In the (British) summertime

In a fairly pointless post I just thought I'd bid farewell to Greenwich Mean Time and welcome in the glorious British Summer Time. If only it didn't mean that we lose an hour that can't be clawed back for another six months. If I hadn't been travelling so much in the last couple of weeks the change in time might ever-so-slightly confuse me, but as it is I think I'll take it in my stride. Now, to change all my clocks...

Slumberland

Yesterday/today/last night/this morning/whenever(!) I flew back from the US after my whirlwind tour of two different meetings. As ever it was lovely seeing Britain hove into view from the plane window, causing me to sing myself a slightly altered version of Gerry and the Pacemaker's Ferry cross the Mersey, substituting "Ferry" for "plane" and "Mersey" for "Atlantic" obviously. An amazing thing happened on this flight. I actually managed to get some sleep! It wasn't the longest of snoozes, for sure, but it was probably a good two or so hours of fairly uninterrupted kip. How did I achieve this when previous attempts at airborne sonambulence have failed? Well I'm not quite sure, as I've been just as sleepy on previous flights, but it mainly involved contorting myself into every possible position that can be achieved in an airline window seat until I settled into the closest thing to comfort that the location would allow, and covering my head in a blanket - much like you might cover a bird cage with a blanket to get a bird to sleep.

Good as it was to get some sleep on the plane, I still had to have a few hours nap when I got home.

Man who?

So it looks like we'll be playing Man Utd in the FA Cup semi-final. Bring 'em on!

TV times

To update you on my present location I did finally arrive in Baton Rouge for my meeting on Saturday evening, after having no further flight complications. This meant I only missed a day despite all my travel problems!

There's been one slight advantage to being in the US in that I got to watch BSG live. I got to see it a full, probably, 16 or so hours before I'd have seen it, after downloading, in the UK. That said, I had to put up with the endless bloody adverts - I far prefer watching the torrent, in which people have kindly edited these annoyances out. With last night's episode being the penultimate one of the season it's getting pretty good again and ramping up the action. Can I wait till next week for the final episode? - I just don't know if I can, I'm that excited! The problem with the season ending is that it will be the first time I've had to wait all those months before getting a new series to watch. I think I'll have to find another show to fill the time.

Tell me WHY I don't like airports...

The reason is that they are the work of Satan himself. They are hellish places when you just have to spend the merest of timespans in them, but when you have to spend entire days, or more, of you precious life in them they become all the more unbearable and maddening. This rant is courtesy of a rather large amount of icey weather in the North East of America, and the general astounding lack of preparedness by the staff of Continental Airlines (as may have been picked up from my last post - BTW I'm now approaching 36 hours of sleep deprivation). The reason these things have effected me is that I had to leave the gorgeousness of the Moriond meeting in La Thuile to attend the rather less attractive prospect of the LSC (my collaboration) meeting in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. So let me take you back two days...

A slightly hungover me leaves the Moriond to travel the much trod road to Geneva. This all goes well (apart from having a large - yet reclaimable - amount of money extracted from my wallet by a greedy coachman). After about 40 mins semi-random wandering I find my hostelry, where I will rest before my early flight the next morning. I partake in victuals at a local eatery, dispatch myself to a pubbe to quaff ale and watch borish sporting endeavours, and then drink with a local comely wench - sorry Helen ;) - forgive my olde worlde tone in the last sentences for I have mostly been reading a lot of Quicksilver in the last day, which is set, for a large part, in 17^th Century England.

This flight was directly from Geneva to Newark Airport, for which I arose at the ungodly hour 5.30 am (cue the start of my sleep deprivation). The flight was as pleasant as any long hall trip can be, but the pilot said there might be some light snow in New York. No-one's too worried as there was no word of delays. We get to Newark and it's fairly snow laden all around, with snowplows whizzing around the tarmac a breakneck speed to clear the snowy slush, but the planes seem to be moving ok. Little did we realise that this movement was a rouse. The planes are leaving gates and new ones are arriving, but barely any are actually taking off. Various people are sitting on their planes on the runways for several hours before being recalled. This seems an obvious point for the local airport staff to start preparing people for the fact that their flights are rather unlikely to take off, and maybe diverting some of the incoming flights to more hospitable airports. However this isn't what happens. They just keep putting back and back the departure times of all the aircraft, with more and more people arriving all the time. When the staff do eventually bow to the inevitable there are thousands of people with cancelled connections all wanting the same thing and with very few points of call to get it. The connections desks develop huge queues, which move at a snails pace and snake around with many hours waiting time. No-one really knows if any flights will be able to take of the next day either, so people just have to hope that a connection can be found. Continental, who were the only people I dealt with, as they control pretty all Terminal C of Newark, where I had landed, gave out a phone number to ring to get a connecting flight, but this was inundated by half the North East of America, so became practically useless - which I found out after many failed attempts at getting through, including a brain sapping, 2 hour 10 min stint, which almost LEFt mE InnSAyNE! I hadn't done the clever thing if just brazening out one of the check in queues from the start (which would have been at least a six hour wait), but had assumed things the numbers of people would dwindle as the night progressed - the only dwindling of people was from the check in staff though, slowing progress even further. This meant that, after a few aborted attempts to sleep in variuos parts of the terminal building, I had to try to rejoin a queue in the morning check in, which would start at 4am we were assured. At 4.40am the check in staff finally arrived. This time I stuck out the line (to use an Americanism), before being told that I wouldn't be able to get a flight to my destination until Monday. The attendant I had spoken to didn't seem to have tried particularly hard to find alternative routes, but I accepted things (in most situations a couple of free days in New York would have been great, but my mood was rather strained at this point) and said to just book me the earliest flight back to Glasgow - I just wanted to go home and sleep - but again this wouldn't be until Monday evening. I walked off to collect my baggage, which had spent the night all comfy in the hold of its plane, feeling distinctly emotionally drained. There was so much stress and high tension in the air from the mass of pissed off and tired people that it just got into you.

Now I don't blame (most of) the check in staff for the situation, or the weather for that matter. What I blame is just piss poor management and planning. Snow and cold weather aren't exactly uncommon phenomena in the northerly parts of America. Indeed it's pretty much expected during the winter, so these situations must occur at least yearly. However there seemed to be no contingency for it at all, with people having a very poor idea of what should have been done and when. The fact that planes weren't going to be flying should, and could, have been spotted earlier. This would have allowed people to arrange their connecting flights as they arrived, which would have been in a more orderly manner with a far smaller flow of people to deal with. Flights that could have been diverted, should have been, so that so many people wouldn't have been stuck in the one place. The phone system should have been more helpful, and at least given an updated message of how long it would be for a call to be answered. I just don't know whether any of this will be done, and it's certainly taken the sheen off what before was one of my least hated airports.

