I went to Trinity College Dublin for college. It’s a lovely college, right in the middle of Dublin. There’s a set of scholarship exams which you can take in your second year in college, just called “schol” by students. They’re a hard set of exams, not least because you have to take the exams at Easter and you have to study your ass off throughout the year. Engineering/Maths/Science are definitely easier subjects to get it in though, at least we have objectively correct answers. There are (or were) far fewer arts students who ended up getting it, and that’s not because they’re not plenty smart enough!

Anyway, the point of doing the exams is that if you get them, you get 5 years of free rooms, fees and an evening meal. Course, most people do 4 year degrees, and so the 5 years is really there to entice you to do a PhD or masters. Interestingly, the meal rights continue even after you’ve left college, so, I was able to work and still come back for the meal. Yum.

So, I was incredibly privileged to be able to just head down and study for the exams, and, fortunate enough to get the scholarship. It completely transformed my time at college. I met many good friends as a direct result of getting it, and lots of interesting chats over dinners (and free Guinness ;). I’d also never have lived out of home before finishing college unless I’d got schol.

One of the perks of schol is that they invite you back every 10 years for dinner. I missed my first 10 year reunion in 2009, but, I really wanted to make it back for my 20 year one, and I’m very very glad I did. It was really lovely to meet up with old friends again. It’s a very odd thing to see people age in 10 year (or 20 year) intervals! Very odd indeed.

The dinner itself was yum, the wine was good, the conversation flowing (helped along by the wine no doubt). The provost gave an excellent speech on brexit’s impacts and the challenges faced by universities. It’s worth a read…

...When I first took office as Provost in 2011, I quoted Erasmus
 in my inaugural speech: Ego mundi civis esse cupio, communis omnium.
 "I long to be a citizen of the world, a fellow-citizen to all people."

This is in direct opposition to Theresa May’s 
‘If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’.

It’s Erasmus I want to channel for our students – education should
lead out towards a sense of ‘fellow-citizenship with all people’.
It is through education that we build our common humanity.

Tonight, as we celebrate our new scholars, we celebrate the brilliance and discipline that enabled them achieve this singular distinction, and we hope that they will use their gifts to inspire generations, to further our common humanity, and to maintain and strengthen warm neighbourly relations with our sister island.
I hope to be back again in another 10 years time, schol, and the friends I’ve made through it, have been one of the most positive impacts on my life.

Well it has been a while since I last posted. Life has changed, quite a bit. Fewer adventures (currently, though, hopefully that’s going to change!), so, fewer blog posts. Having a kid is somewhat different from not having a kid. Still, it has been quite fun seeing Anna grow and develop. We’re planning (quite obviously) on keeping pictures of her off the Internet, as best we can anyway. I will continue to put up password-protected pages, just ask me for the password if you want to see them.

Firstly, Femke (Maaike’s sister) came out for 3 weeks. Totally lovely having her here. We did a few “adventures”, biking in the hills, off to Hanmer Springs, and they went down to Mt. Cook area for a few days.

Next up, advent of code happened again in December. I’d promised myself (well, Maaike) that I wouldn’t get completely obsessed over it, however, I completely failed. This year I tried to do it in Python. I’m a pretty terrible Python developer ;) turns out though, there are some pretty impressive libraries which can make up for bad programming ;)

Good times. I particularly enjoyed day 17 where you had to simulate water flowing down and collecting in buckets. Mine looked like this:

Really good fun. My solution was ridiculously inefficient , but, at least it was correctly ridiculously inefficient.

Next up – Christmas:

We spent it up in Palmerston North with family. Some chess was played. William and I were very evenly matched, but, only because I’ve been playing most days for 2 years, and he hasn’t played for about 10 years or something, maybe more. Good times. Lovely hanging out with family and introducing Anna to her only family in NZ :)

Maaike’s cousin Imke came over from Australia for a visit. It’s amazing how much more interesting you get when you have a child ;). Really nice getting to meet them for the first time.

It was my 40th Birthday in January. Michelle made me a lovely cake. Our tongues did turn green, it was totally worth it!

Maaike has given me lots of “vouchers” for my 40th. Mainly giving me free-time to get out and do adventures! One of which was going and doing a rogaine. I’m not sure if she planned the weather too and is secretly trying to kill me. The front which came through was brutal, but, we’d just made it back to the car by the time it hit.

Have to show a picture of the Rhinosaur-fish which Michelle and Amy made. Maaike sometimes has dreams, and in this one, she was being chased across a lake by a rhinoceros-dinosaur-fish cross. They decided to make one. It’s so cool! I love the detail on it.

Finally, visited the new library (it’s very cool! – new since the quake), went biking with friends, cousin Thomas & Glynn visited… all in all good times.