February 2005 Archives

On the train

Lunch in the pub

(Yesterday.)

Christmas Lights

Anyone know why the Christmas/New Year lights are still up at the Millenium Stadium?

Swansea Lab

Guess where I spent the afternoon. In the lab! We got tissue culture kit sorted, reagents together, and I began teaching some of the basics of asceptic technique with Gareth, an engineering PhD student I'm working with. It's taken a while to get here, but we've finally got started. I'm actually beginning lab work again. I need to advertise for a postdoctoral research associate to work for me too now.

Guessing the 4 digit code to access the laminar flow hood is a new one on me. Usually there's just an "on" button...

Ray of Hope

Cycling along the beach

Man, seeing that photo below reminds me how much I love cycling beside the beach. It's gorgeous at the moment. The tide's almost high when I'm cycling in or away from work, it's so dry that the sand is soft and summery, and there's almost no wind. The sea is calm, flat calm, and mirrors the clear blue sky. It had a green tinge to its shallows this morning. I almost didn't stop at the university, and carried on to the Mumbles.

Home!

Woohoo! I'm home, and it's only just gone 6pm! That's the first time in a while.

Dusk

Swansea bay after the sun has set.

Climbing

I went climbing today. I haven't been for some months, and I was reminded of what I'm missing. Contrary to popular belief, I haven't almost stopped climbing since Jack was born. Sure I initially did a little less, but I still trained and got outside, and Jack came with us occasionally. The truth of the matter was that most of my climbing friends slowly drifted into other sports, and finding a partner became difficult, and motivation waned. Ah well.

I used to have a much more balanced life. I used to work hard, and climb hard. Both to my limits. No more do I have this, and I need it back. Life isn't about work. Life is about all sorts of things, and you only get one go at it. Ultimately we all have only so much time (no - I'm not predicting anything, just stating the bleeding obvious).

Work sucks at the moment. Motivation has been sucked from me, and I'm ground down to the stage where I get stuff done because an inner sense knows I must. I've been seeing Jack for about an hour a day, which isn't enough for me or him. I spent Thursday working at home, and Kim still complained the next day that she hadn't seen anything of me. And climbing today reminded me of how my strength has waned too, with too much work and not enough sport. I'm a soft sack of potatoes, dragging itself up a vertical wall with no grace, afraid of committing to smears. How the hell did I let myself become this? I remember a time when hitting F7c was as important as handing in my thesis, and a damned sight more important than getting a paper published or delivering a lecture.

Moving to Swansea may give me more space to rebuild my training wall, and there's a lot more local bouldering, but I need to start making some changes now. I can see the near future holds a change that will reduce the amount of crap I get at work, and I'll have some more time (maybe).

I don't do New Year's resolutions. Fitness and health aren't like that. It's a 24/7 thing.

Hands

Webcam evidence

Police nab thief after computer camera catches him in the act.

"London: A burglar has been jailed after being filmed by the computer he was stealing.

Benjamin Park, 19, broke into the home of Duncan Grisby, a software developer who had installed a motion-activated security camera in his computer.

Park smashed a ground-floor window of Mr Grisby's house in Cambridge and stole the computer and other equipment worth £3719 ($8935).

The hidden webcam caught him in the act and a back-up system transferred the images to Mr Grisby's private website.

Detective Sergeant Al Page, who leads the Cambridge burglary squad, said: "It made our job really easy and it was a pleasure to see the expression on Park's face when we showed him the pictures as we interviewed him.""

See, it IS worth setting up your webcam as a security camera...

Blah blah blah

Been a busy boy this week.

Amongst other things, I've added a calendar to cardifftri.net for them to add races and training dates too. It seems to be working well, and it was the new Chairman's idea. He's got a bunch of other ideas too, so I'm going to be veeery busy, methinks.

The calendar's from Soft Complex. It does the job, and if you delve into the code it's pretty configurable. Sweet.

Photos

Just taking some photos of Jack...

Addendum to "Crap"

Actually, I think I realise why I'm annoyed with myself. I'm annoyed because I have too much to do, too much I want to do, and not enough time. I'm starting to have to drop things I said I'd do, lowest priority first, and miss deadlines. I don't even think it's my fault, because if I do one thing, I'm going to have to take something away from somewhere else (for example, if I stay any later at work, Jack won't get to see me at all). With the number of different tasks I'm committed too, it's also very difficult to allocate big enough chunks of time to them to get my mind in the correct mode to create something useful.

But I'm still annoyed. I hate this. Less blogging, more working.

Crap

I'm crap today. I've got a hundred things to do, but I can't motivate myself to do the larger, more important tasks. It's really bugging me. I'd much rather do the less important, smaller, more fun jobs, and I can't get myself to do what I have to do. This has mostly come about because I'd planned to do one thing today, and it fell through, so I'm having to change my plans.

Annoyed!

On The Phone

Jack talking to his Nana.

Slow down

I've just been chatting with Kim on iChat on the train on the way home from work. She told me that a little boy got hit by a car by the park at the end of our close. The park that Jack spends so much time in. The car was driving too fast, hit the boy, and didn't stop. A neighbour got a description of the car and the last few letters of the number plate. I feel sick. Worse than sick. Can you imagine how I feel? If you're a parent, then probably.

Speed is not an uncommon problem in Danescourt, even though it's a quiet estate on the outskirts of Cardiff. What the fuck is wrong with people? Slow down in residential areas. Is it worth the thrill of driving at 40mph instead of 29mph? Oooh - fucking exciting. Morons.

People complain about speed bumps and speed cameras. I want speed bumps and speed cameras on the road around Danescourt. If people aren't sensible enough to slow down when driving in a built up area around a playground and a primary school, then you need to be told. Forced. I knew this was going to happen. Kids are unpredictable - you need to watch out for them.