However my luck did change. When attempting to arrange for Continental to at least put me up in a hotel for the next couple nights I came across a rather more competent and professional set of check staff, the very people who I should have gone to in the first place. In their room, which was tucked away at the far end of the main terminal, past the luggage carousels, the atmosphere was a lot calmer. This eased me and when I got to the desk I asked whether a more concerted attempt could be made to get me to Baton Rouge. After a short while it was found that this was indeed possible, and all that had to happen was that I went via Memphis, rather than the original route via Houston. So now after about 26 hours in Newark I'm nearing my flight time. I've still not slept, so no doubt soon my normal sleep deprived experience or audio hallucination's is just around the corner, but hopefully I'm actually on my way somewhere. In fact at this point I don't care where, I just want to be moving and get out of this BLOODY AIRPORT!!!

From the sublime to the ridiculous

I'll regale you with the full story when I'm more compos mentis, but I'm currently sitting on the floor of the concourse of Newark Liberty International Airport feeling shagged as fucker after having spent a night queuing, attempting to sleep on the floor, being on hold on a telephone for over two hours, and then queuing some more this morning. It's not been a fun trip out to the US so far. I can only hope things improve and I reach my destination this evening. I don't hold out great hope, but things could take a turn for the better. The events that have left me semi-stranded have completely buggered scri_minus's travel plans though, although right now I'd far prefer to be at home. Thanks a bunch Continental! (oh, and the weather in the North-East of America.)

Connected

This post is brought to you courtesy of the free wireless of a McDonalds in Chamonix (yes I'm in France now) as I sit outside it in the sun. I just paid the extortionate sum of 140 euros (modern keyboards need a euros key) to get a taxi here from La Thuile, and in half an hour I get a bus to Geneva. But whilst waiting I thought I'd take the opportunity to download a bit of the last Battlestar Galactica episode.

That is all...

Missing all the fun

The only disappointment about being at this meeting (well other than the fact that I have to leave it today and head to a proper meeting where there aren't any ski breaks) is that I missed seeing Daniel Kitson last night at the Glasgow Comedy Festival. I organised for a load of people to go to the gig before I realised I was going to be away. From a very preliminary report I hear that it was amazing, so I can only hope that he'll be in Edinburgh during the summer and I can get to see the show. Whilst not watching Daniel Kitson I was mainly dancing like a man possessed to Eurodisco classics in a videodiscopub (yes that's what it was called) and drinking copious amounts of Leffe (thanks Christian!). I now don't feel to hot.

Hard at work

This conference lark is grueling stuff I can tell you! Here at the Moriond meeting we start at 8.30am in the morning and things don't finish until 8.00pm at night. So what have I been doing during this taxing schedule? Well snowboarding mostly, as there's a specific skiing related break in the conference for 4-5 hours every day. This has provided ample time for me to brush up on my snowboard skills and look pretty damn cool in my gear (I went shopping at the weekend to buy some salopettes, i.e. waterproof skiing trousers, and some ski gloves, and despite the salopettes being half price they still cost £50!) My fellow conference attendees, Christian and Alastair, have also been improving their skiing. My ability has improved quite a lot and I can, most of the time, go back and forth from either edge of the board at will. I've spent considerably less time on my arse, and am far less bruised and battered, than my first time. Here in La Thuile there are no green/beginners runs, although there are several pretty easy blue runs. These are all rather nice to go down, and they aren't too busy so there's plenty of space to move. However, I'm not limited to the blue runs and have attempted, along with Christian and Alastair, a couple of red runs. Let me tell you these can be steep and pretty scary at points. We may not have been the most graceful looking people descending down the slopes, but we survived which is the most important thing. I can't believe I originally didn't want to come to this conference.

On an actual work note I did have to give a presentation which seemed to go well. I also got quite an interesting comment, well worth following up, from a certain Jim Faller (who some people know quite well).

Oh, and did I mention that the weather has been amazing!

Telephone exchange

At the weekend I finally did something I've been meaning to do for sometime. It really needed doing as it had been causing me immense amounts of frustration and occasional bouts of rage. I got rid of my Sony Ericsson piece of crap - with its shitty, unresponsive, or sometimes just plain random, joystick. I've traded it in for a much sleeker phone - the Nokia 6300. This phone is rather nice with attractive metal looks and an ultra thin (without being too small) body. It's got a very decent screen and all the main features you expect from a modern phone i.e. digital camera, radio, music player, etc. I have noticed, however, how similar everything on it is to the general Sony Ericsson layout. I assume that Nokia decided that the easiest thing to do was copy all the features that the Ericsson had, but remove a lot of the annoyances - maybe they were trying to tempt back people who'd previously moved over from Nokia (which used to be the dominant phone a few years back) to an Ericsson. I know this has made the switch easier for me.

Wembley, here we come (almost)!

As I was travelling to Italy I missed Watford's FA Cup quarter final tie against Plymouth Argyle, but on checking the results via the internet today I'm very happy to see we progressed. It seems, from the reports, that our success had a lot to do with our excellent keeper, Ben Foster, being on top form. In the semi-final we face the winner of the replay between Manchester United and Middlesbrough - this could see Foster up against the team who actually own him (Man U). We're only one step away from the final at Wembley now, let's hope we can do it. I think the FA Cup would be at least some consolation for the fact that we're going to be relegated.

Meet me in the mountains

After a couple of weeks of rushing around and giving talks in Brighton and Nottingham I've gone slightly more exotic and am in La Thuile in Italy. I'm here for the Moriond meeting, which is a scientific meeting come ski trip - the skiing is a major part of the meeting I'm told. In fact they have a four hour break in the middle of the days schedule for hitting the slopes. For this reason this will be a short post as I've got to get lunch before grabbing my snowboard and getting on the piste.

Steal from the rich...

...and present to the poor.

Today I'm in Nottingham, home of Robin Hood and rampant gun crime, to give a talk to the Astronomy group at the University of Nottingham. It's been a fairly busy day of getting up early and then spending most of the time travelling and writing the talk I'm to give, but the event is now just minutes away. Bring on the seminar!

In the land of the one screened computer...

...the two screened computer is king.

I am now basking in the glow of two computer screens - ok, I'm only basking in the glow of one as the other ones not been set up properly yet, but I still have the extra screen on my office desk. I can now view two desktops at once, oh yes! I can code and check the web at the same time! It's going to open up virtually limitless prospects for looking at more than one thing at once! Does it mean I'll be twice as propductive though? Probably not.

