't do things by half measures.

Two nice surprises turned up this week on the internet - the first being the 17" Macbook pros. Sure, I'm not going to get one, but that's one less product to announce till the new 12" Macbooks come out. The second was sort of quietly announced on the Google blog - and is high resolution imagery and map data for Germany and large swathes of Europe. Now you can see where I go for a run, check out bits and pieces of the castle, and even find out how to get there. What's even cooler is if you happen to have a set of bookmarks, you can fire up Google Earth and have a better idea of where I live. The Thingstätte bookmark is of particular interest, as that's where I'm heading tonight for some kind of May day festival. It promises to be obscure. Pictures if I can get the camera to work.

I've also been getting back into Australian TV recently, and have found decent ways to see Dateline (which I regard as some top class journalism), The Chaser's War on Everything and Nerds FC. I think I'm probably watching more Australian TV now than when I was actually back there. Sometimes I don't really think I'm living in Germany, but more hanging around in this great big airport with all the other people who are doing the same thing as me - i.e. the international crowd.