The boy sounds like he was "OK". Police and an ambulance took him to hospital with some injuries to his leg or legs. I have no details though. How bad are his injuries? There are consequences of severe trauma.

I'm so pissed off. 10 people a day die on the roads in Britain (random statistic, I know - I'll reference when I get a chance), most commonly due to speeding. I'll admit that I don't adhere strictly to the motorway speed limit, but I'm not excessive (usually no more than 80mph), and I certainly keep it slow in built up areas. We're all just trying to get from A to B, and then back to B again, alive.

Lecturing

Most of my teaching is small group, vaguely practical work done in 30 minute sessions and repeated to cover the entire group of students. This is usually pretty interactive, and you can guage how much the students a) already know and b) are taking in. Besides this, there's a lot of interactivity with body language, and response to what you say and do.

The remainder of my teaching is by more formal, didactic lecture. In a medium-sized lecture theatre, with the same students, even when not many of them are there and they form only a medium-sized group, almost all of that interactivity is lost. They do ask questions, often at the end, and they occasionally respond to something that's entertaining, but for most of the time they just sit there, blank faced. This is normal. But swapping to this type of teaching is tricky for the lecturer. Asking questions of the students is no use, because with the anonimity of the group someone else is always expected to answer. It's very difficult to tell if what you say is making an impression, if it's sinking in, or whether you might as well be speaking Latin.

Or maybe that's just embryology lectures...

Light

It's nice & light on the way to work again, at last. Spring is coming!

Home

Recovery

OK. So England lost to Wales today (11-8, what sort of a score is that?) I
can cope.

Deceased grandmother sued for piracy

"The American recording industry has filed a lawsuit against an 83-year-old grandmother, accusing her of illegally trading music over the Internet as "smittenedkitten.""

Full article on Spymac.

I'm glad such a huge organisation knows what it's doing.

Gower

When I eventually move, I won't be living on the Gower, but I won't be very far away. Most of it will be within cycling distance, say. Go see the "Enjoy Gower" website to see the area. The panoramic VRs are nice.

www.enjoygower.com

ILS at Swansea University

"The first Welsh Institute for Life Science (ILS) was launched recently at the University of Wales, Swansea. The ILS represents a massive vote of confidence in the Welsh Life Science sector by its main contributors - IBM, the Welsh Assembly Government and the University - with investment totalling in the region of £50 million."

Link.

The future of TV in the home

OK, so this is how it's going to be.

People got used to having TV's throughout the house, so any member of the family could watch what they wanted without argument. But this doesn't work any more. With digital TV through satellite and cable providers the number of channels available is huge (Freeview excepted). There is more to watch, and each member of a nuclear family is often going to want to watch something different. Plus, there are so many channels that keeping up with the stuff you're interested in is becoming more difficult (how many times have you sat down in front of a 100+ channel cable box and found absolutely nothing worth watching, and yet complain that you missed the latest episode of such and such?) Plus, the incoming signal has to be decoded, and companies love charging extra subscription costs for extra decoder boxes, making it extortionately expensive to have a TV in the living room, a TV in the bedroom, a TV in the kid's room, and a TV in the kitchen, even though the cost of TVs themselves is at an all-time low.

This is how it's going to be: a central TV input to a central decoder in the house will decode programmes people actually want to watch (and ask for) and store them to hard disk, as Tivo or Sky+. Sky are going to take the lead in this in the UK, but they're going to have to massively increase storage capacity (something already underway with the Sky+ 160GB boxes). Other TVs in the house will connect to this central decoder, and will just stream the video and audio from it wirelessly (Tivo in the US can already be incorporated into a home network for such a purpose with PCs). In fact, streaming to a PC or Mac instead of a TV will in some cases be cheaper and save space (think "kid's room"). You'll also be able to plug your portable video device into the central decoder and pull out the programmes you want to watch when commuting to work or sitting on the bog (Sky are expected to release their own personal video player which is intended to connect to new Sky+ boxes by USB2).

So the huge amount of content available is now filtered to what we want and we won't ever miss the latest episode of The Sopranos. I really think PVR providers should follow Tivo's lead on this with regard to predictive recording. By the viewer telling the box what programmes they do or do not like, the box can guess other programmes that the viewer may want to watch but hasn't heard of, and record them pre-emptively.

The distribution system is solved, with no extra decoder subscriptions. Existing TVs would need an extra piece of hardware, re-usable when you upgrade the TV, and PCs could likely grab the video in software. With wireless networking component costs dropping all the time, how expensive need it be? Most people would find this preferable to either paying a monthly service charge or buying a video sender device (which means the main TV and the remote TV have to watch the same channel).

I don't think any of these ideas are particularly from my mind, more just a group of technologies that could come together to end one of my pet hates. Fingers crossed, eh?

Dario Mitidieri

I just tripped over the website and portfolio of Dario Mitidieri while hunting around for a picture of the Venus de Milo (don't ask, and no, he hasn't got any). He does have an amazing portfolio though. Go and spend some time there. Now that's photography.

Better

Yes, I'm feeling much better thanks. I'm working at home for a couple of days to take it easy though. I cycled into work on Monday and was exhausted by the time I got home. My appetite is back with a vengeance. I can't stop eating.

Working at home is nice. I pretty much finished off a lecture yesterday, saw a lot of Jack, didn't have to get up at 7am and cycle in the dark to catch a train, and was able to work well past 6pm without getting interrupted by the usual effort of travelling home. I spent almost the whole afternoon listening to my hifi while writing (Jack and Kim were out). I should do this more often. I'm back in the office tomorrow.

Stairs

Placecard

I just bashed out this graphic as a placecard for a website I'm developing. Actually, there are two (red and blue, although that's not the only difference) randomly thrown up by a little PHP script. Comments?