Celebrity zoo

It seems like it's impossible to walk around London and not bump into celebrities these days! Well, maybe that's an exaggeration - ok, it's definitely an exaggeration, but yesterday I did indeed walk passed a famous person on Oxford Street. Who was this megastar that I casually strolled passed without being overcome by starstruck awe? Well let's look at the clues. After being a Cambridge footlight he initially rose to prominence when him and his comedy partner won the 2001 Perrier Comedy award. Since then he has gone on to co-write and star in a string of cult Channel 4 comedies. Above his mantel piece he has a copy of The Diary of Anne Frank, who lives in a house like... ok, that's enough.

Those in the know will have guessed that it was none other than star of Darkplace, The IT Crowd and Man to Man, Richard Ayoade. The encounter went like this: When he was approaching me I was like "Hey, that looks like Richard Ayoade, star of Darkplace among other things", and then he got closer (close enough even that if I'd reached out my hand I could have touched him) and I was all "Hey, that is Richard Ayoade, star of Darkplace!", and then he went passed me and I was totally "Hey, you know who that was who just like walked passed me on Oxford Street, it was Richard Ayoade, star of Darkplace." The rest of London, however, went on as if nothing had happened! They just don't know how good they've got it, what with vaguely famous people walking on the very same streets that you or I can tread.

Get your motor running

Last weekend was Veitchfest (for those not quite in the know, Veitchfest translates as a trip to visit, and warm the flat of, our friend [and band-mate] John in his new home in the Midlands). This involved a jaunt down to Birmingham - unfortunately it wasn't a jaunt in the Alfred Bester sense - but required me to drive for several hours across vast swathes of the UK. I can't recount what happened at Veitchfest (what happen's at Veitchfest stays at Veitchfest), but I'll tell part of the story.

I was the designated driver for the trip, being the only person who could drive and of an age for getting insured by a hire car company. We hired an MPV, in the form of a Kia Sedona ("heavenly luxury and a down-to-earth price"), which provided ample space for our group. I'd asked for an automatic transmission car, being as the last time I'd driven a manual was in my driving test over three and a half years previously. It wasn't to be though and I got a manual car. I thought it would be pretty hard to get to learn the car, but it proved not too bad - mainly because it was a diesel which are far harder to stall than petrol cars. I felt quite at home to start with and was driving around Glasgow quite confidently. The next thing to do was go on the motorway - I'd never been on the motorway before. The motorway is in fact a piece of piss to negotiate. It's three lanes all going in the same direction! That wasn't my main problem. On going onto the motorway I got into 5^th gear, but the car was making a fairly high pitched noise, the rev counter was in the red and the speed wouldn't go over 70 mph. I found this quite odd, but just assumed that diesel's were a bit weird and the car had a speed limiter on it. After a while of driving, and with the music on, I forgot about these problems. It wasn't until after a break in a service station, and re-entering the motorway that I realised that the car would go above 70mph and didn't have to make a whiny sound. We realised that prior to the stop I'd been in 3^rd gear the whole time! I don't think the engine/gear box/clutch will have particularly liked it, but we made it the rest of the way to Birmingham and back in the car, so it can't have done too much damage.

The rest of the car trip was fairly uneventful although I did manage some fairly close shaves with cars, bollards, walls, multi-storey cars parks, etc.

Indestructible

You may have heard about the Virgin train derailment that happened on Friday evening. It was a London to Glasgow train that came off the track in Cumbria whilst travelling at about 90 mph. What you probably haven't heard, as it's not really the main news story, was that Britain's top gravitational wave scientist (my boss, Prof. Jim Hough) was aboard the train. Luckily he was one of the few people that emerged completely unscathed. Jim isn't the first eminent UK gravitational wave expert to emerge from a major transportation disaster, as a few years back the University of Birmingham's Prof. Mike Cruise survived an bus crash in Austria. Hopefully these two aren't setting some sort of precedent for being involved in transport accidents.

A little to the right

Read this recent post from Cosmic Variance. It's about a new rival to wikipedia, called conservapedia, that doesn't hold too much hat with all the woolly liberal views that wikipedia expounds. By God, they aim to set things right and they'll do it by ridding entries of the scourge of liberal non-American spelling (see conservapedia commandment number 5) - non-American spelling leads to homosexuality, rape, and cruelty to cats, or something like that! Some of the entries detailed in Sean's CV post and comments sections are obvious piss takes and have been removed, however the posts on Atheism, Einstein and "Anything Goes" are still as stated - I think they might be serious! I know that wikipedia can sometimes have some dubious statements and citations for articles (which you're free to correct), but how's about this for a "true and verifiable" (commandment numero uno) statement:

"Since atheists have no God, as a philosophical framework atheism simply provides no logical basis for any moral standard. They live their lives according to the rule that "anything goes". In recent years, this has led to a large rise in crime[1], drug use,pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy,[2] pedophilia[3] and bestiality."

Particularly amusing/disturbing is that the citation [1] is to a website called www.creationtheory.org.

Express yourself

Tony Blair's an arse! The Queen's a crack ho! Christianity smells! God's a bastard!

Now I like the fact that I can say and write these things, even if they're insulting to people. I like the fact that I can write them as my honest opinion, or as a joke. I like the fact that I can criticise people or institutions that I don't agree with. However, I might think differently if I was in Eygpt, as a blogger who expressed his opinion has just been sent to prison for four years. His crime was "for contempt of religion, insulting the president and spreading false information.", or basically speaking out against an establishment he felt was deserving of some criticism. This type of state censorship/punishment isn't limited to Eygpt (see the UK religious hatred laws for example), but I hope that it wont spread too far and too wide. There's a huge amount that has already been written about freedom of speech and civil liberties, but I just thought I'd bring up this case as a recent example of where things can lead. You can see more about the Egyptian blogger Kareem here.

Flipping out

Just a quick pancake based post this having just been Shrove Tuesday, aka pancake day, and all. This evening I made up some pancake batter with about 4oz flour, 2 eggs, a pinch of salt and half a pint of milk (as described here - normally I just add stuff until it looks about the right runniness, but I decided to use other people's empirical experience this time round). This was all mixed together to the prerequisite consistency and then blitzed with a hand held spinny-bladey thing to remove any lumps - last year I did all the mixing by hand, but the electronic help made things a fair bit quicker. As is the way with pancakes you have to make sure the pan is helluvah hot before you try and cook one, or else it just become some sort of mess. I let the pan reach temperatures that would make the devil sweat before pouring in some mix. Normally I have one duff pancake to start with, but this one turned out fine. My pancake flipping skills were still there and hadn't atrophied from a year of not being used. I made a savoury filling of bacon, red pepper, onion, mushroom and tomato fried up, to go in my first two pancakes. With this went a liberal helping of grated mature cheddar and it turned out to be damn tasty. I can't have a pancake day without having the classic lemon juice and sugar pancakes though, so the remainder of my batter went on these - I was even generous enough to make one for my flatmate.

Where have all the white towels gone...

Today I discovered that, after months of threatening, the University of Glasgow gym (aka the Stevie) has removed their service of having small white towels freely available for exercisers. These towels come in useful for wiping your sweaty brow after a hard work out, and also wiping your sweaty imprint off the exercise machine you've just used. Unfortunately many people abused this service, and instead of returning the towels to the given receptacles for laundering at the end of their session, they would selfishly steal the towel. This even lead to an attempted towel amnesty by the gym, but I don't think it wasn't hugely successful, hence the disappearance of the towel service completely. Now we're left with the far lesspleasant scratchy paper towels to do the job of the old soft and fluffy cotton towel - maybe I'll just bring in my own flannel!

Look up to the skies and see

The last weekend I was away in the north-east of Scotland at a country house, near Edzell, called the Burn. The reason for this trip is that every year we take a group of the second year undergraduate astronomy student to somewhere where we will hopefully have clear dark skies to do some actual astronomical observations - Glasgow's just not really the place to get a great view of the stars, what with all the light pollution. Another reason for the trip is as a socialising (i.e. drinking) experience for the students to get to know each other and to hopefully encourage them to stay on to do astronomy in their honours years.

This was my fifth consecutive year of accompanying the students on the trip. There are normally about 5 or 6 staff, post-docs and post-grads that go along to supervise the students, but also for the observing and social aspects. I enjoy it, so I keep volunteering to go, plus I'm now a dab hand at assembling the telescopes we take.

We travelled up on Friday afternoon, driven by the experienced and trusty coach driver from Ann's Coaches of Kirkintilloch. The drive, given clear roads and no unexpected break-downs, takes about 2 hours 45 mins, and this was the case this time round. The Burn experience always starts with the house Bursar, Andy, giving a short history of the house and it's rules and regulations, followed by another Andy giving the more important information of the bar opening hours. One thing you can always count on at the Burn is consistency in their menu at meal times. They haven't really altered this in all my years of going there, but I find this nice and comforting. The food is prepared by "the girls" as the housekeeping/kitchen staff are affectionately referred to. Friday night, as ever, was vegetable soup, followed by mince and potatoes, with green beans. It never fails to remind me of my Grandma's cooking, as the way they do the mince mean it tastes and smells exactly the same as when she does it - I don't know what they do differently to when I make mince! Anyway, on the actual observing front Friday night wasn't particular good for us. There was pretty continuous cloud cover. Nevertheless, Ross and I did a short demonstration of how to assemble the Meade Celestron 5" telescopes we took with us, and we then got the students to follow our lead. Due to the fact that no observing could be done, we eagerly embraced the drinking option. However the Burn bar shuts at the early hour of 10pm so you have to make sure that last order is a big one and will last long enough in the night. With everyone stocked up on booze most people just sat around playing card games or chatting, but there was no extreme drunkeness as has occasionally in the past made it into the realms of infamy.

Saturday was an altogether nicer day and started off with bright sunshine. I made it down to breakfast at 9am in the morning (I've never missed breakfast at the Burn and wasn't about to start on this trip), but promptly proceeded back to bed after I've eaten as I'd only had about 4 hours sleep. After lunch of (who'd have guessed!) baked potato, some of us went on a walk along the River Esk. The river cuts a gorge close by to the house and has a really nice walk along its edge. The path along has many routes, some pretty precarious, down to the river's edge and it's always fun to scramble down these - in the past there's been some fairly risky bit's of rock climbing taken on, given that the river has some really fast rapid in it. This year a couple of the students decided to take a dip in the river despite it being bloody freezing - this is a first for a Burn trip.

That evening (after dinner of properly good fish and chips) the sky was still really clear, giving us the opportunity for some proper observing. There were only two planets up that evening (Venus and Jupiter). Unfortunately Venus wasn't showing any phase (at least that we could make out), but Saturn, as ever, was great to look at - and Titan was visible to. It's always fascinating actually looking at Saturn or Jupiter with you own eyes and seeing the rings or stripes in the atmosphere, and I can just stare at them for ages and not really get bored. The other objects that were observed quite a lot were the Orion Nebula and the Andromeda galaxy. The Orion nebula was really good when viewed through one of the larger Dobsonian telescopes we had brought. You could easily make out the trapezium of bright young stars in the centre, and a really extended amount of structured nebulosity. The Andromeda galaxy only really looks like a large fuzzy blob when viewed with the eye through a smallish telescope - if only we could adjust the exposure time of our eyes! Of the other objects we looked at the Crab nebula is closest to my heart, however it's distinctly disappointing when viewed with your eyes - I couldn't see the pulsar blinking! It was a good night observing in general, and everyone was just excited to get a good clear view of the dark night sky and appreciate what's actually up there. People got to see the band of the Milky Way properly, they got to learn a bit about how to navigate around the sky, and most people saw a few shooting stars.

After a bit of observing we had the Burn quiz. This is generally made up by the staff on the trip, and in previous years the post-grads have normally taken part in it - and won by large margins I might add. This year we put together the quiz, in part cobbled together from earlier quizzes, and partly new written by (mainly) Ross, Jen and I. This seemed to go down ok with the students. The night, of course involved more drinking, with the odd trip outside to stare at the sky for a bit longer.

I think I've written enough for now... oh, and lunch on Sunday was, of course, Chicken Kiev.

And then there were 8

After a very fortunate win against Ipswich on Saturday Watford have been drawn against Plymouth Argyle in the quarter final of the FA Cup. They're the only non-Premier League club left in the competition, which should hopefully make things slightly easier for us - although they'll probably be more up for it than some of the Premiership clubs left in, particularly Arsenal and Manchester United who gave lacklustre performances at the weekend and have still got replays to get through. The Cup run will hopefully give us momentum and hope for the league, in which we have a crucial home game against Wigan on Wednesday. If we win it'll pull us up to 18th above West Ham and Charlton, a only be four points behind Wigan.

Reading into things

A lot of people seem to use their blogs to review books/films/tv shows/video games/restaurants/foods/drinks/whatever and I've decided to join in by reviewing (or at least briefly commenting on) the book I finished reading last night. It was Cities in Flight by James Blish. This book is actually a collection of four Blish novels following man's expansion from being bound to our solar system to having a galactic civilisation, and it spans an approximately 2000 year period of future history from around the present day to about 4104. The books weren't quite written in their internal chronologies' order, with book two being written first, followed by book one, and then three and four. I may give some spoilers here, but I'll try not to give away anything major.

