Archive for Bank Holiday

Good Friday Morning

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , , on April 18, 2025 by telescoper

Good Friday has a slightly strange status in Ireland. It is a Bank Holiday, meaning that the banks are shut, but it’s not a statutory public holiday so many people still go to work. This differs from the UK and Northern Ireland for which it is a public holiday, which seems strange when you think about the Republic’s Catholic traditions.

Schools in Ireland are closed today, but that’s because they are on an Easter break anyway. In contrast, Easter Monday (21st April) is both a Bank Holiday and public holiday. Maynooth University is closed today, so I miss a Particle Physics lecture, and next week is the Easter break (including Easter Monday). We return on Monday 28th April for the remaining two weeks of teaching, apart from Monday 5th May which is a Bank Holiday and a public holiday. The last day of teaching is Friday 9th May, which also happens to be the day on which I’m giving a colloquium at Maynooth, and examinations start a week later, on 16th May.

The weather so far is consistent with today being a Bank Holiday:

Bank Holiday weather

I think I’ll wait for a gap in the rain before going out.

Oh.

It looks be spending most of the day indoors! It seems a good day to make a start on my reading list.

It’s been a very busy week, not only because of the very enjoyable visit by Brian Schmidt, but also because I wanted to clear my coursework grading before the Easter break. I managed to do the last of that yesterday, so I don’t have to do any of that either this weekend or during the Easter break. There are some more assignments due, but I will deal with them when we return after Easter.

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Reflections on the St Brigid’s Day Holiday

Posted in Biographical, Education, Maynooth with tags , , on February 6, 2023 by telescoper

It’s Monday 6th February 2023, which means that today is a new experience for me: a Bank Holiday in February. This is taking place on the first Monday after Imbolc, a Gaelic festival marking the point halfway between the winter solstice and vernal equinox. The 1st day of February is also the Feast day of St Brigid of Kildare (c. 451-525), one of Ireland’s patron saints, along with Saints Patrick and Colm Cille. . From what I’ve read, St Brigid is an a sort of amalgamation of a pagan deity and an early Christian figure, part legend and part real person. One of her miraculous powers was the ability to change water into ale, which perhaps explains her enduring popularity among the Irish.

Anyway, it’s nice to have a day off even if it is just a week after the start of Semester Two, well before exhaustion sets in. Last week I started both my modules. I was particularly apprehensive about the first laboratory session for Computational Physics 1 on Thursday. In previous years the first session has always generated a lot of technical problems. This year we are running a new version of the operating system on our Linux cluster as well as a new version of Python. Students are issued with accounts specifically for use on this cluster and even logging for the first time and changing passwords has proved a challenge. I am now also using a digital display screen instead of the old data projector I used to have and which conked out last year.

This time, however, there were no significant problems at all in the Lab. Let’s hope the same is true for the Tuesday lab, which is a repeat but with a different (and slightly larger) group of students. In recognition of the likelihood of technical hitches I don’t usually aim to do very much in Lab 1, but this time I managed to cover quite a lot of material. By next week I’ll be starting to get the students to write bits of their own code. Thereafter it gets increasingly hands-on. There’s no efficient way to learn coding other than by doing it, so the sooner they get going with that the better.

I don’t actually have any lectures timetabled on Mondays this semester and, since the lab for tomorrow (Tuesday) is a repeat of last Thursday’s, I don’t have anything urgent to prepare. I’m therefore using the time off to do some Open Journal business – including publishing a paper – and, despite the cold, do a bit of gardening to prepare for Spring.

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Bank Holiday in Bute Park

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on May 6, 2013 by telescoper

Well, I’ve done next to nothing today. Just yesterday’s Azed crossword in which I found

All too public ‘diary’ left in the loo (4)

which clues what this is.

I also held my last ever project meeting with Cardiff student; hand-in dates are looming across the country, I suspect.

Other than that, I’ve just been strolling around, and otherwise enjoying, Bute Park in the sunshine along with half the population of Cardiff. It is a pity the Council don’t take better care of the grass, though..

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