Milo is in the house

This Monday we picked up our pup from his kennel in Lincolnshire. The journey home was remarkably easy (no wee, poo, sick or whining for the whole 2 hour treck!). However, I do think we have found ourselves quite a little character here.

With all his 8 weeks of existance Milo seems to have already decided that the world belongs to him. Everything that isn't bolted down inevitably ends up somewhere in his basket, as Jo found out this morning when she was looking for her shoes. Nevertheless, I'm quite happy to have a confident dog. He's been excellent around all the visitors that have been fussing over him, and is not bothered at all by all the strange sights smells and sounds in his new home, including the thundering bark of the enormous Rotweiler across our backyard.

We've got a house!

After a long and painful proces involving way too many banks and estate agents for my taste, we finally managed to get an offer accepted on a very nice house. If you want to have a look, check this link (hopefully the estate agents won't take it down just yet...). I'll put some pictures up later just in case. I'm off now, sorting some stuff out, I'll post a more in depth story later.

Commercial? How is this commercial?

While consuming my daily news feed for the day, my wrath was awakened by a tiny article on slashdot. For those not in the mood to click through and read, the article described how citizens in New Mexico had supported, and were now adopting, a new extra tax to allow them to build the first commercial spaceport.

I really don't get what's commercial about spaceport that is being paid for by taxpayers monies. If you ask me that makes it at least partly public. Obviously then, this is just a way to sugarcoat ripping of some poor taxpayers for the benefit of a few corporations that can't be arsed to make serious investments in their own future infrastructure. And if this new facility was in any way going to benefit the people that are now paying towards it, that would perhaps mitigate this atrocity, but with an intended price tag of $200,000 per flight ( the intended price for a short space hop with Virgin Galactic), this service is obviously not going to have any real meaning to 99% of the people paying for it.

Another fine example of the failures of democracy. The right marketing will have people vote in favour of the most stupendous ideas.

Graduated!

Today I received my Postgraduate Certificate in learning and teaching in Higher Education. While in itself not a very major award (it's just the first step towards my Masters and, hopefully, a PhD) it was a nice opportunity to experience an anglosaxon style graduation.

On the right here you can see me in my fancy dress. One up front, and one from the back, so that you can see the colours on my robe. Every type of award has it's own colourcode here, made up from the basic colours of the university. For Derby those are red and light blue.

The broad blue and red bands indicate that I am a graduate Bachelor of Science, and the dark blue below that on the cape indicates that this has now been extended with a Postgraduate Award. Once I manage to complete my Masters degree the dark blue cape will get a red rim. a phD robe is different entirely and is competely blue with red accents. For now though, I'll settle for the black.

(for those interested, you can click on a picture to enlarge it)