Spill

Jack! Oh for fuck's sake boy! Yes, he pulled a tin of wood stain from a shelf in B&Q and it exploded on the floor.

Leaving Ghent

A final afternoon in Ghent.

On the train to Brussels airport.

Our BMI plane.

Now THIS is a bag. It's a padded laptop bag by Crumpler, from some looney Ozies. This particular bag is the Very Busy Man. I carried everything I needed for 4 days in Ghent in this bag, some of it delicate and in complete security. A superb bag. A geek's bag.

Kim and Jack on the plane.

Waiting to get driven back to the car park at Heathrow.

ICRS day 3

Oh man, you'll never believe this. The work I had submitted to the ICRS meeting was shortlisted for the Award for Excellence in Cartilage Research (or some such title). I was sitting through the awards ceremony, waiting to finish and go back to the hotel, and up came a slide with the 5 contenders for the title. My abstract title and name was top of the list! This was read out, followed by the other 4 pieces of work, and I got a bigger buzz from that than from actually giving the talk! I didn't win, but was very, very chuffed to have had my work ratified and selected as one of the best pieces at this large international cartilage repair meeting. Top!

I get a certificate sent to me, so that'll get framed and stuck up in my office. Good motivation!

This meeting wasn't as good as the last one in Toronto 2 years ago, but I have taken a lot away from it, and have formulated some new ideas. Although a bit overly clinical, and very heavy on the ACI/MACI (autologous chondrocyte implantation), the meeting was incredibly useful. I think I've just added to the huge pile of work on my desk :)

Beers last night

I went out with Charlie and the gang last night for a few beers and some food. As ever on a night out with Charlie (particularly at a conference) it was a very funny evening. Bags of fun and loads of laughs.

ICRS day 2

PCs in the conference centre.

Tony!

Belgian cafe...

with Belgian waffles! (And great coffee).

Apple shop.

Graffiti.

One of the rivers in the evening.

ICRS day 1

My talk went very well. Piece of cake!

Kirsty and Jack!

Sam's Belgian tea shop.

More talks.

Gent, Belgium

We travelled to Gent today, by car, by plane and by train.

Nice place, crap hotel. Conference starts tomorrow, and it looks like a busy 2 and a half days.

Charlie's Angels

I had a meeting at Cardiff University today so I popped in to see the girls I used to work with and to get them to check out my talk.

ICRS 2004

I've almost kind of finished writing my talk for the ICRS meeting this week. Well, I've put the slides together.

Do you want to see my presentation?

ICRS 2004

This is the conference that I will be speaking at on Thursday:

http://www.icrs2004.org/

I will be in Belgium from Wednesday to Sunday, with Kim and Jack.

Deck Weekend

What a superb weekend! Sunny AND productive.

I had laid the mortar I needed on Wednesday and Thursday evenings last week, and laid out the outer joists for my new garden deck on the Thursday evening. My mum came to visit on the Friday, bringing with her a bench saw borrowed from a friend in Cheltenham. I almost finished the main deck square's joisting (square, my arse) Friday night.

So first thing Saturday morning I got the bench saw out and finished the joisting, banged it all together with 100mm oval ring nails, cut some noggins, banged them in and leveled the whole thing on gravel, slabs, blocks and wedges. It turned out pretty level. I cut some posts for the far end, as the deck is raised there where the ground drops down slightly. I drilled and tightened down coach bolts on them. I did the same for a smaller square that will eventually hold the barbecue that will sit behind the shed. I nailed that to the other frame and leveled it on more posts. Perfect.

Stu had turned up by then to give me a hand, whilst watching the FA Cup final on a portable TV balanced in the doorway of the shed. Once the joists were finished, plus other little jobs (sealing cut ends) we got on with laying the deck boards, which with a bench saw was an absolute doddle. Measure, cut, place. Measure, cut, place. And if the board was a little long, trim the end off on the saw. Easy with 2 people. So in no time the simple boards were all down, and we spaced them and fixed the ends. Light stopped play and we finished the day with beer and mexican food cooked by Kim.

