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The year started with by far the coldest weather we have had in Windmill since we moved to the Peak District.  Fortunately no serious problems occurred with the house, except that the stopcock in the roof froze because the insulation had been eaten through by mice.  A hot air blower and some new insulation soon sorted that out.

I went on a tour of some of our iSAC pilot sites in March to provide some training on managing the semantic network.  This was useful as it allowed me to see how the pilots were intending to use the software.  I made a flying trip to Prato, and was able to call in and say hello to Francesca and Stefano on my way back to the airport, and had a day trip to Dublin.  This was the first time I had been there for a number of years, and it looked much tidier than I remember.

After another trip to Kuala Lumpur, it was off to Taipei for the AAMAS conference.  I flew via Hong Kong the day after the Royal Wedding, and the airport was full of wedding photographs.  Taipei was interesting, even if I did not really see much of the city.  I did however go out to the National Park and hot springs, even though they were shrouded in mist.  The book from the 2009 workshop in Budapest is now published, and I am doing the final editing for a book in the Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series based on this year's workshop.

We spent a week in July in Porthmadog, where we were able to sample the train through the back streets to Beddgelert.  North and Mid Wales are thus reconnected by train forty years after the Good Doctor (Beeching) destroyed the extensive network which once existed.  The weather was fine all week, which was unusual for our visits to North Wales.

In August it was back to Kuala Lumpur with Gillian. We went up to the Batu Caves on the Sunday.  This is now an easy trip as the local suburban train service goes all the way from the hotel to the caves, with just one change of train.  In Borneo, the Orangutans put on a great show and we visited a local long house in the hills.  It was then off to the beach for a few days. 

It was then back to Sheffield for the start of term.  In September I was invited to Lisbon to review an EU project, and they chose the day that Manchester United were in town.  This meant that I could not get a flight from the north of England, and had to fly from Luton.  This made it a long trip for a half day meeting, but it did mean that I had a morning free in Lisbon as I could not get a flight back until the afternoon.

We were in North Wales again for my birthday, which was really wet.  We did a trip on the railway again, and found a Darjeeling locomotive well out of its normal haunts at Beddgelert (the locomotive was restored and is now based in this country and tours narrow gauge lines).  We had a visit from our twinned French village of Parisot  in October and took them to Chatsworth.  The sculpture exhibition was in the gardens, and I am not sure what they made of some of the pieces.  It was certainly different from their art show.  The Hucklow Hobble was in Shropshire, and gave an excellent opportunity to explore the Long Mynd and the local farm museum, where we saw a demonstration of steam thrashing.

November found me back in KL, but this was a short trip, just to do the work.

My External Examiner stint at Leeds Met has come to an end, and is being replaced with one at the University of Brighton, which will mean more travelling than before.  KL comes to an end this year, which in many ways is a relief as the level of travelling has become excessive.  Hertfordshire continues, I think for another year.  I have just acted as Examiner for a SHU PhD, and have another one to examine for the University of Manchester.  My PhD students nominated me for a Inspirational Supervision award jointly with one of my colleagues, and the University is organising a dinner to present the award.

Snow ploughed to the end of our lane, January 2011

Darjeeling train at Beddgelert, Snowdonia, October 2011

Damien Hirst's Pegasus sculpture at Chatsworth. The other side shows a dissected horse.

Steam threshing, Shropshire, October 2011