The Man with No Time

As part of my traditional New Year restrospective, I set myself a series of personal goals for 2015. These covered a range of hobbies, my work, sport, etc., and were designed to be at least vaguely achievable. In 2013 I did pretty well, but 2014 was a bit of failure. So how did 2015 go? Well........in a word, poorly.

Just over a week ago I had an absolutely awesome experience - I spent three days at a hotel just next to Heathrow airport. Which doesn't sound so great, until I say that it was my first experience of a convention. Specifically SmogCon 2015, the UK's biggest Warmachine convention, and the only US-style gaming convention in the UK (and possibly Europe, though I'm not sure that's entirely true).  As I said, I had an awesome time. I'd been hoping to go for the last couple of years, but was either a) in Scotland, or b) forgetful and missed the tickets sale. This year I was actually at orchestra when tickets went on sale, but fortunately there were still about 50 left when I got home and I managed to snag one. I decided pretty early on that I wouldn't bother trying for any of the tournaments; instead I'd spend all my time in the casual play area playing pick-up games of Warmachine/Hordes, or trying out some of the boardgames. I'm quite pleased with that

Just a quick drive-by post today - as of 9:00am this morning I'm now officially a member of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick. That's right, I started my new job, and now I'm actually employed by the place that I work, rather than being a permanent 'visitor' (hah!). I don't expect much will change; I've been here for a year and a quarter already after all, and I've pretty much been doing my new job for a month already. But it's nice to have stability for a bit longer than I did before. The new job is 50% research, 50% project office work for the PLATO Science Consortium . Which should be a lot of fun, as long as I get to maintain my research time (which is something that I'm definitely going to have to fight for). Anyway, I guess I'd better get back to work. I hope to get some more posts up fairly soon about some stuff I've been up to recently.

So for the last week I've had a friend staying with me - her normal train-based commute into London has been disrupted (a massive landslip that took out a whole train line), so she was using my flat as a base to get to Coventry train station. Now that she's left, I've got to thinking about the value of having visitors, and by extension the value of flat-sharing. It's actually been really nice coming home in the evening and having someone to chat to, eat dinner with, and slouch in front of the TV with. Our schedule's were reasonably similar (although she did have to get up earlier than me), and so we did have most evenings to just hang out. It was a good change from being in the flat by myself, and brought back memories of my first couple of years sharing with John in St Andrews, when we use to watch "'Allo 'Allo", or "Monty Python's Flying Circus" together. It made me realise that I actually quite like having someone else in the

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! I don't tend to go in for 'normal' New Year's resolutions. Instead, I like to set myself a few targets and goals to try and meet over the coming year. These range from work-related to hobby-related, and I find them a good way of balancing up my various hobbies, and of maintaining a decent work-life balance. My success has been pretty mixed over the last couple of years; in 2013 I met about half of my goals, but 2014 was a bit of a failure on many fronts. Still, I'm going to persevere. As per usual, I'll be trying to make my goals relatively achievable. In some cases I'll be building on experience from the last couple of years (a '*' marks those carried over or repeated from 2014).