view from a Nice hotel window

I've arrived in Nice for the UCNC conference starting tomorrow.  I went for a little explore, walking down to the sea (about 20 mins stroll).

There is a large plaza on the way.

And the sea is spectacular.

No wonder it's called the Côte d'Azur.  It was much brighter, and much bluer, in reality.

After I had found where the restaurant quarter was, I went back to my hotel to unpack, and wait for my colleague to arrive so we could go for dinner.

view from my hotel window

the wrong blue lines

The pond work continues, with shuttering around the back edge for building the path, and blue lines on the ground marking out where the rest of the paths go.  The blue lines are in the wrong place.

Castle Howard

We are running the European Conference on Artificial Life (ECAL 2015) in York this week. It’s quite hectic, and great fun.  This afternoon was the conference trip, to Castle Howard.  I’ve been there before, and adore the grounds.

This time, there was a stately greeting.

The house is splendid.

But once again, it was the grounds I enjoyed best.  I concentrated on the walled garden.

The wall being put to good use

One of the delegates excitedly pointed me towards the blue: a whole sub-garden of delphiniums.  Believe it or not, these photographs do not capture the sheer intensity of the blue (and it wasn’t even sunny!)

Deep blue was not the only option.

There was a glorious pergola smothered in honeysuckle.  Some varieties had almost chocolate coloured flower buds.

The avenue to the walled garden allowed glimpses of the fountain.

So, after a lovely walk around the grounds, and some loitering to check all the delegates had got back on the coaches, it was goodbye to Castle Howard.

too blue

I have been resisting moving from MS Office 2003 to any of the more recent versions. However,  my new machine at home has Windows 7 and the newer MS Office.  So I have to grin and bear it.

The main reason I didn't want to upgrade is that I hate-hate-hate the "ribbon".  It's ugly, it's cluttered, and it seems to encompass a work flow orthogonal  to mine.

However, it struck me after I had changed the default blue wallpaper on my home machine to the Hubble Deep Field photo, that another reason I dislike the latest Office is that it is so very very BLUE.

a much more soothing wallpaper image

Ah!  Surely I can change that?  After much hunting (did I say that I hate the interface?), I discovered a "Word Options" button skulking at the bottom of the main menu (you know, that absolutely crucial menu that hides behind a little circular icon that looks nothing like a menu button?)  I clicked it, and I found that one of the "popular options" allows me to change the colour scheme.  Result!

What, a whole three options?  What an embarrassment of riches!

I had a look at "black":

Better. But my goth period is long past.  What about "silver":

Much more civilised, if somewhat ... grey.

So, I've now set the option to "silver" (I set it in MSWord, and it magically propagated to Excel and Powerpoint), and I now only hate it when I look at the ribbon (which, of course, I have to do every time I need to do anything more complicated than plain typing, ie all the time), rather than looking anywhere else on the screen.  I suppose that counts as a win.