Well, it's a small world. Went to the geekpubtrip as usual last night, and discovered that Becky had brought along a friend, who turned out to be Juliette-from-Oxford, someone I met ten years ago on the Maths Olympiad training week. Not only that, but she also recently did a PhD that ran roughly parallel to Gareth's, so I'd heard about this from him. This meant I got to surprise her rather a lot by saying "So, I hear you've been working on zeta functions of groups then?". Muhahaha.

(We tried to get Gareth to come to the pub and meet her, but with no success, which was fair enough given the ten seconds' notice we gave him. Ah well.)

Meanwhile yesterday, I had my latest computer delivered, a tiny little thing the size of a network appliance which I'm pretty much going to use as one. It is the most unpleasant shade of pale green I could conceivably have imagined. Since I have to take its lid off anyway to fit a storage device, I'm sorely tempted to spray-paint it a more palatable colour while I'm at it...