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 The Indian Summer ended today when high winds and torrential rain arrived. Within minutes, there was minor flooding on my path home across Singleton Park to Brynmill. It was also nearly dark at 5.00 pm so winter’s almost with us.

Since I discovered them a month or so ago, I have been tuning in to the webcasts of Brian Harvey’s course “61A Introduction to Computer Science” from the University of California Berkeley. A couple of things struck me. First, the breadth of this introductory *course which seems to take in the whole of computer science from functional programming through to logic programming and seemingly all types of programming in between. Second, the length of the semester in the US: from August 27 through to December 10 (about 5 weeks longer than the *Michaelmas term in Swansea). That’s forty-odd lectures and seperate lab sessions! If we had the same length of time, we could really give some depth to our teaching.

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p>”When do they do research?” I hear my colleagues cry out in alarm. I don’t know, but I suspect that to be a lecturer at Berkeley, research activity is still a requirement1)! Is the work ethic indicated by this level of student and staff commitment part of the reason that the USA suceeds were other countries fail?

It’s even more amazing when you consider that the students are paying really serious tuition fees for the privilege!

1) It turns out that Brian is actually employed by UC Berkeley as a full time teacher now, but he has a pretty impressive CV nonetheless!

There are all kinds of interesting nooks and crannies on campus. Here’s a mock gothic window in Singleton Abbey. I like the heads had the bas of the arches.

Today I introduced blogging to my students in EG-259.

As noted in a previous post, I am working on a 365 photos project and that means that I always have a camera with me and need to find a suitable subject every day. This one didn’t make it into today’s selection but I still quite like it.

Your mission, should you choose to accept, it is to identify the spot in the University where this historic entrance to the Arts faculty is located.

The BBC Proms Season ended with a bang in Singleton Park last night as the Fireworks, launched during the Welsh National Anthem, brought to an end a great concert of Italian Music and Neopolitan songs. The BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, conducted by David Charles Abell and Soloists Rebecca Evans (Three Costume Changes!) and Alfie Boe kept us all entertained for the three hours of the concert itself and the rehersals, which as early arrivals, we also got to see. The usual link ups with the Last Night in the Albert Hall (which incuded a new orchestral piece created for the occasion, and had contributions from all six last night venues) seemed to go without a hitch. I recorded the whole lot on my V+ Box at home so I’ll be reliving it all again soon. More pictures on Flickr.

Today we took a walk along the Beach. It was late evening, just before sunset and the clouds, sea and sand made for some dramatic images. The full set are to be seen on Picasa.

One of the nice features of the newly released beta of Google Chrome is the feature that makes it easy to convert a tab into a standalone desktop application shortcut which you can add to your desktop, quick launch and start menu. I’ve already gotten Google Reader, Flickr and Zoho Docs “application-i-fied”, and no doubt Facebook, Google Docs, and my other frquently-used web apps will follow. A major advantage of this is that the applications launch in their own independent windows whereas links launch in tabs in a separate instance of the Chrome browser. This reinforces the application feel of the web application. If, like, me you keep your frequently visited web sites on your browser home page, you can now instead make them into application shortcuts and add them to your windows startup folder instead. I’ve created a short screen cast to demonstrate this feature and how it works: I’m sure you’ll agree that it’s easy!
http://content.screencast.com/users/cpjobling/folders/Jing/media/0fa89ecf-853e-48d8-8ab6-dfbbb1dae3db/bootstrap.swf

If you are not yet prepared to ditch Firefox and your carefully collected set of extensions, you can achieve a similar feat with Mozilla Prism and the Prism for Firefox Extension as described in this LifeHack article.

Day 3: Legitimate Ospreys Fan
Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling

Today, I picked up my first Ospreys season ticket (actually the first season ticket of any description) so I’m all set for a year of live Magner’s League, Anglo-Welsh and European cup rugby at the Liberty Stadium. First game is Shane William’s testimonial against Leicester Tigers tomorrow!

Another rainy day in August
Originally uploaded by Chris P Jobling

Here’s the first real 365 Project photo. It puts into pixels what I feel about August so far!

Follow the rest of this series by visiting Crispy’s 365 Photos Project.