There is nothing worse, I've decided, than sitting in a hotel room, working. At least my office is *my* office - full of some of the paraphernalia that defines my existence, if not also aspects of my identity. According to tripit.com (which I use for managing my travel itineraries), today is the 54th day this year I've spent in a hotel room. By the end of the year I'll have spent 61 days in hotel rooms spread across 31 different cities, 9 different countries, and 72,000+ miles.

It's time to stop. And go home.

For reasons unknown to me, more people are visiting this site than ever before. Have the TV networks stopped showing repeats of Friends? Is The Simpsons no longer broadcasting? The problem I'm faced with is that I now feel obliged to update this blog, simply to prevent the disappointment that would result, I suppose, from people coming back, time and time again, in the vain hope that it would have been updated. I can't blame these poor hapless souls as I do the same thing. No, not with this website, as I actually have inside information on the timing of its updates, but with the websites that currently interest me most... those that offer the cheapest price on the De'Longhi ESAM6600. Regrettably, those prices do not change, and if they do, rarely in a downwards direction.

I used to be a Gaggia man, but the machine in our lab is ageing even more rapidly than am I. And as I researched a replacement, I discovered that Gaggia were taken over by a bigger fish - Saeco - a company founded, oddly, in a place called Gaggio (Gaggio Montano, to be more accurate). But then the bigger fish was eaten, just this last summer, by an even bigger fish - Philips (you have to love their toothbrushes, if nothing else). So that just leaves De'Longhi as one of the last Italian firms making bean-to-cup coffee machines. Not that I really care about all this historical stuff (if I did, I probably would avoid wanting to buy a coffee machine from a company that in fact specializes in heating equipment and radiators...) - what I really care about are the resoundingly positive reviews that their machines tend to receive, and the even more resoundingly positive reviews that the 6600 receives. But it costs megabucks. So I continue to check the price comparison sites, and continue to dream of a day when I either win the lottery (unlikely since I haven't bought a ticket in years), or miraculously save the life of a De'Longhi executive who will reward me for my courage with precisely the machine I covet. It is a sad fact that winning the lottery without a ticket is probably the more likely of my two fantasies...

A more manageable fantasy over the past two weeks (since we switched from BST to GMT, or as our American cousins would say, since we came off daylight savings time) has concerned the clock in my otherwise fully-functional car (a Peugeot 207, which, I sadly realize, is a quite paltry vehicle compared to the BMW convertible that one of my colleagues has recently purchased... an extra heavy load of manuscripts will shortly be coming his way...). The fantasy was a simple one - to get the thing to show the right time. But the challenge proved too great. I failed to figure it out because no matter which buttons or combination thereof I pressed, I kept coming back to a menu item on the dashboard display which promised to "display configuration". This wasn't particularly useful as I didn't want to display the configuration, I wanted to change it. So eventually I resorted to the manual. It contained the following information:

In the event that you wish to change the time on the clock, abandon the prejudice you have to interpret "display" as a verb and "configuration" as a noun - instead, adopt the less frequent reading of these two words, with "display" as a noun and "configuration" as the second noun in a noun-noun compound. You will then have successfully found the one menu item which allows you to change the "display configuration" - on encountering this menu item, press 'ok' and you will immediately see a message offering to change the hours and minutes of the clock. If you are too dumb to realize that "display configuration" has two meanings, and that we the manufacturers will naturally have pre-selected for you the least likely meaning, you barely deserve to drive this car.

It really does say that in the manual! And I feel suitably ashamed at my linguistic prejudice. Needless to say, with such cognitive infexibility, the chances are slim of being able to get the coffee-machine equivalent of a BMW convertible to do anything as impressive as grind a bean. So it's probably just as well I can't afford it. Even better is that I will miss out on the joys of having to figure out, each spring and each autumn, how to change its clock...

So I made the mistake, in that last post, of promising to update this page with greater regularity. Yeah right. I instead, rather foolishly, decided to fulfill my obligations over the past two and a half weeks to:

• NIH (7 grants reviewed)
• Cognition (18 manuscripts sent out to review, 51 action letters written)
• Carbon Emissions (3677 miles flown, 124 miles via train - I've still to take the return journey)
• My stomach (dinner at Vidalia in DC and Amada in Philly were highlights of my gastric experience, as well as La Colombe which still serves the best cappucino on the American continent)
• My research (and more specifically, a collaboration with a bunch of people in Philadelphia that will shortly culminate with a bunch of other people being stuck in an MRI scanner - and by 'stuck' I mean 'placed in' rather than 'unable to be retrieved from')
• Hotels (3)
• The Wine & Cocktail Industry (I think, but can't quite remember...)
• Casio (I bought a new watch - radio-controlled from atomic clocks in USA, UK, Europe, Japan, and China; solar-powered; 200m. water resistant; and in many ways, though perhaps not aesthetically, highly desirable)
• Amazon.com (various)
• Marks & Spencer (underwear... what else?)

So details of my dare-devil attempts to windsurf in Turkey will just have to be left to the imagination. Sorry.

[UPDATE, posted from a Starbucks back in London...] The BEST pasta ever was served on Thursday 15th October, 2009 at Vetri, Philadelphia. It made one gasp. As did the wine, which cost as much as the meal...

After a period of abeyance, this blog is, once again, in a 'go' phase. Planned updates over the next couple of weeks include:

• Turkey: windsurfing, ringo riding, and Jamie propelled at speed into the depths of the ocean...
• Barcelona: conferencing, electricty blackouts, and a foolish offer to host AMLaP 2010 in York next year (dates most likely to be 6th-8th September, 2010. You read it here first!)
• A publicity photo for a public lecture in which, miraculously, I had grown hair where no hair will ever grow again... (I did manage to intercept, and depilate, the photo before it went to press...)
• Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass computer speakers - unbelievably good. Too good. Can't use them in the office without the entire corridor rumbling to the beat...
• Ocado.com - grocery delivery via iPhone... geek heaven!
• Bearded Dragons on the horizon, if Jamie has his way and I can't think of a good enough reason why we *can't* fit a 120cm vivarium into our living room...

Of course, anyone reading this won't care about what updates are planned. I merely put them here to remind me in the coming days to fulfil my promise and make public the memories I hope to recall in future years. Not even 6 NIH grant applications to review, scores of Cognition manuscripts to process, new data to analyze, two theses to read, experiments to be run (because I was so stupid that I need to re-run the last one..), and students to supervise, will get in the way. The only limiting factor, as that last sentence makes clear, will be my grammar.

Excerpts from the BBC News website, Monday 31st August 2009:

"Thousands of people have signed a Downing Street petition calling for a posthumous government apology to World War II code breaker Alan Turing.... In 1952 he was prosecuted under the gross indecency act after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man. Two years later he killed himself...”

To read the full article, click here (opens in new window).

To sign the petition (British citizens only - bizarre - does no one else have an opinion that the UK government is willing to listen to?), click here (opens in new window).

Many of us who spent time working on “artificial intelligence” will know Turing for his seminal contributions to that field (amongst others). It is fitting, to me at least (and the other signatories of that petition), that we acknowledge the mistreatment he suffered through the institutionalized discrimination of the day.

An update describing my windsurfing (and ringo-riding) antics in Turkey will follow...

[update - 11th Sept: Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister, wrote the following in a statement to all signatories to the above petition: "[...] Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction [...] So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better."]