Meetings

I am sat in a series of very slow, official, dull meetings. It's too warm, there is too much paperwork, and it's hard to maintain focus (especially if you're blogging from your PDA). All I can think about is how much I'm looking forward to going for a swim after all this. Warm up, 4x 400m in 8 mins each, warm down.

Then I get to cycle home in the rain.

Energy and motivation for work is really starting to dip now. I must take some time off. Maybe next week.

Lotto Win

Woohoo! Actually only a tenner, but it's still nice.

Sod's Law Revealed

I told you Sod's Law was real - a descriptive formula for the law has been calculated, and by a Cardiff University lecturer no less. Mathematically it is expressed as:

1/8Ti x I 3/8 + O + Sb
P + M

with:

• Task Importance (Ti)

• Inconvenience, and financial and emotional cost of task not going to plan (I)

• Optimism - the tendency to think everything will work out fine (O)

• Background Personal Stress Levels (Sb)

• Extent of Planning (P)

• Memory - especially for things that worked out well

I'm not entirely sure how I'll be using this on a day to day basis, but it's a good start to changing some of the variables and avoiding the effects of Sod's law.

Link to BBC article.

Gadget Geek Kim

Kim says she wants to buy a Playstation 3 when they come out. Honest, this was not my idea. She really does want a game console. I swear I didn't put her up to it. She loves playing the musical genre of games, like Songstar (the karaoke game) and Buzz (the music quiz game). Jack loved Guitar Hero (a guitar playing game) when he tried it at the weekend with Ele, Lee & Nick, and I reckon he'd really enjoy some of the dance mat games. I'll bet there are some drumming games out there somewhere too.

Kim also watched Doom last night, the film of the game. She knows a little of the game(s), but not much. She thought it was "a very good film" right up until the fight at the end, which she thought was silly. I never would have guessed that she would have enjoyed it. I didn't really expect to enjoy it myself. Maybe she'll be playing Battlefield 2 soon...

So I'm adding a Playstation 3 to my list, probably to buy in Spring next year. Maybe.

Blue C on BBC

Swansea University and the School of Medicine's IBM Blue C supercomputer is noted on the BBC's news website. We're predicting UK avian flu scenarios.

Link.

The Triathlon Salmon

I'm reading an article on xtri.com about cortisol, stress, training and the salmon. It's nicely relevant to www.dontbeasalmon.net (this website) and is similar to comments I've made in the past, but this time is linked in with problems of overtraining (the salmon "under-rests" for weeks in its attempt to reach its spawning grounds and as a result of continued high stress levels then dies).

"Over the long term, elevated cortisol levels can be as detrimental to overall health as elevated cholesterol is for heart disease or excessive blood sugar is for diabetes. Aside from that, elevated cortisol levels make you fat, destroy your muscles and bones, kill your sex drive, shrink your brain, squelch your immune system, and generally make you feel terrible. So what to do?"

"Remember, it’s OK to eat the salmon, and it’s even OK to save the salmon – but just do whatever you can not to be the salmon." I feel I've heard that before somewhere...

Link.

TDF Outage

Noooo! I'm in Swindon, trying to watch the deciding stage of this year's Tour de France, but we're under a huge thunderstorm & the satellite signal has been lost.

Rivers in the street, hail of the size to put in your drink, & lightning almost in the garden. All because my sister planned a barbecue.

Specs

I picked up my glasses today. Only a minor correction (honest), but computer screens & other reading material instantly feel so much easier to read. Now I can feel the strain in my eyes without glasses. I'm back to maximum geek power!

Mad Blogs

I love the internet:

thegalacticpost.blogspot.com

Landis

Uh, did I say "out of contention"? OK, not if you attack on the first hill with over 120km to go, drop riders in the top 10 with bemused looks on their faces and blast your way over all the mountains on your own to both win the stage and come back to within 45 seconds of the yellow jersey.

Time trial on Saturday. OMG it's going to be ace!

Painted Walls

It finally seems as though the paint problem has been solved by sealing the surfaces and repainting. This time around we're finally getting some colour on the walls. Jack has a blue wall and a red wall!

TDF

The Tour de France is really starting to get going at last, even if it is in the last week. Flandis (the yellow jersey) went bang in the hills, losing lots of time. That put him out of contention so the race is wide open again - who can win it? It's the last day in the alps today, so today plus the 57km time trial on Saturday should decide it. Fantastic.

Shady Cycle

We're having a really hot week. It has been above 30C every day so far, which is very warm for South Wales. I'm very glad of the sea breeze and of this very shady and cool cycle route to work and back.

Sky+ Mobile

I set up my Sky+ mobile recording options over the weekend, and downloaded the Java app to my phone. Wow! This is superb! Something useful for my expensive 3G data tariff at last (now that I've stopped commuting). This app is pin sharp, quick, and very useful. I don't actually know if it works yet, so I've sent a record request to my Sky+ box at home to test it.

