jonny goes to england

I found a nice Engrish food description from the packaging of a Chinese walnut snack. Can not refuse to put this up here:

The back is also somewhat amusing:

I was invigilating midterm exams again ..

Apparently, eel dishes (for example jellied eel) are an east london speciality. You see a few shops around here which offer eel pies and other atrocities. Anyway, my housemates bought chopped up eel in some stock soup. Here are the pics — be prepared.

First, just an innocuous soup .. however the smell of it reveals that there must be more to it.

Desk at my temporary office:

Hey. More pictures for you.

Close to my bus stop in the morning is a Starbucks. Two or three times a week they give out free taster coffees on the streeth. The 20-something tiny cups are distributed very quickly .. I was lucky enough to get one more than once. Nothing better than sipping on a hot, nice coffee while waiting for the bus:

Dave arrived. It’s a laptop table from IKEA. I don’t have too much space.. so that’s currently my solution for my laptop:

Finally, I just walked past this very run down grocery store. I remember I once walked into it to buy a diet coke but then the urine smell was too strong for me to actually by the can. Anyway, see what’s written on their blue canopy:

“Welcome to Dream Land” …

Our office is getting repainted and refurbished. This means we’ll have to move somewhere else for a few days. So today we had to clean up our mess and the one from two chinese guys who left about 200kg of rubbish in their workplaces before leaving university.

I started cleaning up, the first thing I found was this:

Yeah, that’s a proper butchers knife hidden in my office. Now I know what happened with Sunyi when Tao-yang lost his temper..

I went through the abandoned storage thing of one of the guys and found a few nice books. Most of them I don’t understand at all, but they are still cool to have. After going through his stuff, a sudden OCD-like urge to wash my hands hit me. Here’s the pic:

Next up, and totally out of context: the recession hits London apparently the most. Here’s one bar on campus offering special credit crunch lunches:

And as last pic, Christ Church around the corner. I like this building:

A list of things

• The street our university is on (Mile End Road, Whitechapel Road) will probably get renamed due to the Olympics 2012. Names in question are “Olympic Boulevard” or “High Street 2012″. That’s awesome .. who wouldn’t want to have his address at the Olympic Boulevard?
• On Friday, we submitted a paper titled “Lattice of Information and Quantitative Information Flow” to the Computer Security Foundations (CSF) conference. A very good conference .. we’ll see what happens. In the paper, we explored the connection between quantitative and qualitative research in the area of language-based security. It’s very elegant .. but then again I’m not sure if it’s enough for CSF.
• I changed the look of my university webpage. I will structure it a bit better later and perhaps add a bit more content..
• A lot of other stuff I forgot! I got to get used to blogging regularly again!

It snowed Sunday evening and through Monday! Quite a bit but not too much really. In my area, perhaps 10-15cm. However, funny enough, university shut its campus, all buses in London stopped operation and the Tube system status looked as follows on Monday:

The department advised people to go home early on Monday (for those who made it to work) and to not try to come to work on Tuesday (today). The mail containing the advice used words such as “hazardous journey”.

Wanna see a pic of the snow shutting down London? My street on Monday afternoon: