Last weekend Andrea and I went to Belgium for a short break (otherwise known as an authentic Bridget Jones mini-break). We had a great time, but it was incredibly cold.

I made a pair of fingerless gloves (one day I’ll work up the courage to make gloves with fingers, but they look so fiddley) to take.

I still haven’t gone through the photos, but for now, here are the gloves.

I spent Christmas and the New Year in Granada with Andrea’s family again this year. It was a wonderful chance to relax, eat lots, and generally do christmasy type things. Although I did spend a fair portion of the time I was there knitting.

The spanish do their gift giving on (Three) King’s Day, the 6th of January, which means that there’s plenty of time after la Noche Buena (Christmas Eve) to organise gifts. I received, amongst other things, a set of fantastic Sony headphones to use at uni, a belt, a face cream (to keep me looking young and beautiful), and a jumper.

Andrea’s nephew Bruno is getting bigger all the time, in fact it seemed he grew substantially while we were there, must have been all that good food he was eating. He was doing his best to sit up (e.g. stay balanced) and is at that stage where he’ll put anything in his mouth, of course he also seems to have a good stomach as he’s quite happy eating just about any adult food he’s allowed to try.

I made my traditional christmas cake again this year, complete with red royal icing, which I put on before we left, and a scene with the three kings arriving in Granada, which Andrea and I made when when got there.

You can see it all, and more, in the photos I put up last week.

I selected a pattern for a great looking blanket that I found on the fantastic Ravelry and at the beginning of November I got to work. Two months, over 59,000 stiches, 1.5Km of yarn, and countless hours later I finished my biggest knitting project to date.

I’m not sure Bruno was aware of the blanket (he did enjoy tearing up the wrapping paper though), but I hope that it’s something that will serve him for years to come.

The science library at uni has a display out the front where they put topical exhibitions up which change from time to time.

This week they put one up celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Évariste Galois (b. 25 Oct, 1811).

Galois was a french mathematician who founded that basis for a large part of modern number theory, part of which was named after him, Galois Theory.

He was arrogant and worked somewhat messily, he had a lot of his work rejected by his peers during his life. It was only after his death that a friend of his, Joseph Liouville,  took the time to make what he had started understandable, and Galois Theory was founded.

He was a revolutionary during his life, served in the the Republican artillery, and spent a few stretches in prison for activities mainly related to protests.

He managed all of this before dying  at the age of twenty, from wounds suffered in a dual, spending his last hours preparing his notes for Liouville to read upon his death.

Compared to this, modern mathematicians can be considered a fairly boring lot.

I don’t remember exactly what he was there to talk to us about, but the bit that I remember is when he talked about his faith, or rather why it was his faith.

He followed the faith of his ancestors, the sort of totemic tribal faith that native americans always followed. He learned it from his grandmother.

But when his grandmother taught him, she explained the faith to him, yet urged him to leaner about other faiths and make up his own mind.

He had travelled, spoken to many people of many different faiths, and in the end he had returned to his roots, but he chose to return to his roots.

At the time I understood that his case was unusual, although growing up in the liberal environment I did, I didn’t understand exactly how unusual, yet it’s a story that I still remember.

David Chudzicki has created a python package (Knit3d on github) which simulates in 3D the shape that will be produced by a knitted pattern. I haven’t really looked at it yet, but it looks very interesting. Check out his blog post on simulated knitting.

Last week our email server finally tanked. This was pretty bad timing as we’ll be moving to a hosted email server before the end of the year.

In order to get things up and running as quickly as possible, we installed a new server from scratch, imported all the users, and configured email. Some users didn’t have their history, but at least they were receiving and sending email.

One of the things that I love about this sort of administration is how much can be done remotely.

After breaking the new server again on Friday just before the end of the day, I had a freshly installed, but completely unconfigured server and a photo of the serial number from the back of the machine when I got home on Friday.

Using this, I could set up the server from scratch from my apartment in Barcelona, I always loved this sort of central control when I was doing server admin and tech support.

But at the same time, when I was in London, I was always the first to leave the office and run up the stairs to fix a problem on a user’s computer.

As much as I love central control, I always preferred actually being physically present when resolving people’s tech problems.

Since the book I’m reading at the moment is prohibitively large, I’ve not been carrying it around everywhere as I usually do with books. Needing something to read at Andrea’s place, I picked up Looking for Alibrandi.

Having not done VCE at the end of secondary school, I had’t read the book, although it’s pretty similar to the film with Pia Miranda based on the book. At one point, Josie’s grandmother is telling her about when she first came to Australia, she didn’t know anyone and couldn’t speak the language.

It occurred to me that, coming from a country of immigrants, there is a certain irony in my emigrating from Australia back to the old world.