People who are new to Reading may well have noticed just how many aeroplane fly over the campus. We seem to get one a minute at times. In the last few days it has been especially busy and I thought I would give some explanation why.

Heathrow is only about 20 miles away to our east and if you look at the map, you will see that the two main runways run east-west. Aeroplanes like to land and take off into the wind, so when the wind is coming from the east, the planes land from the west of the airport. On approach, they line up with the runway and use Instrumented Landing System (ILS) to guide them in. In fact, we are almost in direct line of the runways but it is the north runway which aeroplanes will land on if they are coming in from the west (this is due to the Cranford Agreement that prevents this runway being used for take offs). This lies on a line that passes a few miles north of campus, approx. over the village of Sonning. 

To make things even busier, incoming planes are often 'stacked' prior to arrival. There are four stacks around the airport, about 20 miles out at 10, 2 4 and 8 oclock. When it is their turn, air traffic control put the planes onto final approach where they must leave the stacks and then line up with the ILS. This is why you often see aeroplanes coming in first from the north and then from the south, banking hard to take a west to east line about 2-3 miles north of campus.

Over the past few days, the wind has been from the east. You can check for yourself the wind direction of Heathrow at http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/EGLL.html. Yesterday was quieter (although I doubt it was noticable due to the rain) as the wind was from the west - which is the prevailing direction. There is a preference for landing east-west as this abates takeoff noise over central London so westerly approaches only occur when the e-w vector exceeds 5kn.

You may have spotted the deliberate mistake in the welcome video. Our Community Server is now not a Moodle site but a wiki. We are using mediaWiki to be precise, hoping for some of the success of Wikipedia. Please feel free to make changes but obviously - be constructive.

I have spent the latter part of the day adding some of the content of the old server to the wiki. Others in ITNG have put on documentation about the bits they have been working on over the summer. We have a lot of nice services for you to explore this year but, as we are a University, you will find you need to go looking for much of it. That is until we can employ someone to write documentation full time (yea right!).

Gave the annual ITNG welcome video today in the Freshers Welcome. Hope those who saw it enjoyed it. More importantly, I hope you don't now think we are a bunch of bungling idiots who cannot even make a video. It was only a bit of fun.

If you missed it, it is on-line but beware - it is ~ 180MB.  

Each video seems good for about two years - so I expect we will do it again next year. That will be version 3.

A pictures of Wales (as promised)

Just back from a week walking in Snowdonia (North Wales). Very theraputic. Spent the time walking, drinking (only a couple of pints a night) and sleeping - great. Also, Snowdonia is one holiday place which is not really that full of people. If you keep off the popular hills (i.e. Snowdon and Cadir Idris) you really can go out and walk all day without meeting another soul. In my job, you really appreciate that at times.

I'll post some pics in another entry.

Back to blogging - will try to make this more than a once-a-year occurance.

Shirley suggested we could make an entry that would be interesting to new first years. I though wow - what a lot of things we have got going on that prehaps newbies may not know about. For a start, there is this new get-your-username-early business which allows people to have a good look around the University before they even come - virtually that is of course.

Once people do get here the fun really starts. ITNG (of whom I am the manager) is busy getting computer labs and systems together for the new session and we have some nice new systems in store. This year we continue our theme of making them available externally, so people don't even have to get out of bed .

I'll post some further entries through September, although I am in Wales next week doing a spot of walking. These should give some idea of what is in store and some of the things I am thinking about doing.