Returning to ECS

Returning to ECS

Having been back in the UK now for nearly two months, I am well settled into the lifestyle. This year I live in a bit of a multi-lingual household with a Spaniard, a Frenchman, and a German in addition to a couple of English freshers. It has been good fun getting to know everyone’s quirks and we hardly ever fight over the shower in the mornings thanks to a rather scattered pattern of morning alarm clocks (I’m usually up first). The house language is by now a sort of odd mixture of Spanglish with the occasional silly German phrase thrown in for good measure.

It feels great to be back at university after spending more than a year in another country. I really missed the fruit and vegetable market that comes to the union every Monday and my favourite bakery just five minutes from campus down Burgess Road. After a year with foreign bread and without root veg. I’ve been spoiling myself a bit in the kitchen, making all kinds of things with potatoes, squashes, pumpkin, and so on. I do love cooking!

There is already a lot to do at university. I have a couple of websites to build, one demonstrating security, the other showing a model of a common business role. I have a team, with which I have to build “something” out of a collection of different odd bits of technology and try and get everything working together. And then of course there’s the individual project, which is going to be a experiment in multimedia organisation and discovery through searching and filtering of content taken from the social web. Loads of room for fun there!

It looks like I’ll have my work cut out going forward but I thrive on an interesting challenge, as my job in Spain proved, so I’m sure this will be a great year.