Firstly I should say that I did enjoy this book, but it's definitely a book of two halves (I know I already said it's made up of four books, so in reality it's a book of four quarters). The first novel follows the development of the technology that allows humans to eventually begin flights to other stars i.e. faster-than-light (FTL in sci-fi speak) drives - called spin-dizzies - and what Blish calls antiagathics, or drugs that prolong human life almost unlimitedly. This book only covers a short time-span of a few years and holds together very well, with enough characterisation for you to appreciate the main characters and a really well developed plot that stays interesting throughout. The second novel jumps forward about a thousand years and we get to hear about the cities in flight of the title. Many worlds have been colonised in a first wave of expansion after the invention of the spin-dizzies, however things on Earth are fairly bleak. The spin-dizzies enable entire cities to lift themselves off Earth and fly about the galaxies to look for work on colony worlds. We hear of one city and a boy press-ganged onto it as it takes flight to find work. This story also takes place over a relatively short period of time and concentrates on this boy as the main character as he experiences first the harsh life aboard the city he was press-ganged onto, and then the completely different experience of being on New York - which had taken flight many years before and was well used to the wandering lifestyle. Again it all hangs together well and is a very compelling story which makes you want to hear more about the characters.

Things start to go a bit wrong in the third book. This is set a few hundred years after the previous novel and now concentrates on the travels of New York in its searches for work, with the major player being its Mayor Amalfi. The main problem with this book is that it spans several hundred years, which leads to the reader feeling that there are quite large inconsistencies in the time frame. This is because the characters don't seem to evolve as you'd expect that they would over such a period of time - this is on purpose, I expect, because the characters have such long lifespans (due to the antiagathics) that it's natural that things take such a long time to unfold. Unfortunately Blish a) doesn't really give the reader a consistent grasp of the time frame, so things seem to happen at very weird rates and b) the characters start to grate on you a bit. You just feel that you're missing something. This feeling caries on into the fourth and final novel, which mainly however grates because of the very weird physics it invokes (I know that FTL travel is weird physics, but it's a mainstay of much sci-fi)!

So basically I'd say that the first two novels are very good reads. The second two are ok, but just seem poor after what's preceded them. You basically end up wishing that Blish had carried on in the same vein, with maybe some of the characters, as the first two novels. If you've read the book and think that I'm completely wrong (or right) then let me know.

You can now look forward to my next review. I'll be reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson which is pretty thick, so it may take a while to get through. I hope it's on a par with Cryptonomicon which was very good.

One to watch

After a bit of pushing from my flatmate I've started watching the new (well newish as it started last September) NBC sci-fi show Heroes. I'm three episodes in and I'm hooked - this adds to the list of House, 24, Lost and of course BSG that I (or my flatmate) have to download each week. The basic premise of the programme is that there are a disparate group of people who have special powers, because they're the next step in human evolution! They're only just beginning to know about these powers, or start to feel that there's something special about themselves, and they're each coming to terms with it in different ways. This is all building up to some climactic event (which is pretty much spelled out early on in the series) during which I expect all the protagonists will be forced together and the full extent of there powers revealed. It's kind of a mix of the X-men (maybe a rather large part of the mix) and Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear. As I said I've been sucked in now, so will be eagerly anticipating each new episode.

999

Today I encountered an accident. A woman, who was a little worst for wear, fell over and cracked her head on the pavement. I rushed over to help along with another guy who'd been closer to her. Now I've encountered this sort of situation a couple of times before (with accidents of various seriousness), but am still rather poor when dealing with it. The woman had a fair bit of blood pouring from her head and was rather confused what with the fall, a bit of shock and her general drunkeness. My main response, other than being slightly bewildered, was to call an ambulance and hope someone else dealt with the situation at hand. Luckily a couple of medical students happened by who were far more equipped to deal with the accident. Now I know medical students can get a lot of stick, but I have to say that I was very impressed by these two. They had the right combination of dealing with the injury whilst also reassuring the woman and getting useful information from her. Doing things like trying to reassure and calm the person and even offer them a coat (which they did as it was still very cold) are common sense, but left my brain when really needed. All I could do was stand around sheepishly waiting for the ambulance to arrive. This highlighted to me how inadequate my own abilities were, but hopefully I've learned something for the next time.

Away win

We've done what's eluded us so far this season, we've got an away win in the league! Yes, you heard it, the mighty Hornets went to deepest, darkest East London and bested West Ham 1-0. Apparently we were deserved winner, but I'll have to watch the highlights on MOTD this evening. It's the same score line we beat them with to get through to the next round of the FA Cup (in which we're playing Ipswich next Saturday by the way). This bring us to a glorious 18 points (I know we're still bottom of the table), only 7 points behind Wigan in the tantalising 17th spot. I can see us staying up I really can (ok that's just a fevered fantasy, but I'll live it for a few minutes).

[Update: I just watched the match highlights and it game was pretty eventful. There were two penalties: the first one was for us, and in reality was a fairly soft foul, but Henderson slotted it home; the second was for West Ham, and maybe should have earned Gavin Mahon a red card, but the Hammers missed it. Phew! There were a few other near misses from both sides. Mackay cleared/deflected a goal bound Tevez shot, and Foster had to make a great save to keep us ahead. Foster did, however make a bit of a blunder when he dropped the ball in his area whilst Zamora was hassling him, luckily he somehow managed to snatch it back off Zamora before he could get a shot on. I'm just happy we got the win.]

In England rugby news we got a 20-7 win against Italy today. It was however a rather dull game compared to last week's Six Nations opener, so there's not really much to say about it.

I may be some time

Early this morning, walking home from an evening of poker at jakeybob and ellielabelle's flat, I found out what it was like for Scott of the Antarctic. I have a new found admiration of the madmen people who venture into the extremes of cold all for the simple joy of exploration. I think that the cold may have reached my pancreas and started to freeze it, and even then I only walked half way home before hailing a cab - I may have been fully frozen through if I'd walked the whole way!

Cracked pottery

After posting the paper the other day I received an email about it - "Hmmmm.. maybe I'll get some interesting and useful feedback!" I thought. The person that emailed goes by the name "Doc" although I wont give his full name as it'll probably make me the number one google link for him. Now this guy was just passing on information about a paper he'd written back in 1980 which related to some of our work and telling me about a talk on gravitational waves that he'd been to. The paper is genuine enough and was even published in Ap. J. - I've not really delved into it yet though, but I'll try and read it properly. However the first wierd thing of note was that he'd cc'd this email on to one of the head LSC (our scientific collaboration) people for no apparent reason! Does he know him? Possible, as he is an MIT graduate, but a bit strange none-the-less. The next weird thing was when I looked at his affiliation, first on his paper, and then on some of the other things he's written (obviously my first response to getting the email was to google the guy) - see for here for example. Now the guy's probably great and in all fairness in his email he was just pointing out a potentially useful paper, but sometimes you just get those warning signs of potential crackpot flagged up. I just hope he doesn't read this now, as he was only being helpful and here I go casting aspersions about his nature, and all from one email!

