Barriers to success

I was reading an email sent out by our archery club secretary today, and was rattling through it casually, when I was brought up short by a single sentence:

[He] was 1st male novice, with an excellent score of 510 - first CUB novice to break the 500 barrier this year!

See anything jarring there? Maybe I'm being too pernickety, maybe I'm used to positive reinforcement techniques, but I balk at the word barrier for a couple of reasons.

Do not pass go, do not collect $200

 Let's talk semantics. The word barrier is synonymous with such words and phrases as "obstacle", "limit" and "bar to passage". Now, the competition the archers were shooting at was a Portsmouth round (5 dozen arrows at 20 yards on a 60cm target face). With metric scoring, the maximum possible score is 600. That is the "limit" - an archer cannot score more than that. (And if they have done, then something has gone wrong somewhere.) 500 - that's not a barrier. Many archers can score higher than that. And do.

So, it's not literally a barrier, is it? No, but look at it. It's a lovely round number. And what do we do with round numbers? Fixate on them to the detriment of our actual skill. After a term of shooting, a number of novices are getting 460, 480, having enjoyed a pretty steep learning curve up until then. But recently, most of their scores will be 400-odd, and it creates a greater sense of accomplishment to change that first digit, which has been around for too long without changing (and for some really good novices, it hasn't changed at all).

But there is 500, tantalising in its attainability. And then what happens is archers focus on that, getting that score, "breaking that barrier", and forgetting about little things like "shooting properly," "aiming at the middle", "keeping consistent". I'll own up, it's happened to me too - I can't begin to count the number of times I shot over 990 on a FITA and never managed 1000.

One thing I've learnt about archery: it isn't hard. What makes it a challenge (once you've learned how to shoot), is the fact that your brain will often get in the way of your shooting. Some archers find that if they start scoring generally well, they panic and shoot badly in "compensation", to end up with almost the same score they would have done had they been shooting at a mediocre standard throughout. And vice versa; an unusually low score might spur them on to "fix" their mistake, again with the result that they shoot much the same score as always.

There are various mental tricks archers can use to try and get the brain to think about something other than that holy grail of a score. Sometimes you can avoid knowing your score (just writing down arrow values and not adding them up). That's alright, but you can sometimes "feel" that you're doing better, and sometimes you're at a competition where they demand running scores, and you can't help but be aware of exactly how you're doing. Another idea is to aim for a different round number - slightly hard, because 600 is quite a way off, and 510 or 520 or 550 just isn't as round. Or aim for something else entirely; handicap tables - or the CUB Tabs based on them - are set at scores which are very decidedly not-round. If I remember correctly, a score of 480-something will earn you your black Tab, then 520-something will get you Blue. If you aim for those, somewhere in between you will have got 500, just like that.

So, back to the idea of this "barrier" then. It's a perception, caused by the fact that we have a decimal numbering system. There is nothing stopping anyone from getting over 500. Except that we refer to it as a "barrier". So let's change that - 500 is now a "benchmark" of success. We can see that we are better archers if we score higher than 500 more often than we did before. Let's use it as a way to show improvement, not as a limit to our talent.

Cephalonian Method 2: Cephalonia Strikes Back

We've been open to the public a week now (hurrah!) and certainly it feels as though we've been missed. Term had begun at the beginning of the month, but it was only today that we finally ran the induction for postgraduate students. Sadly only three made it along at the ungodly hour of 10 am, but that made for a pleasantly informal chat rather than a hectoring lecture, which I think has three advantages:

1. Smaller groups ask more questions and are less afraid to put their hands up or interrupt to query something.
2. You can bounce off the body language much better with a small group (are they bored? do they look confused? much easier to read signs like that in a small group than a large one).
3. Finding the experience informal and friendly means they'll be more likely to come back again, even if it's just to ask all the questions they'd forgotten to ask during the tour.

I tried to encourage a bit of interaction; asking them to ask me the questions rather than overloading them with information, but adding little snippets of advice with each answer I gave. So, "do you have a copier?" is answered with something like: "yes, it's self-service, coin-operated, so you don't need to buy a card to use it, and it does colour photocopying too."

It was also interesting when I mentioned we use LC classification to see the sighs of relief on the students' faces; I guess that's a disadvantage to an in-house classification scheme that I hadn't thought of - it may suit your books better, but not necessarily your users, who may well have got Dewey or LC all figured out elsewhere.

We'll see if the induction worked over the next few weeks I guess.

