Success

Today began and ended with grim, wet walks with Django, between which things went pretty well.

After processing some benchmark results, I went into work in time for lunch with intern R, and PhD students B and Y. After that I attended the seminar given by our visitor. She lost me on the second slide but, unusually, I managed to catch up with the essence of what she was doing, and it was interesting. Back in the office, one of my class attended the "office hour", and then Y and I looked through an early draft of slides for a presentation she's giving next week. Suddenly I got an email saying that the tender bid I'd put in two weeks ago had been successful. It still has to be approved internally, but it's a welcome development. Finally my Year 4 project student came to see me to discuss his dissertation, and it was looking much better. He'd also observed an interesting property of the algorithm he's studying. I'd been concerned at his lack of progress, so it's quite a relief that he'll be OK. On leaving, I had a brief but interesting technical discussion with our visitor and a colleague, where I feared that I'd been a little forceful.

On the bus I wrote a conciliatory email to them, and messaged our visitor, but she later replied that what I'd said had been great, and had fuelled further discussion at dinner.