In an hour, my father and I are attending the high table dinner in Wadham. This has been my first occasion to wear the Scholar’s Gown that Alex and Bryony gave me - and which I am entitled to wear instead of the normal graduate student gown because of being a Wadham College Senior Scholar. [...]

Mentally glancing over the tasks I have set for myself over the winter break, I am a bit daunted:

See Turkey (4-16 December)
Complete and submit papers for developing world seminar
Complete a very considerable amount of thesis reading
Write a draft of the first three thesis chapters: Introduction, Literature Review, and Background to Case Studies
Substantially advance the process [...]

Comedy Central has rolled out a new interface for showing Daily Show and Colbert Report clips. The player seems to be rather more stable than the previous version, with no errors discernible in Firefox 2.0 and Mac OS X. The videos themselves are a bit bigger and seem to load faster. Perhaps the biggest improvement [...]

Most of today was spent giving my father a fairly comprehensive tour of Oxford: south of Wadham College. Starting at Wadham, we went up Hollywell Street to New College where we saw the walls, mound, and cloisters. Then we carried on to Manor Road and the Department of Politics and International Relations. Down Longwall Street, [...]

A particularly cunning sort of fraud is occurring in the UK right now: someone comes to your door and convinces you to donate to worthy charity X. You agree, and bring out your chequebook. The fraudster hands you their pen, to fill out the cheque. The ink of of a vanishing sort and, after the [...]

I am now thoroughly excited about the upcoming trip to Istanbul. Before starting My Name is Red, my general notions about the Mediterranean had me expecting it to be fairly warm, if not as much so as Malta was in March. Now, I am expecting the real possibility of snowfall. Judging by my weather widget, [...]