Remote recording via the internet is next, and that should be even better. It's difficult to set up your week's TV recording on the Sky+ box if other people are using it. Programming it from the web will make searching for programmes easier too.

Random Recent Photos

You've got to love fresh tarmac.

Year round sandcastle building.

Back on the bike. I don't remember the last time I was in lycra.

Summer hats.

Footy Photos

I was asked to take some photos of a friendly work kickabout. Some of those photos are up on the Photos page.

Spotter 3

Today is the final anatomy exam of the year, and the last piece of the human structure module for most of our medicine students. Many of them were looking far more nervous than I've seen before. We're examining the anatomy of the head and neck, which can get very detailed and intricate but is a shorter term (and in theory less information) than the other two. On the one hand they may be worried about the minutiae, but on the other they should now know the style and level of difficulty of this type of exam.

Time will tell. I should get them marked within the next couple of days, but then they need to be second marked and all the marks discussed and compiled.

Summer?

Time to put the mudguards back on, I think.

Eye, eye

My eyesight seems to have been getting worse recently. I've caught myself a few times closing one eye when reading dark text on a white background on a computer. Over the last few days the (very big) text on the Sky+ menus has confused my eyes, and again I've had to close an eye and look away. Reading a small manual for a new heart rate monitor today has the same effect.

From a photographer's point of view, I'd say that each eye had a different "white balance". My left eye has a cooler, more blue view, than my right eye that has a warmer, more red image. Of course my brain actually performs the "white balance" perception alterations so I only see this difference if I close one eye and then the other. An optician friend of mine did explain this to me once; the light to my weaker eye is shifted towards the red end of the light spectrum, but I can't remember why. I think I'll make an official visit to see her next week.

This is interesting timing: we've just finished the term that teaches the anatomy of the eye.

Boredom

For some reason today I am experiencing absolute crushing boredom. I have no idea why. I'm holding an exam next week, and I've been very busy with the term so far, so maybe it's just the lull before the storm.

I can't even go out and run or ride it off because I did that yesterday and I need to recover. Aargh!

Web perils advise switch to Macs

Funnily enough, as I've been complaining about scan, scan, scanning on PCs Sophos have commented that Macs are safer, and are likely to remain so for some time.

BBC News article

New Shoes

I've been getting bored again recently. I've had to put an awful lot of hours into my job for the last couple of months to ensure that the students will be as prepared as possible for an upcoming exam, and because I'm organising two modules at once. Consequently I've had neither time nor appetite for my usual sport (fishing) as I'd rather be spending time with Kim and Jack in the few hours when I'm not working. I think I'm also missing some of those fun brain chemicals now that summer is here and I'm not pushing my body to do some grueling task that it hasn't done before.

The problems that stopped me running seem to be a little less of a problem now, after using some stretching exercises prescribed to me by a friend (probably tight tibialis posterior and flexor hallucis longus muscles if you must know). So maybe it's time to get running again. I've run for most of my life and I enjoy running. I run even when I'm focussed on completely unrelated sports, and I used to run to work and back (4 miles each way) almost every day when I was uber-fit in Cardiff. I just like to go running. I run all year round, usually for no more reason that that it feels good. There are the added benefits of staying thin and fit, which I also get from cycling to work and back.

I've set up an online account with the Polar Personal Trainer for fun, and also because I'm a biological scientist and I love monitoring how my body changes in response to exercise. I'll probably get a new heart rate monitor so I can get geeky and make graphs, but there's not a lot of software available to do it quite how I want to. This online solution lets me access my training logs from anywhere. I've been looking to see how I might publish training data as part of my blog, but nobody wants to convert data from heart rate monitors into a useable standardised format (like CSV or XML), so that might prove difficult.

So time for new running shoes, time to persevere with the stretches, time to hit the road, and to discover my new surroundings in Swansea. Maybe I should lengthen my cycle route home once in a while too...

HRH Visit

Pretty much my only view of the Royal visit today: Swansea University webcam from home.

Coke Zero

I have a bit of a coke problem. In that I often drink too much of it, and it contains far too much sugar. There seems to be a new branding thing here, but I'm not sure how this differs to Diet Coke. It doesn't taste too nutrasweety (or maybe that's just because I drank it cold) and it's nice and caffeiney.

Pre-Royal Visit

The University is full of police searching the grounds today, before tomorrow's Royal Visit. We had a fire alarm this morning so the Fire Brigade turned up too. Almost a full suite of emergency services.

Tour 06

OK, so the football has finished (for England). Did you *really* think we'd make it all the way this year?

Anyway, England left the tournament just in time for the start of the Tour de France. Get your live info updates from Eurosport, a live online video feed from rtl.lu (if you're very lucky), your Google map fly throughs from the CSC team's website and pick any of the thousands of blogs to keep yourself up to date (although Google's top hit is tdfblog.com, which isn't bad).

Vive le Tour!

Sun, beer and jenga

A sunny weekend, spent with good friends in Cardiff. Excellent.