Clouded judgement

Thanks to some very useful code from phydeaux3 I've converted my rather dreary looking list of post labels, into a very modern and fancy label cloud. It takes up far less space and displays the post tags with varying font size according to how often they are used - this will be familiar to many people as it's used on a large number of blogs already. I now feel I'm almost up with the times, now I just need to get that Trackback sorted.

Finally

After a long and gruelling process I've finally submitted the paper which provided the bulk of my thesis to the e-print arXiv - it's called Upper limits on gravitational wave emission from 78 radio pulsars. It's been over a year since the main results in this paper was presented in my thesis, but since then there have been a series of modifications, checks, re-calibrations, reviews, and then re-checks to make sure everything wasok . I can't take all the credit for the paper. As with all our results papers it's gone out under the authorship of the entire LIGO Scientific Collaboration (along with Michael Kramer and Andrew Lyne of Jodrell Bank Observatory who helped us with our pulsar data). During the review process there were very many useful additions to the paper in areas in which I'm no expert, along with the general selection of typos, re-wordings and grammatical corrections. And as it's a results paper we also acknowledge the great many people who got our detectors working to the stage where we can start getting results, and who maintain and look after the instruments for us data analysist's benefit.

The final process in the submission to arXiv didn't entirely go without a hitch as on first attempt it didn't like some of my LaTeX, but on second attempt it all went through fine. Now we sit back and wait for two weeks whilst the paper is perused by the Gravitational Wave International Committee (GWIC) before submitting it to Physical Review D.

Second home

In an effort to write-up my research/ideas/to-do-lists on a regular basis I've created a research blog. I did have a very basic version previously, but it was just a simple html webpage and had no features whatsoever. For this blog I've made use of wordpress as it has very easily installable software - I only had to get out local sys admin to do one thing which was set up a mySQL database for me. Hopefully this will encourage me to keep regular research notes, which will now be handily archived and tagged depending on the subject.

One man army

After a year (well a bit more than that actually) of utterly dire play the English rugby team have finally put a smile back on their fans faces. We started off the Six Nations with a 42-20 victory against Scotland at Twickenham. This was thanks in a large part to one man - Jonny Wilkinson. Now there's a lot of hype surrounding Jonny's return to the England set up and it risks being blown out of all proportions, but his performance today was just great - and this is from someone who's been out injured and not played for England in three years, and who's only played 40 mins for his club this season! I think this injury factor makes people feel for Jonny a bit more than other players and adds to the hype. There's also the fact that he was one of our World Cup heros, which means in England fans eyes he's something of a legend. I can imagine it was a fair risk including him at all, but I think he showed why he can be so important to the team. Just talking about Jonny does a disservice to the rest of the team like Harry Ellis, but as I don't follow rugby much except for internationals I don't really know who the majority of the team are, so I can't talk much about them. One match can't tell everything though, so we'll have to wait and see if the team can keep it together and build up to something decent in this World Cup year.

And yes, I know that Jonny's try shouldn't have counted.

Oh, what a night!

So last night I stayed in the Van der Valk hotel (named, I assume, after the Dutch detective of the same name) in Hildesheim. Now Hildesheim is supposed to be a nice, fairly picturesque, town, but I didn't really get to see much of it as I was only there for an evening. My hotel room overlooked a very pretty, very German looking, square, but my main experience of it was the load bells that peeled every quarter of an hour. The hotel itself was very pleasant and had a good, homely, feel to it. My room was large although my huge double bed was covered by two small single bed duvets! One of the main reasons for going to this hotel was so that we could all get together for a meal with the PPARC delegates. The main restaurant was closed for refurbishment, so we were squeezed into a room next to the bar. The bar was filled with rowdy Germans watching Germany versus France in the Handball World Championships (currently being held in Germany). As I hardly ever order fish at the restaurant I decided to go for the Red Snapper (with rice and mango chutney). I was sorely disappointed though as my fish was bloody tough and chewy, although everyone else's meals looked delicious.

Tonight I'm in the Maritim hotel at Hannover Airport. It's huge, with a giant atrium with hangliders hanging from the ceiling. It seems to be set up to cater for business conferences, but I'm yet to check out the dining and drinking facilities. Hopefully they'll be decent, but it's not the ideal place to be spending a Friday evening.

[Update: I went out to dinner at one of the hotel restaurants (well the only one that was open) and had a great meal - far better than last nights rubbish (and that's not too harsh a way of describing it). As you expect from a restaurant I got the complementary bread, but this came in three different varieties and with butter and pesto - pesto goes very well on a nice piece of buttered bread, although I'd never put them together before. I then got a small complementary starter of some lamb wrapped in pastry and a lemon grass soup - as I said it was completely complementary and not something I ordered, but it was bloody nice. Next came my starter which was some rabbit with salady vegetables, but which also included some chicken wrapped in spinach! Again it was lovely. My main course was a venison dish which was sort of like beef wellington, but with the cow substituted for deer. This came with some fried red onion, some potato, carrot and turnip cakes, something bready that I couldn't identify, and (this being Germany and all) some sourkraut. It was great, and meant that I'd had a total of 4 different animals like a true carnivore. Finally I got a complementary chocolate mousse, which although tiny was very nice, and was made all the better by the fact that the waitress who brought it over was attractive. The whole meal was washed down with a couple of glasses of Weissbier. The meal was great, but the sad fact is that I was eating on my own. It does make me feel rather awkward sitting at a table on my own between courses just twiddling my fingers. After the meal I decided to have a drink in the hotel bar (called Bar Night Flight). After one pint I couldn't take it anymore. I can drink in bars on my own if there's some sport to watch, but just sitting at the bar nursing a pint whilst a lounge style piano player/singer warbles at you was too depressing for me (I also wanted to punch the pianist/singer as at the end of each song he'd repeat the last line in a whisper e.g."I wanna make love to you, baaabbyyyyy".)

Defender of the thesis

This evening I got to experience a live German PhD thesis defense (the equivalent of our British viva). This defense was for one of the PhD students at the AEI in Hannover who has worked on various aspects of the characterisation of the GEO detector. A German thesis defense (and I think this is similar across France and Italy to) is somewhat different than our viva. The defense can be attended by anyone, and this one had pretty much all the staff and students at the AEI in the audience - including a few of us visitors. It involved a 45 min talk on the work done by the student, followed by about 25 mins of questions from the thesis examiners, and then it got thrown open to the audience to ask questions. Being as we were in Germany the defense talk and questioning was conducted in German, although as a nod towards the fact that there'd likely be some native English speakers in the audience the talk slides were written in English. As the subject area of the talk was pretty familiar to me I managed to pick up all our gravitational wave type jargon. It was an interesting thing to experience, but I'm not convinced its how I want to spend many more Friday evenings.

