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Chancellor of Cambridge University

Yesterday morning I queued in the autumn sunshine to vote for Abdul Arain as Chancellor of Cambridge University. We were guided by top-hatted administrators, and helped into gowns by others. I found myself next to an elderly lady who was separated from her husband for technical reasons I won’t go in to. She told me that she was a scientist and had graduated from Newnham College in 1944. She didn’t get a degree, she told me, but a certificate that told her that she would have been awarded a degree if she had been a man, but as a woman she could only be given a certificate. I’ve been reading about women and universities recently and I believe that Cambridge University only started admitting women in the 1920s.
Once inside to vote, the assistants looked up my name in two huge folders. I told them that I had not really expected them to have a computer database. One of them laughed and said ‘Give us another 800 years’.
Details of the vote and the result are at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/universityeducation/8829408/Lord-Sainsbury-to-be-Cambridge-University-Chancellor-exit-poll-shows.html

Synology Disk Station Network Drive

Synology Diskstation DS211j: My plan for world domination involved gathering all the media taking up oodles of disk space on the computers in the house, including my sons’ vast and growing music and video files, into one place tucked in a corner. There are lots of products that appear to be designed to do exactly what I wanted – but lots of them seem to get very bad reviews notably the nicely designed iomega StorCentre. The Synology drive is currently priced at £265 by Amazon (with two 1T drives installed) and gets much better reviews. Their support and website information is impressive, the actual interface is nice

and crucially the box itself is very quiet. As promised it serves iTunes music perfectly, photos (in spite of IPhoto’s ridiculous system) quite well but movies play just a little too slowly over my network and falter every now and then. The drive can be accessed via a handful of iPhone apps and can be set up as a web server. So far, I recommend this.

Next year’s tour

Despite western Europe having better weather, better food and drink, nice accommodation, languages that I can make myself understood in, and being closer to home I am drawn, for my travels, to those former communist eastern countries. Perhaps they are more slavicly exotic. They are certainly less familiar and harder to understand how things work. No sooner am I home from one motorcycle camping adventure than I am thinking about the next. I have been looking at Ukraine but I think it is too ambitious, certainly too far. Its exciting because it is on the easterly road to Russia and the stans and finally China. Instead I’m starting to look at Hungary and Slovenia to add to a trip that includes Germany, Austria, Czech republic and Slovakia (a country I’ve been wanting to revisit for a while).
The next stop is trip planning.