In other news, we had our first Novice Squad session with the archery club last night. Lots of promising young talent there, which bodes well for the season. Plus a few joined us in the pub afterwards - also very promising!

Weekend? What weekend?

I can't wait for a day when I can just pootle around doing absolutely nothing...but it looks like December is going to be the earliest that that's going to happen. London this weekend, for a wedding on Saturday (great fun, possibly the best one I've ever been to), and the Archery Test Event for 2012 at Lords' Cricket Ground.

Mospinek of Poland beats Wegh of the Netherlands in the quarter-finals

We only had tickets to the Ladies Individual Finals, since that was the only day we could do and fancied the lie-in (hence missing the knock-outs). Sadly, our one English hopeful following the seeding round, Alison Williamson, got knocked out at the 1/32s. Still, it was a great experience, despite the dire commentating (seriously, get someone who can pronounce the archers' names for a start, and not keep blaming the wind for every arrow not in the red or gold).

On the whole, though, the event ran so smoothly that it bodes pretty well for next year. And having never been to Lords' before, that was a pretty cool thing to tick off the list!

TFI Friday

So it's been a busy old time here in the reference library. We've been closed to the public now for 5 weeks (one to go!) due to building works elsewhere, resulting in the relocation of three other departments (that's right, three!) into our hallowed reading room.

The library looks remarkably like this

Not only that, but as I mentioned previously, we said goodbye to a number of colleagues, two of which were library staff. Given that we were effectively a full-time staff of three...yeah, I've taken over a few extra responsibilities! But now we're looking at the future, and hopefully soon we'll have a temp coming to ease the pressure, so that's good news. Though I'll still have to train them, and supervise them, and they won't be working Mondays at all...

Then we've had a colossal book move, swapping a room of oversized books, dealers' catalogues and art books with some of the archives. Hundreds...maybe even thousands of books being moved in two weeks...ouch. And much as I love not having had to move the books myself, this does mean I wasn't able to stop the movers when they reshelved the oversized books not by classmark, but by size. So now nothing's in order and I have no idea where anything is!

Added to that we've got the usual start-of-term chaos happening out in the real world university - I shall be giving tours to the History of Art postgrads soon. I've also been asked to run tours for the Cambridge Library Group, so I'm ankle-deep in email conversations with the other two libraries here to try and co-ordinate that (but that won't be until April, so I have a little time yet!).

The students I'll be showing around the library are ever so slightly older than these

I am luxuriating in the freedom to make decisions - I'm looking at ways to publicise the library and tie it closer to the general museum experience. So the idea is a person comes in, checks out the exhibition that they came to see. They might take in a couple of other galleries, eat at the café, make purchases from the shop...somewhere in there I think I can insert "visit library to look at further material on the exhibition, or just have a browse of the fantastic resources the library has on various forms of art". Or maybe just "visit library to sit down and allow feet to recover from all that ambling and read the Times Literary Supplement". I'm not fussy.

And finally...
My course is ever-progressing (at snail's pace). I've read 26 articles and learnt Set Theory for my latest assignment - and I'm hoping that that will be sufficient! I want to get it all done in order to go back to Aberystwyth in April, which means basically having completed everything by January. A month for each assignment should be possible, I think. Particularly given I've done so much reading for the next two already. Once I've completed Information Organisation and Retrieval, it's only Collections Management and Research in the Profession to do to be allowed to go back. It would be nice to have done Music Librarianship and one other before then, but we'll see. I'm hoping to have an idea about my dissertation by then too. I'd love to do something to do with music, but I'm pretty stumped for ideas beyond that thought.

And just a last cartoon which seemed pretty relevant to an art library but that I couldn't fit in with the rest of my verbal splurgings.

Happy Friday!

Business Hours Are Over, Baby

It's party-time. We're saying goodbye to a few colleagues, so here is the festive table before it got summarily destroyed by rampaging employees.

The un-fail-cake is hiding at the back, with Good Luck! written on it in my best icing handwriting (which, for the record, is so much harder than normal handwriting as a leftie, because you're not allowed to smear icing writing). The Christmas decorations are simply because we wished to decorate, and they were the only decorations to hand.

The plan is Easter eggs and plastic daffodils for this year's Christmas party.

Time for a Room Lovely

If you're not sure what that is, check this. I've thought time and again that a blog should be about the things that interest me, as much as it should be about the things I think should interest others, and I don't know, maybe it's because I've been struggling in the kitchen today (the first cake turned out remarkably torus-shaped) and I have a whopper of a headache, but I feel the need to share one of my more obscure pastimes. To wit: NetHack.

