Tag Archives: Tiree

island life – three weeks in

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It was three weeks yesterday when we moved here to Tiree and slowly getting into the pace of island life.  Steve, our first visitor, left on Thursday, on the ‘big’ plane (about 30 seats).  Had a great time working with Steve on the Physicality book that we are writing as an outcome of the DEPtH project.  We managed the odd walk on the beach together, albeit rather windy, and Steve, brave soul, cycled several times from his hotel in Scarinish to our house, not far and flat all the way, but with a 30 knot wind in your face!

Otherwise have had our first fuel shortage when we needed petrol for the car and found there was none on the island for several days (incidentally the garage must have one of the best views in the country), had our first takeaway (fish and chip van 100 yards from the house … we are well positioned), lit our first fires (ah the smell of coal smoke reminds me of my childhood), registered at the doctors to get vaccinations ready for India (not in regimented 10 minute slots!), and of course lots of paddling in the sea … but think I might be developing my first every chilblains … well I know my own fault, but how can I resist when there is sea and foaming waves to dip my toes in.

It still feels like a holiday …  of course holiday for me tends to mean working with a nice view … so not sitting around the whole day watching the wind blow foam back in clouds from the breaking wave crests and the patterns of dark and light constantly shift with the moving clouds.  Getting lots done, for once clearing the to-do list faster than it grows (although it does still grow, some things don’t change), but for the first time for years free of that ever present feeling of heavy heavy weight on my shoulders.

… and on Monday I’ll be experiencing the flight to Glasgow myself as travelling to Dublin to give the SIGCHI Ireland inaugural lecture.  Managed to work out flights without needing a stay-over in Glasgow, but I have a feeling I will get to know the Holiday Inn Express at Glasgow airport quite well over the coming year.

Coast to coast: St Andrews to Tiree

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A week ago I was in St Andrews on the east coast of Scotland delivering three lectures on “Human Computer Interaction: as it was, as it is and as it may be” as part of their distinguished lecture series and now I am in Tiree in the wild western ocean off the west coast.

I had a great time in St Andrews and was well looked after by some I knew already Ian, Gordan, John and Russell, and also met many new people. Ate good food and stayed in a lovely hotel overlooking the sea (and golf course) and full of pictures of golfers (well what do you expect in St Andrews).

For the lectures, I was told the general pattern was one lecture about the general academic area, one ‘state of the art’ and one about my own stuff … hence the three parts of the title!  Ever for cutesy titles I then called the individual lectures “Whose Computer Is It Anyway”, “The Great Escape” and “Connected, but Under Control, Big, but Brainy?”.

The first lecture was about the fact that computers are always ultimately for people (surprise surprise!) and I used Ian’s slight car accident on the evening before the lecture as a running example (sorry Ian).

The second lecture was about the way computers have escaped the office desktop and found their way into the physical world of ubiquitous computing, the digital world of the web ad into our everyday lives in out homes and increasingly the hub of our social lives too.  Matt Oppenheim did some great cartoons for this and I’m going to use them again in a few weeks when I visit Dublin to do the inaugural lecture for SIGCHI Ireland.

for 20 years the computer is chained to the office desktop (image © Matt Oppenheim)

(© Matt Oppenheim)

... now escapes: out into the world, spreading across the net, in the home, in our social lives (image © Matt Oppenheim)

(© Matt Oppenheim)

The last lecture was about intelligent internet stuff, similar to the lecture I gave at Aveiro a couple of weeks back … mentioning again the fact that the web now has the same information storage and processing capacity as a human brain1 … always makes people think … well at least it always makes ME think about what it means to be human.

… and now … in Tiree … sun, wild wind, horizontal hail, and paddling in the (rather chilly) sea at dawn

  1. see the brain and the web[back]

From Parties in Aveiro to Packing A Van in a week

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Last Friday I was in Aveiro giving  keynote at ENEI, the  national congress of Portuguese informatics students.  The event was organised for and by the students themselves and I was looked after wonderfully.  João was especially great picking me up from Lisbon airport at midnight, driving me to Aveiro the next day and then on Saturday driving me to Porto airport after less than 2 hours sleep … but more on that later …

The congress itself was in Portuguese except my talk, and I  was only able to spend one day there as I needed to get back to pack, and so, by the time I met press and talked to different people, the day flew by  … in time for an evening of typical Portuguese culture of different kinds.

First dinner of roast suckling pig – prepared in the town near Aveiro where this is the traditional dish.  Those who know me know that despite all appearances to the contrary: sandals, long hair, beard; I am NOT a vegetarian 🙂  The meat itself reminded me of the rich flavour of belly pork at Sunday dinners when I was a small child; although much more delicate and without the tooth breaking thickness of the older meat.

After traditional cuisine I was given a taste of traditional student life.  This period was a weekend when first year freshmen students all over Portugal have parties … for several nights in a row.  The student organisers I was with had been up to 6am the previous night as well as organising the conference during the day.  And this night, after having eaten suckling pig at 10pm, drove me down to a location in the dockland of Aveiro, far form any homes that would be disturbed by the noise, to a tiny village of food stalls, a huge music tent … and bars run by every student club in the university.

Some of the students wore traditional academic dress of Portugal – a thick black felt cloak hanging nearly to the floor and hats – different for each University.  A group of visiting students from of Braga wore three cornered hats and looked every bit like a troupe of Dick Turpins.  The cloaks are torn around the bottom, where family and friends would tear a gash in the edge … social networking before Facebook.  The middle of the back of the cloak is reserved for the girlfriend or boyfriend to tear … but if a relationship ended you had to sew up the tear ready for the next one!

I talked with a group of students from Évora who explained their tradition of peer tutelage (I have forgotten the name of the practice).  Two older students take a new student under their wing and teach him or her the practices of the University.  The young student did not have his cloak yet as only after six weeks did he become a true freshman and entitled to the cloak.  In the mean time they would carry him home of the parties proved too much and also put him right if he did things wrong … I missed the details of this, but I’m sure this included eggs (!?).  The young student was enjoying the process and the older pair clearly took their responsibilities very seriously.  At the end of the evening they asked me to tear their cloaks, involving using my teeth in order to start the tear.  I was very honoured to be asked.  The idea of biting cloth that had been scraping ground is not something I would normally relish (!), but given the evening consisted largely of groups of students, who had been at the afternoon lecture, pressing shots of various drinks upon me, by 4am, a little dirt didn’t seem to matter so much 🙂

And this Friday, no shots of liqueur in chocolate cups, or suckling pig and Portuguese wine, but instead packing a Luton van ready to move up to Tiree for my sabbatical.  Kiel was an absolute star, coming first thing in the morning, lugging filing cabinets and freezers … and boxes some way beyond the current 25kg one-man lift limit.  I recall routinely carrying hundredweight sacks wen I was younger and Kiel spent his youth lugging rolls of cloth around a textile factory, so for both of us 25kg seemed a little wimpish … however, there is a vast difference between a 20kg box and a 30 kg one … so the health and safety people probably have it right … and we did try to keep them all below 25kg, but very hard with boxes of books … and there are many of them a ton weight of books in fact, not to mention another half ton of bookshelving.

So this morning finds me half way up the M6, tomorrow morning we’ll be on the ferry, and the next morning in  Tiree, ready for a year of hermit-like writing and working … not to mention the odd walk on the near empty two-mile beach outside the door … but that will be another story.