Travelling salesman

At the moment I'm away on a whirlwind tour of Hannover's many hotels. I'm in Hannover to take part in a visit by our funding agency PPARC to our very own gravitational wave detector GEO600. Tonight we'll be schmoozing with the visiting dignitaries. Tomorrow we visit the detector site and then head back into Hannover to the Albert Einstein Institute where we will give a selection of talks. The upshot of this trip is that I'm staying in three different hotels over the three nights I'm here. Last night was the Holiday Inn and Hannover Airport. It's a pleasant hotel, clean and modern, and with spacious, well designed rooms. They do a good selection of beers and a nice cheese burger and the staff are polite. As with many of the large chain hotels they have extortionately priced wireless internet though! Tonight I stay at the Van der Valk Hotel in Hildesheim. Then Friday night will be in the Maritim Hotel again at Hannover Airport. We'll see how they compares.

My eyes, my eyes!

One of our best eyes in the sky has gone to silicon heaven. The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope has decided that it's had enough of taking photos of bits of the sky for us Astronomers to analyse (and for the general public to go "Ooh, isn't that pretty"), and has gone and broken itself - damn those lazy CCDs, you send them into space and ask them to do a perfectly reasonable job, but sooner or later they want out and just die on you without a word of warning.... It seems that there's no fix and that the people who's observing programs will have been cancelled are either buggered, or will have to wait around until the proposed camera upgrading shuttle mission next year. Depsite my grumbling about the camera it has provided a wealth of images and science over it's short 4ish year life. Hopefully people can make do with the two cameras that are still functioning - WFC2 and NICMOS.

Hammy's return

Top Gear returned to our screens this evening after a longer than normal break due to the injury of little Dicky Hammond. The show offered us its usual fair of fast cars and general piss-taking between the hosts. Most of the features in the show were filmed last year before the accident, and included them relaying a road in a day and driving around in a Jag. At the end of the programme we got shown footage of Hammond's crash. This involved him being essentially strapped onto a jet engine and then attempting to break the British land speed record. He actually made two attempts at this before the crash happened and we got to see him go through the fear and exhilaration of these two attempts. He even made, what would turn out to be, some rather prophetic statements. The final, and ultimately rather unfortunate, run was made because they had the airfield for another half hour. Despite the pretty extensive injuries he suffered Richard, thankfully, seems to be his usual self and was on top form in the show - all the best to him.

Two in a row

"We are in the fifth round. We are in the fifth round. Na naah naah na, na naah naah na!" My singing is due to Watford beating West Ham 1-0 to get through to the fifth round of the FA Cup. This gives us two wins in a row, a feat we've not achieved all season. We're on a roll! The next team to face us must be shaking in their boots ;) Obviously I was sorry today to see Luton Town go out of the competition to Blackburn.

Damn Burns!

This evening I get to give a speech at the University of Glasgow Astrosoc Burns Supper. The event as a whole is a meant as a tribute to the life and works of Scotland's most well loved bard, Robert Burns, who penned such classics as A Man's a Man For A' That , O, MyLuve is Like a Red, Red Rose, and the perennial Hogmanay favourite that no-one can ever remember the words to Auld Lang Syne. My part in this event is to give a toast to the Scots from all the non-Scots present. This generally will involve a massive slagging light hearted, and witty, ribbing of the Scots. At present I've not written the speech yet, but I have a basic idea around which it will hopefully naturally form - then there's always a bit of last minute improv which can be done. I do, however, have to live up to my now legendary speech from two years ago, when I loudly proclaimed "Damn Burns!" and launched into a tirade about him being so inconsiderate as to have gone and been born on a date which just so happened to clash with Watford playing in an FA Cup replay.

Are you sitting comfortably? Then let me begin...

Today I gave my first undergraduate astronomy lecture on Observational Methods - or telescopes and detectors as the majority of the course will be. The lecture style I have decided upon isn't quite the fully old school chalk and talk method (my writing-on-the-blackboard skills aren't well developed enough for that), but is fairly routed in non-digital technology by using overhead projector slides. These are supplemented with the standard array of handouts and a few nice pictures displayed, in a nod towards digital technology, via the medium of my laptop and a digital projector. The first lecture seemed to go fairly smoothly with no full on technological breakdowns, or student riots or walkouts. I was also there on time and didn't overrun - what more could you ask for? I'm not sure, however, if the students are too enamoured with the amount of writing they were expected to do. In the classic tone of "You don't know how lucky you are! In my day..." I should tell them that my, in my opinion, fairly sparse slides are nothing compared to the amount writing I did in some of my undergraduate courses - and I was bloody well grateful for it to! To be fair to the students I've not actually received this complaint, but it was more of a feeling I got. Given time their hands will get used to writing notes and they'll appreciate what good training I'm giving them when it comes to having to write lots in their exams ;) Also, as I'm kind at heart, I've posted the lectures on the web for the students to download, despite rather sternly telling them that I wouldn't do it until the course was finished as I didn't trust them to not just stop turning up at the lectures. Anyway giving the lecture was actually quite fun and hopefully the students might actually enjoy them! I'll have to think of some good off-topic anecdotes to tell them - "... and I saw this telescope and it was THIS big!"

Three points

I got the surprise of my life today when I opened up Mozilla and Footiefox showed a Watford win! We beat Blackburn 2-1. And I didn't even know we were playing last night. That's only our second win of the season and gives us a grand total of 15 points - still 7 points away from the safety of 17th in the league unfortunately!

Masters

The final of the snooker Masters this evening saw a blinding display by Ronnie "The Rocket" O'Sullivan. Ronnie was playing the young, up-and-coming Chinese player Ding Junhui, who's had a great tournament so far. At the start of the match Ding set off very well taking the first two frames. Recently Ronnie has been one of the most unpredictable players around and you never know if he's just going to get frustrated with himself and fall to pieces. However today he was at his very best and was completely unstoppable when he got in the balls. He chalked up high break after high break. Up until today every time I've seen Ding play he's been unflappable and not shown any signs of pressure no matter what the situation. This time with Ronnie completely controlling the game, and an annoyingly vociferous crowd shouting out for Ronnie all the way through, Ding finally broke. With the game at 8 frames to 3 for Ronnie, Ding was completely dejected and walked out at the mid-session interval having to be consoled by the Rocket. Ronnie won it 10-3. Overall it was fantastic to watch Ronnie on his top form and when he plays like that you know that he's the best in the world.