Incidentally the cake is for my dearly-departing colleagues, and will be coffee in flavour, with coffee-flavour butter icing in the middle and Mars Bar icing on top (which is a couple of bars nuked in the microwave until all melty and delicious and just smeared on top and cooled down). The oversized doughnut (or "fail-cake" as Ian delights in calling it) will remain carefully concealed at home until the evidence can be more thoroughly destroyed. Mmmm.

Another incidental prior to my actual official ramblings (yes, they haven't even started yet), is that I am currently trying out the new blogspot interface. It looks bigger and emptier than before, so I suppose that must mean it is now "streamlined" and "minimalist"...so things should either speed up because it isn't filled with crap or things should slow down now I can't find the buttons I need anymore...we'll see how it goes. In any case, I was distracted by the stats on my blog. Some very interesting ones!

• Thing of note the first: Apparently I'm not the only one who reads it (yes, this surprised me too).

• Thing of note the second: It has been read by someone (or something) in places as far afield as Canada and India. Wow. Big shout out to those places...

So anyway, going back to the original point of the post, what is NetHack and why is it lovely?

I could say that NetHack is a Rogue-like dungeon exploration game. I could say that it is all represented in ASCII characters. Neither of these things would have meant anything to me when I first started playing, and certainly wouldn't have been the reason that I have been playing for about ten years and don't plan to stop any time soon.

The image above is my current game. I'm playing a knight called Dan. It's going pretty well at the moment. I'm the @ sign in the room left of the middle at the top of the screen, with my pet orange dragon (D) to the left. There are lots of gems (*) buried in the rocks around the dungeon, and a fair bit of gold ($). There's an up staircase (<), and a down staircase (>), and a few other bits and pieces. I'm on Dungeon Level 7 here, though I have reached the Castle level (though not completed it).

So what's the attraction? Well, it's such a carefully wrought game, you can't help but fall in love with it. Every game is different from the last, right down to dungeon layout. The messages you receive as you play are genius. The number of different ways you can die are, frankly, unfathomable (I've died a lot and I've probably done it <1% of the different ways you can). It's a hard game, and requires you to really think about your next action: if you're down to a few hit points, what's the betting that you can kill the monster attacking you? Is it better to run away? Or maybe try out that potion you've yet to identify, in the hopes that it might be a potion of full healing?

I've ascended twice, which is a fancy-pants way of saying I've won the game. The first time I was playing a wizard, and for once didn't die of starvation a few levels into the game. The second time I was a valkyrie, and just hit everything around me.

So the game itself - you start at Dungeon Level 1 and go down. Monsters start out pretty easy, and get tougher as you get further, so you start with newts (:), goblins (o), grid bugs (x) and jackals (d), then end up with dragons (D), titans (H), arch-lichs (L) and other unpleasant beasties. You pick up stuff as you go, either from dead monsters or just left in rooms, but you don't know what it is without experimenting or reading a scroll of identify (assuming that you've managed to identify said scroll, that is).

Fairly early on, you come across two down-staircases on one level. One leads further down the dungeon. The other leads to the Gnomish Mines. These are about 8 levels, a bit tougher than the main dungeon because of the wide open spaces (plenty of room for monsters to be generated in, and not many places to hide), so I tend to dip in, perhaps grab a pickaxe if it's convenient, and scarper back to the main levels. A few more main levels down you reach the Oracle Level, which has a big blue @ in the middle of it, ready to dispense his wisdom...for a price.

The level directly below that has two up-staircases, one leading back from whence you came, the other leading to the Sokoban levels. The Sokoban levels are 4 puzzle levels (each progressively harder than the last) where you have to roll boulders into pits/holes in the floor. At the end there is a "treasure zoo" - a room where each square is filled with gold and a monster, and a closet with either a bag of holding or an amulet of reflection (both very useful).

So, having completed Sokoban, I tend to wander back to the Gnomish Mines, and try and get as far as Minetown (which has a few shops and a priest who can grant you a better armour class). If I'm feeling brave then I'll go down further and complete the end level of the mines (one of three versions, all have a luckstone, again very useful). If not now, I come back later.

Then a few more levels down the main Dungeons and you hear a telepathic message from your Quest Leader, and somewhere there's a magic portal to transport you to the Quest Levels. You have to be a certain level of alignment with your god/dess, and a certain experience level to be accepted on the quest - otherwise you're sent back to a) be better at being chaotic/neutral/lawful or b) kill a few more beasties. This happens to me nearly every time I find the quest levels!

