Blog of Norman Ralph

I spent most of yesterday helping the School of Computing at the University of Leeds celebrate its 50th anniversary. There was a whole programme of events, starting with a formal lunch and the unveiling of a statue to Geoff Cook. This was followed by a lecture, given by Andrew Herbert - a Leeds SoC alumnus and currently director of Microsoft research at Cambridge - and then a reception in the School of Computing’s “Long Room”.

I attended the lecture, which was surprisingly good fun and very informative, even for a relative layman like myself. I didn’t think that a Microsoft employee would be wuite so self deprecating and ‘tongue-in-cheek’ about the failings and quirks of Microsoft products and services. Andrew was a good speaker and his enthusiasm for the subject was obvious. His talk was entitled “Why everything I learned at Leeds is now useless.” It focussed on how the subject has changed over the thrity years since he graduated with a degree in computational science. The punchline to the piece was that although the technology has improved byseveral orders of magnitude, the underlying principles and purpose of academic computing are still relavant today.

The reception afterwards was amazing. Free food and a free bar which sported four rebranded ales from the Elland Brewery. In the four hours it was available, the bar was drunk dry - all four firkins were emptied! I have to admit some responsibility for that.

Maths Chris and I left the “Long Room” at about 8.20 and headed to B’s for some dinner (and more drinking seeing as we had managed to acquire 4 bottles of wine…). I was most disappointed to note that most of the circle had bailed thre reception - some people didn’t even go to the lecture first!! After some korma at B’s, her friend Ian appeared and we set about the task of getting drunk!

**Blur - twister, cards, trip to Co-op, pizza and red wine. face painting and general tom-foolery.**

I woke up this morning next to Michelle with a raging headache and the phrase, “porn babies” stuck in my head. Fun.