Okay, so I am totally sad and writing a blog post on Christmas day. Well, the thing is that I’ve been teaching for months and moving house. This is the first still period that I’ve had for ages; well, thinking is inevitable.

It’s been all quiet of the blog front for a while — over a month, in fact, although I did find half a finished blog post hidden away in my November directory. Not enough, sadly, to remember what it was going to be about, so that’s that gem gone forever.

Fours days of ontology bashing at an OBI meeting; this leaves me extremely glad to be going home. The meeting was long, hard and tiring. We got a lot done in the time available, though, and that was impressive. All the people in the room knew what they were doing, and we managed to work together and in parallel to an impressive extent. Even while listening to the main conversation, most people were also skype chatting about something else to those in and outside the room.

Bleary eyed, stacks of chocolate muffins obscuring the “healthy snacking” sign, kids on heelers. Yes, I’m in the airport at stupid-o-clock on saturday morning. I’m heading out to Philadelphia for an OBI meeting. It’s an important meeting; OBI has been a long time in gestation, but this should constitute the 1.0 release; it’s going to be a mass tidy up session.

I was most entertained to read about EPSRCs funding policy changes. Basically, they have taken a long hard look at their system for funding, they have decided that the peer-review system has fundamental problems, and have therefore issued their well thought out and considered solution to the problem: blame the users.