Anyway, get the experience, improve the alignment, and you're in. If you've successfully identified a wand of death, even better. There are a few filler levels, then you get your Quest Nemesis level (which is different for every class that you play. The knight has to defeat the dragon Ixoth, the valkyrie must defeat Lord Surtur and so on). The nemesis holds the Quest Artifact (usually something awesome, like the knight gets the Magic Mirror of Merlin) and the Bell of Opening, which you need later on.

Okay, so Sokoban, Gnomish Mines, Quest levels completed, what's next? If you're lucky, it's Fort Ludios. It's a secret level which is only reachable by a magic portal in a vault room (a 2x2 room filled with gold) somewhere between the quest level portal and Medusa (we'll get to that in a minute). It's tough, but so worth doing, because if you survive the treasure zoo, the hordes of soldiers, the four dragons, the giant eels and Croesus himself, you get tons of food, gold and precious gems, and possibly dragon-scale armour and a fair bit of experience. One room only, so when everything's despatched, back to the main dungeon and continue down.

Medusa is the next milestone. She sits in meditation on an island (yeah, don't ask me how the dungeons have water levels above rock levels, they just do). If you don't have levitation, reflection and the ability to see while blind, then you need to get these things, otherwise you'll struggle to cross to the island, and defeat a monster who can turn you to stone with her gaze. Fairly easy then, though if she reads a cursed scroll of teleportation, you then have to chase her across a number of levels, which is a pain. Beneath her level are a few labyrinthine levels, then the Castle.

The Castle is tough (surprised?). It has hordes of monsters, a couple of barracks of soldiers, it's surrounded on all sides by a moat with sharks and eels in. The spellcasting monsters are the worst - I often genocide liches/arch-liches/demi-liches before this point so they can't curse all my stuff and summon more monsters. But again the rewards are worthwhile, because there is a wand of wishing hidden away. This is how I acquire much of my "ascension kit" (the kibble most useful when attempting to win).

To progress further down, you need to fall through one of the trap-doors in the castle, or make a hole - no down-stair here! This takes you to the last of the main dungeon levels, the entrance to Gehennom. Lots of monsters including mummies, zombies, vampires and ghosts. Then you enter the Gehennom levels. Most are just labyrinths again (hard because lots of traps, lots of monsters, and no quick ways to find staircases). There are a few with named demons you have to face: Juiblex (he has his own swamp level), Baalzebub, Orcus and so on. Then you have to find yet another level with a second up staircase. This leads to Vlad's Tower. Vlad the Impaler is a nice easy kill compared with most of them (as long as he doesn't read a cursed scroll of teleportation, otherwise you're chasing him all over the place again). And when he dies, you get his Candelabrum of Invocation, which you need later.

Heading back to the main Gehennom levels again, you start finding an interesting-shaped and impenetrable construction in the middle of the level. This is the wizard's tower. You'll want to steer clear of that for a while, and concentrate on clearing out the levels of some of the monsters. Eventually you reach the bottom (or is it?) - no more down-staircases. Instead, you'll find a vibrating square somewhere in the dungeon. Mark that, and get ready for a mad dash! Bless everything you need, make sure your loot is handy to pick up somewhere, that your exits are clear. You're going wizard-hunting.

Ascending the tower isn't too bad. A few monsters, generally nothing too complicated. It's a pain if the Wizard of Yendor wakes up too early, but hey, it happens. He's at the top of the tower, meditating away. Kill him (preferably as quickly as possible, usually with a wand of death), and pinch the Book of the Dead from his corpse. Now, everything needs to be done as efficiently as possible, because the wizard keeps. coming. back. "So thou thought thou couldst kill me, fool."

So, race down to the vibrating square, open the portal to the bottom-most level - Moloch's Sanctum, cut swathes through the hordes and hordes of monsters, and reach the secret room where the Amulet of Yendor is held by the priestess or priest there. Kill them, steal the Amulet, then get upstairs as fast as possible. If all this has gone as planned, then upon reaching Dungeon Level 1, you don't leave the dungeon for the world outside, you get transported to the Elemental Planes. You dig your way through the Plane of Earth, fly through the Plane of Air, levitate through the Plane of Fire, and float through the Plane of Water (easily the least taxing of planes, as long as the flipping wizard doesn't appear again!). From there, you reach the Astral Plane, your final destination. Tons of heroes and angelic beings to defeat, not to mention the small matter of Famine, Pestilence and Death (does that make you War?), before finding the correct altar on which to sacrifice the Amulet. Do this, get bathed in glory, ascend - success!

