So...I'm on a plane right now flying back from Copenhagen to Zurich. 6 days ago, did I know I was going to Denmark? Of course not. But I was there today, attending a 4-hour meeting in the town of Assens. At this point, do I really understand why I came to Denmark? Nope. But it's been an interesting day ( Read more... )

You all know me. I'm a pretty cynical guy. I'm suspicious of manufactured emotion, and I'm wary of most commercial attempts to manipulate said emotion. And, to be fair, I'm usually right. But ho-lee shit. I just watched that boxing movie with Russell Crowe and Renee Zellweger - Cinderella Man - and I fucking dare all of you to watch it and not ( Read more... )

I'm back in Oxford at the moment, and quite tired, but I just moved all my stuff over to Cambridge, and it's in storage in the basement of one of the buildings at Selwyn. Cambridge is pretty as always, but I'm hit hard by nostalgia for Oxford right now, particularly since basically everything is changing in the next couple of weeks, and I won't ( Read more... )

So this is how I ended up going with a group of total strangers - including members of the Swiss Socialist Party - to the year's biggest football (soccer) match, in a three-week-old solar-powered stadium ( Read more... )

1. Reply with your name and I'll respond with something random about you ( Read more... )

Ahhh, Michael Bay's The Island, you could have been so excellent. Interesting, edgy concept, good production design, excellent lead actors, a director with at least some visual sense, and a budget that could endow a university. But then they actually made the movie. Two disclaimers, before we get started ( Read more... )

Jamie was visiting this past weekend, so I've been a bit inattentive to all manner of online lives. But I'm back now. It was a good weekend, with significant ground covered, though nowhere near the excesses of last September's week-long train extravaganza. Speaking of trains, that woman is cursed. This is my fourth time living in Switzerland, ( Read more... )

Best reason ever to have $18,000 and three friends: a brand-new Empacher coxless 4. Oh man. So nice. OK, it was about 3 weeks old, but that's close enough for me ( Read more... )

I was just in Bern for a meeting, and I had about 20 minutes to kill before catching my train back here to Biel, so I was wandering around the station a bit. Bern station is pretty big, and they have a kind of airport-style shopping concourse down there. So in the course of my wanderings, I came across a little food stall, called "Pretzels of the ( Read more... )

Well, a big decision got made for me today when I found out that my application to stay on at Oxford for the DPhil (what Oxford calls the PhD) was unsuccessful. Though being unpleasant enough, this isn't really a surprise - I've known since December that my first essay grade made it impossible to get a distinction on my Master's, and that without ( Read more... )