It's cruch time

This is week is not shaping up well. My normal workload has increased, not entirely unexpectedly, increased substantially but unfortunately this seems to have coincided with a spike in the consultancy side of things. If things get any worse, I'm going to have to start handing out numbered tickets.

Worse still, a chance check of my calendar this morning caused me to realise that I'm supposed to hand in the last couple of chapters of my thesis at the end of the week — a revelation that prompted much swearing and cursing. So after spending the early part of my evening reading up on Rawls, I did what the tough always do when the going is hard: I went cycling.

After yesterday's rest day, I was on pretty good form and pushed reasonably hard to keep up a good pace. In the end I managed a 23 mile loop over mixed Devonian terrain in around an hour and ten, which gives me an average speed of around 20 mph. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Five random fragments

For no very good reason, a handful of today's oddments:

• Snow Leopard has arrived early;
• thanks to modern search technology, House is now surplus to requirements;
• Jo Walton examines David Weber's Off Armageddon Reef;
• nothing is quite so secure as a machine knocked off the network by its own security software;
• making felt bags from blankets is easy