It's intricate, involved, convoluted and at times just plain evil. Best. game. ever.

New (Old) Books!!

I haz unpacked:

The Handy edition Scotts.

More Handy edition Scotts, a few others, and peeping in at the left are a couple of the set of H.G. Wells.

Pretty books! See me preen!

But then, I think I did mention how much I like sets of books:

The Star Wars books are double stacked. The Terry Pratchets will be just as soon as we find the rest of them...and the reason we have duplicate Harry Potters is because we both wanted to read it as soon as it came out.

Mmmm books. The sad thing is, I have very few actual classics, simply because they're on the whole out of copyright, which means I read the e-books instead, which don't have the nifty gold embossed red leather spines to sit on my bookshelf (and take up far too much space). So maybe when I've finished Jane Austen (in the middle of Mansfield Park at the moment), I shall find a nice image of her books on a shelf and place that here as testament to my hours spent ploughing through 18th century England (it's been hard, I can tell you).

And it's back to work... A! G! A-I-N!

For those of you who didn't spend the mid-90s swooning over Blur's album Parklife, learning all the lyrics off by heart and taping their every performance on Top of the Pops (a popular music programme back in the day - ask your parents), the title of this post comes from a song called "Bank Holiday". It's a Bank Holiday today. I am working.

This weekend was spent fetching boxes of books from my parents' house. I have several thousand books. Unfortunately, as seems to be the case with so many libraries, I have nowhere to keep them. There are a few I could probably stand to get rid of - Ben Elton, chicklit I read once for a lack of anything else to do, buried under the rest of the books there are probably quite a few Point Horror books and maybe a couple of Christopher Pikes that can be disposed of (I had a terribly uncultured and lowbrow taste in reading - still do, for that matter).

But the rest I still want - lots of classics, and modern-day classics, because they just look so nice on my shelves (and make for pretty good reading too). Rows and rows of Agatha Christie, Stephen King, James Patterson (because I like sets of books) - when I have the room in my house they'll sit beside the M.C. Beatons and Terry Pratchetts that currently take up a not inconsiderable amount of room in my bookcase.

I've not brought back with me any of those though. Nope, I'm starting classy (and then plummeting down to the depths of awful, no doubt), and now I need to find shelf space for my grandmother's 1877(ish) Handy editions of Scott, cherry-red, calfbound, gold leaf on the outer edges...yummy. Pictures to follow when I get home =)

I Could Tell You, But Then I'd Have To Kill You

Er...hello? Is this thing on?

Since my last post began with me being embarrassed at how long it's been since my last post, perhaps I'd better not start this post the same way... So, instead we shall begin with a strong recommendation to visit the Splendour & Power Exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, since I've just come from there and it is fab-u-lous!

Now, I shall cringe at how long it has been since my buoyant post about the state of my library degree (which is, sadly, much in the same state as it was six months ago). In that time, there has been much upheaval at work, but I can't say in any detail what that upheaval is/was, or what its repercussions have been. Suffice to say, I'm trying to coping with significant change, more responsibility, etc. etc..

I've got another reason for not writing on here, though. I've been prioritising and taking stock of a lot of things, and one thing I considered is what my blog should actually be about. In between just getting work done, and trying to find time to do my degree work, I don't have the energy to keep abreast of all the new and wonderful things Library 2.0 has to offer. Thus, if I'm keeping a blog, it's not going to be about me and my attempts to engage with these wonderful widgets.

I have basically two directions I can take, I think. One is to keep it professional, following work and degree work. The advantage here is that it has a clear and specific interest (I hope) and a single focus. Later on, when I have finished my degree and work has settled a bit, I might be able to re-embrace the digital world and engage with it. The disadvantage is that there are lots of things about work that are actually confidential, so I'd be struggling to find the balance between being too vague to be any use, and being so informative that I'm being too open.

The second is to make it more personal. There's more to me than just librarianship! The advantage is that I can take it in interesting directions and (hopefully) find a distinct voice in my blogging style (which to my mind is currently pretty bland and faceless). The disadvantage of that is that there may be a lot of crufty entries to sort through before getting to the useful stuff. There aren't going to be many archers interested when I wax lyrical about Notre Dame polyphony, nor musicians interested in my love of 1980s children's TV. Maybe.

