Chateau Pichon-Longueville (again)

Last month I said that this was where I'd most like to be. We had dinner with a friend last Saturday. He produced a bottle of this Chateu's wine from 1980! Sadly, it was past its best, but still had colour and some fruit. How generous (and what a shame we didn't drink it 10 years ago!).

The picture is the public tasting room at the chateau.

I was just checking ...

I was looking for a piece of software to test my wireless mouse. I didn't find it, but I found this interesting way of testing your personal political called THE POLITICAL COMPASS. I found that it was (surprisingly?) accurate for my position. Why not try it and let me know what you found?

My hands are too big (or why I hate cars)!

One of the headlight bulbs on my car failed. It turns out that they're a bit unusual, so I had to mail order them (the Toyota garage was horrifically expensive) - when they finally arrived (ordered the wrong ones first) I just had to fit them. There was a LOT of swearing! I did (finally) get it done, but it would have been so much easier if I'd had little hands!

Back to work!

So, home from the south of France. Missed the bad weather and the terrorist attacks.

Back to University today (quite nice to have been missed) for lots of meetings, but especially pleased to be meeting with 'my' Chinese students. It's nice to find such enthusiasm.

BIG IT problems for most of the day -- it isn't very nice to find that your network access has been deleted while you were away, but all sorted now.


Marseille is a wonderful, vibrant city - rather like Birmingham, but by the sea. Learnt a lot about tourist retaurants as well (and how to avoid them).