Indoor and outdoor cats

People get quite exercised about if pet cats should typically be indoors (typical in the US) or outdoors (typical in the UK). I don't have strong opinions on that as I think it's nice if they have someone looking after them at all given how many surplus cats there are. I do think it might be cruel to keep a cat indoors that is used to being outdoors.

Our cat has always been indoors. I'd not want to keep at cat indoors in a small apartment where the owners are out at work all day, but if there is usually somebody around to entertain them, or in a large enough house multiple cats they get along with, then I figure that keeping them indoors is okay. They certainly live longer, healthier lives on average, possibly less stressful, but also perhaps more boring. As I don't think longevity is everything then, where possible, I like the idea of letting cats be outdoors when they choose, but I think one needs plenty of land and not-busy roads for that. Our house in Ohio would have been fine for outdoor cats, we had a large rural plot. I honestly don't care greatly about local bird populations. As it was, our cats there already had some excitement in catching the mice and snakes that entered the house.

One thing that does annoy me though is the typical British local cats: we live in a fairly dense estate with terraced housing, and there are many owners of outdoor cats. That basically means that they choose for others to have to deal with the cats. Why have an outdoor cat in an area that already has abundantly many, I've no idea. We also have the railway line and dual carriageway nearby, not that I've seen roadkill. I am far from impressed with my neighbors' causing me to have to keep cleaning up their cats' feces and vomit from my yard, I'd rather not accidentally step in them while mowing. At least with our using the cross-trainer most days the local cats don't usually get shut in our garage for very long after sneaking in.

Hand-holding staff through the seminar calendar

I work in the University of Dundee's Life Sciences Research Complex in which constituent components have academic staff and students so there are various seminar series. The computational biology ones started up again with a most pleasant surprise from Katarina Blow. If I heard correctly, she is but an undergraduate from Cambridge who joined us for some weeks of summer work, but in explaining her analyses of a simulation related to the Thomson problem she clearly had command of the material and it was among the better seminars I've attended. Although I am employed as a software developer, I am technically research staff and encouraged to use my time with the university as a learning experience.

Those sharing the building complex with me tend to have advanced technical qualifications, access to computers, notebooks, online calendaring, etc. Maybe a week and a half beforehand I had received e-mail advertising the seminar so I noted it accordingly and went along to it: not a difficult task, one would think. I was one of the few who was there by the time it was to start: apparently many others didn't make it on time because the division secretary hadn't e-mailed out a reminder on the same day. Indeed, I often receive several e-mails about the same seminar which is annoying because I check each over in case any of the details (time, venue) have changed. Honestly, are these people really unable to recognize an interesting e-mail the first time and arrange some means of remembering to act on it? It's not impressive, nor are the various e-mails I receive with the subject prefixed PLEASE READ as if I might think that the message had been sent to me for some reason other than that I am intended to read it.