Which brings me to a slightly sobering point - there are far more blogs created than read. Ultimately, I'm going to be doing this more for my own ego-massaging benefit than to actually be engaging with other people. It kind of defeats the object of Web 2.0 of democracy of communication, if the only person I'm communicating with (if in a slightly roundabout and public way) is myself.

Back to librarying!

Today I posted off my second assignment for Studies in Management, part of the Aberystwyth course. In between training for the new job and moving house, this one module has taken me 18 months to complete, so naturally, I'm a little relieved. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed management - I'd done business studies and sociology at school, and a lot of this stuff linked the two really nicely. But 18 months, when it should really have been four...I'm so glad it's over!

How do I intend to celebrate? By throwing myself con brio into the next module (Information Organisation and Retrieval, or for those in the know, Cat & Class) with the intention of finishing both it and another twenty credits by March so that I can attend my third study school in April. A tall order, I realise. Particularly now term's started up in a big way, and every weekend until mid-March is occupied. On the bright side, two of my orchestras have their concert on the same day, so I'm going to have to pick one, which means there'll be no point me rehearsing with the other one, which gives me another evening free each week.

pcorreia at Flickr

I mentioned my joy at being able to return (cue hasty counting on fingers) seven books to the UL and to the Judge Institute to a friend, and he likened it to a ritual burning (in fact, 'returning' is almost a portmanteau of 'ritual' and 'burning' now that I look at it). I've only ever actually burnt one book in my life - following an arduous year of failing to learn German, I chose French as my GCSE option and disposed of my German exercise book in the barbecue at home. Fun times.

*blows the dust off the computer*

Er, yes, haha. Um. Well, all right. It's been a while, hasn't it? Wonder if I can remember how this whole thing works still.

I've not been blogging for roughly 2 months. I've been ill. I've been away, living it up in Christmasland with the family. I've been slaving away over Management Studies (still). And the main reason is that I've had nothing to say. But excuses aside, thought I'd write a little about yesterday, which was the annual libraries@cambridge conference.

The theme was "Working Together". There were a number of speakers, and a few really stuck out for me. The first was a guy from Microsoft Research, who talked a bit about what they were currently working on. It sounded like the semantic web for academia, in a workable format, so I'll try and keep aware of that.

The next was Ned Potter, aka "The Wikiman", who talked about "Escaping the Echo Chamber". Brilliant stuff - because we blow our own trumpet well enough within librarial (I still intend that to become a word) circles, but fail at getting the message out to others. He pointed out some failures and some successes, and offered some simple guidelines for library advocacy. He also played us the fantastic "Study like a scholar, scholar" New Spice video, from the hugely successful viral marketing campaign. Best. Libraryvid. Ever.

One thing he mentioned as being a success surprised me, though. I'm sure every librarian heard about Frank Skinner's vitriolic words about libraries in the Times some months ago - it seemed to spread through the community like wildfire. However, I hadn't realised that some time later he visited a library and recanted his words - a real shame, but entirely typical of mass media, which seems to glory in bad news and catastrophic events, but can't be bothered to celebrate success in the same way at all. Bah, humbug and all that.

Another good bit was the discussion of copyright and special collections (as it turns out, I don't think that was the session I had originally booked in for, but couldn't remember and thought it sounded interesting, and didn't involve moving rooms). I've taken away some useful cribsheets about determining copyright and shared them with my offline colleagues.

Finally the afternoon session was a bit of an exercise in self-congratulation (but why not? There were a number of things about which we could be proud). I was very pleased to hear that TeachMeet would be happening again (but still can't think of anything I'd be able to talk about!), and it was good to be reminded about the 23 Things. I was interested in hearing about the 23 Things for Researchers taking place in Huddersfield, and if that goes ahead in Cambridge I'll probably sign up to that if it will help me in my degree.

OpenCambridge sounded great, and I might consider talking to the librarian about setting up a display and opening up our library. The museum is already involved, so it would probably depend on whether or not I felt like working a weekend at the library as to whether it would go ahead. Fresher's Fair sounded great too, although I was appalled that it costs so much to be involved when you're not a student society. (I have a number of other gripes about the fair too - CUSU taking up too much space (seriously, why bother?), sports societies being shoved away together even though a sport like archery has a more lateral appeal &c.)

A good day, overall, despite the triteness of the title ;) The highlight was recognising two of my answers to a questionnaire being used in Andy Priestner's talk on 23 Things! It's like being cited or something =)