Monday, September 22, 2008

Review and restart

It has been a few weeks since the last post. And before that, posts were thin on the ground for some time. Where have I been? What have I been doing?

Packing and preparing to leave our beloved home in Sydney;
Travelling in India, visiting old friends and meeting some locals;
Moving into Edinburgh, staying first with a friend of a friend and then moving into longer term accommodation;
Conferencing in Rome, concerning which I might post a few thoughts in the coming days;
Helping Jess start a new blog;
Conferencing again, this time in Dunblane on a more intimate scale with my supervisor, two other academics (including his wife) and a few PhD students from Edinburgh and Oxford;
Enrolling and being oriented at New College for my PhD studies in the School of Divinity at Edinburgh University;
Adjusting to a new city, its geography, topography, demography and public transport; and
Waiting for a reliable broadband connection to be set up.
Thus, I haven't had much space or opportunity to blog, and the little time I have been able to grab on the net has largely consisted of writing emails and Skyping. Hopefully, I will now have a little more space and things can get rolling once more. Enough of the excuses; time to re-start.

6 comments:

the don said...

glad you're back byron!!

Jonathan said...

Woohoo! Are you read for the darkness yet?

Martin Kemp said...

New College...
School of divinity...
Edinburgh uni...

How are these all connected?
Sounds like the Oxbridge system...Is this right?

Anthony Douglas said...

So...did you take the red pill, or the blue pill?

Mike W said...

thanks Byron, sorry for whinging

byron smith said...

Josh - ditto (I hope).

Jonathan - Bring on the darkness!

Marty - not really at all like Oxbridge (as much as they'd like to be, or maybe that's just O'D...). New College is an arm of the Church of Scotland (=Presbyterian), in which is held the School of Divinity, which is a non-denominational school of the University. Thus, New College can hold Presbyterian services without getting up the University's semi-secular nose. Basically, if you're talking about the building, you'd generally say New College. If you're talking about the university structure, you'd say School of Divinity. But as we all known, throwing around "Divinity" doesn't always generate a lot of light in a society that now barely ever uses the term.

Anthony - both, of course.

Mike - thanks for prodding.