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It was a glorious evening yesterday, but I didn’t make it up the big hill before dark. I thought I’d give the panorama an attempt anyway.

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VITAE (a UK organisation to support researchers) recently advertised for paid blogger positions on their career development blogs. I wasn’t successful in my application, as I couldn’t make it to their training day in London, what with me living in France and all. But they said they’d publish the submission from my application and it’s now up: ranting about powerpoint overview slides. Seriously, I have, in the past, considered adding a slide to my conference presentation which says: Waffle Other people’s stuff What I did How it worked Waffle The other thing I’ve considered doing is photographing every overview slide in a conference and turningRead More →

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I’ve taken up dance lessons – partly because I enjoy dancing, partly because I know I’m not very good at it and lessons will help, and partly because it’s something sociable that gets me out of the flat and doing some exercise. I’ve been to six or seven lessons now and am beginning to be able to string a few moves together, but I’m always counting in my head and trying to remember stuff. There are a few sentences that repeat and I am sure I have a look of absurd concentration on my face – I don’t think it goes as far as stickingRead More →

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My favourite one-and-a-half hour bike ride goes out along the Drac, past the confluence with the Isère, across the dam, then back along the Isère. Here are two panoramas from the barrage – the first in early summer (June, I think), and the second today: Click for bigger versions if you want a bit more detail.

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The last post contained lots of StreetView frames, and it took me a while to work out how to get them to appear properly. WordPress automatically adds <BR /> tags to the line endings, which is kind-of ok for text, but really messes things up if it chooses to do it in the middle of a block of embedded HTML. There’s a plugin which fixes this – it’s called PS disable auto formatting. It doesn’t work quite how you’d expect though. What it does is disable auto-formatting completely, therefore changing the appearance of all your past posts, and means that for all future posts you’llRead More →

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I’ve just had a guest post published at Grenoble Life, the Anglophone website for Grenoble & environs. It’s about finding spicy ingredients in Grenoble. Here are some Google Streetview links to the various shops, just in case you want to find out what they look like: Saïgon Store, 6 Rue Doudart de Lagrée 38000 Grenoble has a range of mostly Vietnamese products – good range of noodles, some fresh exotic vegetables and some frozen stuff, and a huge range of spices. You can get decent hot chillis here and stuff like lemongrass, galangal, and other south east asian vegetables and spices. View Larger Map CarrefourRead More →

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A couple of articles in Grenoble et Moi (one of the many free magazines and newspapers distributed throughout the town) caught my eye the other day. The first is about the reaction of Algerian fans every time their national team wins a match – apparently last time this happened, a car and a scooter were torched. I’ve not seen any burning vehicles, but I have seen lots of hooting cars with young men hanging out waving Algerian flags. The police are quoted as saying: “Nous ne sommes pas à un niveau d’alerte dun match du GF38, mais nous devons maintenant être vigilants à chaque matchRead More →

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Those of us called “Hannah”, who are from the UK, spend a lot of time saying things like this: My name’s not “Anna”, it’s “Hannah”, with an “H” My name’s spelled “Hannah”, with two aitches, one at the end and one at the start Yes I do know it’s a palindrome, thanks! Yes, please tell me your favourite palindromes. Yes, I have heard the one about the canal and the plan. I’ve always found it particularly annoying when people manage to send me email to hannah@ … but then start the message “Dear Hanna”, or “Dear Anna”. As for spoken anna-isms, I noted a markedRead More →

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Number 5 in a series of N… Now, having looked it up, I know that Chlamyde is the French word for a Chlamys. Which is a type of Greek cloak. But when I first passed this shop I was sure that it was an upmarket tailors called Chlamydia. Which is a type of sexually transmitted infection.

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This post, whilst a bit geeky, might be useful to anyone who’s got to write documents with references in them… I’ve recently discovered Citeulike, a website that organises your references and bibliographies for you in a nice shiny web2.0 kinda way. A colleague pointed me at it a while ago and I was sceptical – because it would be terrible to have all of your references and bibliography saved on an internet site and then for that internet site to go bust. But you can always download the database files (they export to many formats) and keep your own backups, and now they’re now sponsoredRead More →