Sunday morning I put the rest of the screws in the boards we'd laid (450 screws, all predrilled!), had a cup of tea, and sized up the remaining boards. Because the back of the deck is longer with that second square on the side I interlaced the boards, having one long board on the left, then the right, then the left and so on. No measuring, just laying the board down and marking the joist underneath with a pencil to see where to cut. Pretty quick.

The garden of course isn's square, so the final boards at the very back had to fill a triangular gap and had to be cut to fit around a couple of posts. I borrowed a circular saw, measured, measured again, and still managed to screw up the first cut. All of the following cuts were fine though (I had learnt my mistake - too much sun?) and I had all the boards laid down pretty quickly. Stu helped me fix them, and we soon had the other 350 screws in place, and the deck was finished. It is a very quick way to cover an area of this sort of size (4.5m x 7m at the far end). I see why they use it so often in those rapid gardening programmes.

One last job to do: bang the fence up. With some of Stu's ingenuity we finished it very quickly. Bench saw + rough cuts = very quick. Job done!

Jack had a good run around on the finished and definately approves. He loves being outside, so now he has somewhere safe to play. I think I'm going to sit outside this evening with my iBook and finish writing my talk for a conference in Belgium I'm off to this week. I can burn all the waste wood (of which there are only offcuts - good guess on usage, eh?) to keep me warm.

I had better pick a colour to stain it. That's a job for next Monday as it's a bank holiday.

Deck done

Deck's finished. Too tired to blog.

Destruction, construction

These works at Port Talbot are coming down.

Swansea City's new stadium is going up.

Busy, busy boy

Redrafting the anatomy learning objectives.

Mixing more mortar.

I've got wood.

Triathlon?

Maybe I should do some more triathlons.

I had another puncture this morning: going fast down a hill and over some potholes I had an impact puncture. Explicable at least. So I ended up having to cycle hard to get to the station in time and then run down the platform to catch the train. Does that count as training bricks?

Another sunny day

Man, am I sick of mixing mortar and concrete. Ug. I've got to lay some mortar tonight to load blocks on to support this deck I'm building. And probably tomorrow night too. Arse.

More...

Too many photos for you?

Run, run, run

I went running along side the beach this afternoon for the first time in a couple of weeks. The sun had brought out a few more runners than usual and I was expecting a struggle with both fitness and speed. This cycling to work every day is paying off already it seems: I ran faster, further and more easily than I had done before so far this year. It felt like I had a tailwind, but nope. So that's a bonus and a motivator.

I don't think I'm losing any weight though. Maybe if I cycle all the way to Swansea...

My Day

That last photo was taken just with the light from the K700i cameraphone.

500!

Yesterday's post was my 500th entry!

The Rest of the Day

Cycling to the park

Hey, Dad, New Phone?

Hey, dad, you've got a new phone, and it's got a camera in it!

That's right, Jack, it's the new Sony Ericsson K700i, and on one side it's a phone:

and on the other it's a camera:

Crikey dad, does that mean you'll be taking even MORE photos of me? Have you even seen The Truman Show?

Friday Snooze

*snoooooore* It's Friday, it's warm, and it's time for a snooze.

On another note, I got my iBook back today! I sent it on Monday morning and got it back, repaired, by 11am this morning. Impressive! Was it difficult for me to go back to the iBook from the powerbook? Nah, the iBook's mine with all my stuff on it. I am tempted to buy a new G4 (faster) iBook with a bigger disk now though....

Ducklings?

I took a photo of some baby ducks I saw on the way to work for Jack. Not very good, is it?

Party Boy

Here's another pic. He's all dressed up for a party (from the other weekend). Big boy, eh?

Phoning

You all want more pictures of Jack, so here's a couple. He's very keen on using the phone:

BBC Interactive Body

This is superb:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/body/index_interactivebody.shtml

Learn basic anatomy! There's loads of good stuff in there.

Path 3

Cycling through parks on a day like this to work and back is great. You should all do it. Buy a bike and ditch the car for getting to work and back!

Path 2

Path 1

Histology at 70mph

I caught the slow train from Swansea today, to avoid the poxy new Intercity 5.30 which keeps trying to take my bike to London. It takes an extra 20 minutes, was nice and quiet, no hassle with the bike, and had plenty of time to get a fair bit of my online histology teaching jobby done.

