Have been in Istanbul now for several days. Been down the Bosphoros, up a castle and in a mosque. It’s an impressive place. The central tourist trap, Sultanahmet, is also overloaded with places to go and see, from many different ages. From an Egyptian needle (1500BC according to the guidebook, 400BC according to the plaque), through to the Byzantine hippodrome which used to house a huge swimming pool where they raced the beasts after which it was named, to the Palace which housed the Ottomans, through to the Blue and Aya Sofia Mosques. This city, perched across the straits, gateway to two continents has been the centre of several huge empires for many centuries, robbed only of it’s crown when Ataturk decided that Ankara was the place for his capital, on the basis that finding somewhere to erect state buildings in Istanbul was going involve knocking down several UNESCO world heritage sites.

I think I now have my blogging environment as I want it. I’ve been using blogpost.py to do my posting. I couldn’t let go of my text only environment. I don’t care if it’s old fashioned, but I like the separation of editing and viewing. In this case, I’ve even had to learn asciidoc, but it was worth the effort.

Thankful, the talk is over. It went okay, didn’t stumble too much and most importantly, got a few laughs.

Blogs are generally seen as a slightly dubious part of the scientific publishing landscape. This is not, of course, unreasonable. I put stuff up here, for example, such as my idea for IDs that I’ve thought about for a few days, but that I am unlikely to follow any further, or stuff opinion pieces on bees about which I have as little expertise as the average journalist.

So, this year of Bio-Ontologies is upon me; I’m sitting in the airport waiting to fly in the wrong direction; although I’ve noticed that the airport signs no longer call this “waiting time” but “shopping time”.