Flock!!

Flock to Flock! Or so I hear. If you fancy yourself as a techie savvy young scamp, have a squiz at this crazy wee beasty... http://www.flock.com/

Ooooh.

I haven't written anything for ages, but that's ok as no-one really reads this anyway! On the offchance that anyone might pass this way, I'll take this occasion to let you know what I'm up to now.

You may already know that I've polished off two degrees already - one at the University of Warwick in the UK and another at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. Feeling the first for more knowledge (!) I started applying for Ph.D. places. Seeing as I live in Cambridge, it'd be very convenient for me to go to the university here and pleasingly they seem to think so too.

I'm now doing a Ph.D. in bioinformatics in the department of biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. It's a three year thing so I'll be here for a bit. I hope to be able to lots of computery - mathsy - biologyey type stuff and so far it seems to be going quite well.

Catching Up

It must be about 6 months since I moved back to the UK from Ireland and I still feel like I'm catching up. For example the news - I've always kept on top of current affairs and put stuff I don't know down to forgetting to read the paper or something. Recently I've noticed that there are some stories that are completely unfamiliar to me, stories that I think I really ought to have known about. I didn't know that cannabis had been declassified, or that Iain Duncan Smith had left the Conservative leadership (in an interesting fashion).

I've now worked out what's going on. When I moved to Ireland I felt I was still in touch with affairs as I still read the papers - but obviously the Irish papers. I had the feeling that I knew what was going on outside Ireland, but obviously I didn't.

Curiously, I feel like I know what's going on outside the UK at the moment (I still read all the papers). I'm now rethinking that... I don't believe I can really understand what's going on outside the UK when I only read UK papers.

I hate painters

I hate painters and their stupid inane whistling. Or, in particular one stupid painter who's in my house at the moment whistling some tuneless dreary crap. He's not even trying to whistle a tune in particular, just a long series of gasps that sound like a dying cat's sphincter muscle releasing wind. And I make him nice hot cups of tea regularly... Argh! it's driving me crazy. Hang on, if I put some music on I can't hear him anymore. Sweet.

Mmmm Jammmmm

It looks like I've found myself a new job at last! It's just a little temporary one to keep me going until something bigger comes along, but I'm chuffed. Last year before I went off to TCD I spent 4 months in a jam factory, which is were I'm heading back to. It's good, honest work and I like the way it makes me feel as if I've earned every penny! Maybe my opinion will change after I've had to do it for a few weeks, but hey, that's life. I start on Monday so fingers crossed...

Automatic Hand Dryers

It's not to hard to spot the difference, is it? One of the pictured hand dryers drys your hands when they are wet, the other one doesn't. Why? Why bother with the one that doesn't work? If I were the person who designed that dryer I would be very depressed.

Specification: Design a machine to dry wet hands.
Result: Some piece of metal crap that exhausts a weak excuse for a mouse fart in no particular direction, excepting the direction where you have to hold your hand to activate it.

Stupid machines.

Stupid Car Park

My local car park in Cambridge is undergoing refurbishment, which includes an overhaul of the ticketing/charge system. Presumably lots of money is being spent as this is a huge project for little Cambridge because of this, one might have hoped that common sense would have been consulted. My gripe? The irritating accent the ticket issuing machine seems to have developed. Cambridge is a city rich with heritage, the last thing we need is a cheery machine which greets us with an American accent everytime we purchase our tickets. I have nothing against modern technology nor Americans, but couldn't someone have fixed this before we'd spent our taxes installing something which will only irritate? The parking charges are bad enough by themselves.

Things do get a bit better when we consider the Park and Ride scheme. There are several car parks dotted around the outskirts of Cambridge and each car park is served by a regular stream of busses to the city centre. The parking is free and the busses are cheap. There is always parking available and the busses generally have their own bus lanes to get through the traffic at rush hour. I'm rambling a bit now, but the Park and Ride scheme is great.

Rosie's Birthday

I've just had a wonderful weekend in London celebrating Rosie O'Donovan's (no relation) 23 birthday. Woo I'm tired now though... After a delicious pasta dinner cooked by the girls, we went to the Hope and Anchor, a trendy indie pub which left me feeling a bit like a back water yokal - too cool for this kitten. Then off the the Garage... There was a bit of a slow start as the crowd from the previous gig dispersed, leaving some interesting characters behind in the club. I believe the night was called 'International hi-fi' and was possibly one of the best indie nights that I've been to in a long long time. We were all pretty pooped when it was all over, we hadn't had a break from dancing the whole night as the tunes just kept coming and coming... They finished with New Orders Temptation (let me know if that's not right - I can't really remember, I's a bit pissed by then) which was absolutely perfect! Email me at the usual address if you want me to send you all the photos. There are 28 mb of them though so beware...

Wow Wi-Fi!

Much against all my expectations, I've managed to get my Belkin 802.11g 7010 wireless PCMCIA card to work along with Fedora Core 3! I'm such a happy bunny! All thanks are due to the ndiswrapper project at sourceforge. What a great piece of kit that wrapper is, I could use my MS Windows drivers through the wrapper to make the modules for my kernel. Brilliant! Now I'm trying to work out why I ever installed windows? This is how Linux/Unix should work...
PS It's also really great as now I don't have to buy my driver from Linuxant! I will make a little donation to the guys at ndiswrapper though...

EU Software Patents

Ok, I'm a bit late on this one, but as it's a subject close to my heart I aught to say something. And I think that has to be 'Thankyou Poland'. Finally some people with power have the courage to talk sense. Despite endless petitioning, governments in more 'developed' countries persistently treated this issue as a unimportant side-line. No doubt they were trying to avoid drawing attention to it's obviously corrupt origins and they're own private gain (Ha to Ireland's presidency). If you're of the same opinion as me, why not sign the "Thank you, Poland!" letter?

Delirium Cordia

I've just bought the new Fantomas album Delirium Cordia from Play. Play were actually quite good, they were sort of cheap and don't charge for postage. Unfortunately Play don't have an exhaustive catalogue, but some of my friends work there, as if that should make a difference. The cd arrived in two days which was also nice, I could get used to this...
I'm not sure I would be entirely accurate if I were to describe the one 75-minute song on the album as music. It's more noise, though at times pleasant, other times angry, depressing and seemingly potent. I think I quite like it, although this may be because no-one I know will also like it (Indie snob that I am). The casing is different enough to make it worthwhile too. If I had payed to download this album I believe I might have felt cheated, but actually having something tenable to hold makes it worth the 'real online' purchase.

Dum dum d-dum Countdown!

My good friend James Iles is due to appear on the infamous channel 4 show countdown on wednesday the 12th of January, 2005. I think we'll probably have a big Countdown party sometime this weekend... Can you imagine the joy?

Allison...

For those of you not in the 'bridge I'm letting you know that Allison and I are no longer Dallison. Despite our best efforts the Austin, TX - Cambridge, UK gap has proved to be too big, even for us. Anyone who knows me will understand that I'm pretty devastated.

A new year arrives....

This is a not really a nice first post - I'm afraid I didn't really want the old year to end. I've greeted the new year through the eyes of a dumped man and it's not looking too rosy :-(
I'm sure though (as I've been reassured by my ex-girlf) things'll start looking up soon. I'll let you know when they do...