In And Out

That was fun! When the traffic is blocked up, bumper to bumper, there's not much more fun than bombing through the city centre on your bike, diving into gaps, dodging pedestrians, laughing at the lazy fatties stuck in their cars in rush hour. It's most fun on a day like today when its warm, bright, and you're in shorts and t-shirt.

Yeah, I enjoyed cycling home today.

Ug, need coffee

It's too early. It's always too early on a Monday.

Yep, Dead.

My iBook's dead again. Back to Apple next week.

iBook Rises

My iBook seems to be alive again. Didn't we go through the same thing with the iPod? Hmm. I daren't do any serious work on it, but it seems OK so far today, using it just for web, email and IM access.

The box from UPS to send it back to Apple has arrived. I guess I'll use the iBook over the weekend and see how it does.

Swansea Beach

Some days cycling to work is actually quite nice.

Beach East

Pbook On The Train

It's a bit huge on the train. This is the 15" powerbook. How much huger is the 17'? And don't say, "2 inches".

Powerbook!

It's funny how things go. My iBook died yesterday, and we had a brand shiny new powerbook delivered today. We'd ordered it a while ago. Wierd, huh?

This'll keep me going (kinda) while my iBook is getting fixed.

Death of an iBook

Oh woe is me! I'm listening to sad songs on my iPod and grieving over a (mortally?) wounded iBook. The iPod knows how it feels, itself resurrected recently by Apple Support. (Actually the first iPod was buried and replaced by a new one, but don't tell the kids).

I swear that although I'm a heavy user I'm also a careful user. I have a heavily padded, top-of-the-range-nothings-too-good-for-my-kit Crumpler bike bag for transporting it all in. Am I unlucky?

I know that in this case the fault is likely to be with the logic board - a huge batch of iBooks were built with a dodgy component. The Apple phone support fella (who was superbly helpful and sympathetic) agreed that the symptoms matched this diagnosis. Apple Support will soon find out when it reaches them in its little cardboard coffin via UPS.

This will test my backups. I did a weekly backup to an external disk last week I think, and my current work is always backed up to my iPod, so I didn't lose this morning's stuff. I can still access iBook's hard drive on another Mac if I start it up in targeted disk mode, so I am in fact pretty safe, data-wise.

You never feel great when you find your backup system works, but you feel wretched when it doesn't.

Only Me

My bike was the only one on the train this morning. We're in the wave of a cold front and the whole country is getting soaked. How hardcore am I?

Truth is I would have to have planned to get up earlier to get the train from home to Cardiff Central Station...

Bachelor Pad

This is the sort of thing only allowed in a bachelor pad. Yep, that's where the bike lives. You see that thing in the bottom right corner? That's an ex-formula one tyre, now coffee table (from Ebay, of course).

Cheers, Gumby!

Try-a-Tri

This morning I had a 6am start to help organise the Cardiff Triathletes' Try-a-Tri novice sprint distance triathlon. My role (luckily because we had plenty of marshals) was to take photos for the website. I took a couple of hundred pictures, and lent out a camera to get another hundred photos from the start/finish area while I was out roving on my bike. (Thanks Gwen!)

Here's a pic of the winner, Peter Rowat. And he's a new Cardiff Tri member too, so I think he really is a triathlon novice? Click the pic for a larger image.

I put the results up on the website this afternoon and generated a photo gallery of some of the better, more representative photos of the event. Later this week I'll upload a massive gallery, trying to incorporate pictures of as many competitors as possible.

I have had to upgrade the hosting for the Tri website and for Jif (at HostOne.co.uk) as we were exceeding our limits and I have a lot of content to add. Luckily I get 2 months hosting free (I think - if I was quick enough) and a free domain name. I wonder what I'll do with my free domain name?

Just him and me.

Kim's off getting herself pampered all day so it was just Jack and me today. Brilliant. I can't speak for Jack but I had loads of fun! We did the usual stuff and then went cycling for an hour by the river when it stopped raining.

Is he showing his best side?