It’s only 8:30 but I’m in for the night. It’s rather cloudy and chilly right now so I don’t feel lame.
This morning, after the strange dreams, I got to breakfast a little later and ran into a few people. It was nice to chit chat before the lectures.
The first talk was excellent. Alastair Dunning from JISC talked about digitizing “cultural heritage,” which is complicated by the problems of proper metadata (adding the proper info to, say, thousands of digital photos), data modeling (eg, putting pictures with metadata in Excel – not feasible!), dissemination (eg, trying to play a video from PowerPoint), and accessible files.
He illustrated each with concrete examples – a digital file of his great-grandmother’s postcards, a video link from his presentation that wouldn’t work, etc. It was one of the best talks so far.
The second talk was all right. It was interesting to hear how the university system is set up in Greece, but the whole thing went on too long, especially for a session before lunch.
In the afternoon we went to Thompson Reuters. Some of the info was interesting, but it was essentially a sales pitch. Another proud of myself moment: that division does a lot of work with my company and others like it, so I went up and introduced myself at the end of presentation. Score one for the shy girl!
Afterwards a group of us walked over the Trafalgar Square. One woman wanted to take the train from there, one wanted to walk around that area, and two of us went to the National Gallery, though once we got in, we each went on our own.
I sort of breezed through the museum. I was tired and wanted to get back into time to Skype with MB. (We had an 8 PM Skype date.) I spent about an hour there, then a shorter time at the National Portrait Gallery.
View of Trafalgar Square from the National Gallery
On my way back I stopped for Korean (yes, again!) and ordered the shin ramen, which turned out to be very similar to those spicy instant Korean noodles. That plus dumplings and a soda was 16 pounds, the priciest meal I’ve had so far. I figured what the hell since I spent less than 9 pounds earlier in the day for lunch and snacks.
Skyping with MB was fun, though, like I said, I felt all self-conscious. It almost felt like it wasn’t him, like it was a date with someone very much like him. A virtual date, I suppose.
Tomorrow: the Tate Modern, the Dali Museum, and the South Bank.