The flight to the US was long and mostly spent working through a backlog of e-mails over the satellite wi-fi, but I touched down in San Francisco mid-afternoon on the Fourth of July (a little ahead of schedule) and was quickly collected by my hosts Mynx and Hours to be shuttled over to a nearby furry house party to initiate what was now in effect a ( Read more... )

It's been a while since the last one of these ( Read more... )

After being back in the UK for one week it's already time to leave again - this is a summer of nearly maximal travel, and from May through to the end of August my time at home will be a tiny fraction of the time away from home. In fact, the 8-day span that's just ending now will be my longest span at home of those four months ( Read more... )

I am way behind in updating: the past few weeks have been a chain of essentially nonstop travel from place to place to place to place, and with talks and presentations to give and an assortment of imminent deadlines throughout (plus social activities occupying what few evenings I did have available) it's taken until the end of this trip to given ( Read more... )

Following the trip to West Virginia last week I landed at Heathrow around 8am on Friday morning and made my way on the Underground towards central London. Originally my thinking had been to simply catch the train directly to Birmingham, but I knew that Lupestripe would be planning a beer-tasting party during the con and the store that sells beer ( Read more... )

As was the case last year and the year before, one of the responsibilities I agreed to this year was to serve on the National Radio Astronomy Observatory User's Committee, the independent panel that comments on various policies, practices, and plans that might affect their scientific user base. This year was different, though, because instead of ( Read more... )

The most recent event of the past few weeks has been my trip to Furry Weekend Atlanta, which without a doubt has been one of the most enjoyable weekends in memory. FWA has never been on my con rotation - the last time I attended was a full decade ago, and since that time I've only moved further away, my life has become even more busy, and I've ( Read more... )

It's been a while since posting - the past month has been one of those periods where initially not very much happens, until suddenly quite a bit happens all at once and it's hard to keep up. I tried to write this entry a week or so ago, but in the run-up to FWA couldn't quite get through it - and while finishing it after the con feels a bit odd ( ( Read more... )

While I'd had to wait decades for the first opportunity to easily see a total solar eclipse, thankfully the next one wouldn't require anywhere near as much patience: a short seven years after the Moon's shadow crossed the US in 2017 another total eclipse was slated to happen, providing an opportunity to relive that remarkable experience. And ( Read more... )

No news yet on the job I interviewed for, which is becoming somewhat more significant now that it's been two full weeks. They have almost certainly made a decision by this point, but the faculty hiring process is so bureaucratic that it's anyone's guess how long that will take to filter through to a formal notification to the successful candidate ( Read more... )