A day in the life

24 is back in a sixth series following a day in the life of, some time, CTU agent Jack Bauer. The first four episodes have been shown and were quickly downloaded in my flat. I won't give (m)any spoilers, but will just say that the format is the is the same as ever. The ever present torture aspect is still firmly there - I think they lasted about 20 mins into the first episode before any knives were stuck in places you wouldn't really want. As they've covered pretty much every aspect of terrorism in the previous seasons there's a very familiar feeling about the things happening at the start of this series, but it's still kept going along at a really fast pace and so maintains the excitement. I'm just wondering how many episodes the initial terrorist storyline will last into this series, until we find out the real situation and inevitable, completely different, uberplot that is always present. Bet's on as to who's the mole in CTU this time round!

United

Today marked the 300th anniversary of the Scottish parliament voting for the Union between the Scottish and English parliaments. This has of course been greeted by debate (sure to continue up to this year's Scottish parliamentary elections) over the place of the union and whether the United Kingdom should break up with an independent Scotland (and indeed and independent England - in a lot of these debates Wales and Northern Ireland get a bit forgotten about, but then they are only small). There are three main areas where these debates tend to focus, and they are used to argue, by various parties (not only meaning political parties), both for and against independence: the political arguments e.g. self determination in all areas of government including taxation and defense, the West Lothian question; the economic arguments e.g. other small independent European nations have vibrant economies, businesses thrive with close links to the economic powerhouse of London; and the cultural arguments e.g. we diminish/enhance our identities through the union. I've just given a few examples of some of the areas which arise from the independence question and there are many more. Each of them is very complex with no simple answer or conclusion, so I'm just going to give a bit of opinion as to why I favour keeping the union rather than delving into any one particular argument.

I'm English and have lived in Scotland for over four years now, so I have some knowledge of what it's like to live in both countries. Before moving here I liked the idea of the union, just because I thought it was a nice notion, although I didn't have any real idea of the strength of the Scottish national identity or of the differences throughout Britain. On moving to Scotland I've enjoyed the fact that there is a distinct cultural identity here, however I've never felt like a foreigner (ok, except during the football!). I don't know if it's just the shared language that makes it this way, and maybe I'd feel the same in, say, France if I spoke French, or them English. Then again, I do feel like a foreigner in America, where they speak English. I think the main reason that I feel like I'm at home in Scotland is that the union's been around so long that the links and commonalities between the nations are actually rather ingrained, and comfortable. Sure there are difference and it's nice to celebrate these things, and to show them to others, but on another level there are (again in my opinion) far more similarities. So my main reason for the retaining of the union is still that I like the way it feels. I like the fact that England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland are part of something bigger and that because of it they do have so many links and things in common. I suppose I'm arguing here that there is (in my experience) some sort of common British identity, which a lot of people don't like the idea of or get defensive about - maybe this is because they think it somehow dilutes or takes away from their narrower national (or regional) identity, or maybe it's just that they like being in a slightly more exclusive club, or maybe it's that they don't like the idea of a label or national identity at all, but I don't really know. I have to say that one aspect of the independence debate that I hate (and which thankfully you don't often hear) is one of racism, whereby the Scots, Welsh, Cornish are Celts and racially different that the Anglo Saxons and therefore are fundamentally different and should have independent (and maybe they're suggesting racially pure!) countries.

Anyway, these are the opinions of someone who's from England, or more specifically the South-East (London), so it would be interesting to hear other peoples views. Maybe you see the commonalities that I say run deep are actually the superficial things, whereas the differences are far more numerous and ingrained. Let's not get to divisive now though ;)

Back to the general starting point of this opinion piece:- The main thing I think that would be seen if independence were to happen is that a mixture of the pro and anti-independence predictions would be born out, with some benefits being seen as well as some loses (for both England and Scotland), plus some outcomes that no one expected - I know that's not a very insightful thing to say as it's pretty much stating the bloody obvious, but politicians tend to paint things as either one option or the other.

Let's play DARTS!

This evening saw the riveting final of the BDO World Darts Championship between world number 1, Martin "Wolfie" Adams, and rank outsider and house husband, Phil "Nixy" Nixon (not quite as original a nickname there for Phil!) I missed the first half of the match and when I started to watch Wolfie was up 6 sets to nil, requiring only one more set to be crowned Champion of the WORLD. "That's it, the match is over." I, and everyone else, thought, but boy were we wrong. Set after set I watched the dynamic comeback of the man from County Durham (that would be Nixy). His comeback was partly because Adams fell apart on the doubles and missed several opportunities to clinch the match. However it was a really gutsy performance as Nixy managed to pull the game back to 6-6 with the crowd getting more and more behind him. In the final set Adams managed to get back on his game and won the three legs required to take the title - although his anxious wife had had to leave the venue as she couldn't watch. That's it from Lakeside for another year, but I look forward to seeing the likes of the Count, Wolfie, the King, Johnboy, the Viking (get well soon Andy) and of course Bobby George next year.

Play the music

Tonight whilst doing a bit of air drumming (maybe the lowest form of air intrumentalism) I thought it would be good to learn another instrument. As such I've placed a bid on ebay for a cheap keyboard - the piano/keyboard seeming to be the gateway drug into other instruments. If I do get the keyboard, and learn to play it decently, it could be another weapon in our band, otherwise it could maybe just help me appreciate playing proper music slightly more - as a drummer you generally are just bashing out a beat rather than playing a tune! This might lead me to being a multi-instrumentalist like my fellow band member ellielabelle.

Update: I've now purchased the keyboard I bid for for the sum of £50. I should however realise that in the future I might be wise to not go on ebay very late at night after several beers - just in case I end up buying more things I don't really need.

Update: My keyboard arrived yesterday and looks pretty decent. It also came with a couple of learn-to-play-the-piano books, so I'll have to get started learning over the weekend. I didn't however get that great a deal for it, as I just found it could be bought brand new from GAK for only £59 - I still made a slight saving though and as I said I did get the books thrown in.

Everybody hurts

My body at the moment is in a fair bit of pain. This pain has been inflicted on me by throwing myself down the side of mountains on what's essentially a plank. I have bruised and battered knees, hips, elbows, wrists, coccyx (aka arse bone) and ribs and just about every muscle in between aches like buggery. But it was great fun! This is what happens when you spend three days snowboarding in the French Alps.

So on Wednesday of my trip to Geneva spacetimewaster and I got up at the ungodly hour of 6:30 in the morning in an attempt to get out to the ski resorts. Carrying our ski gear we headed to the bus station to see where the buses would take us. The weather was quite foggy, but wasn't too cold and looked like it would clear. At the bus station we were able to buy a combined ticket and skipass for the day. We had the option of either heading to Les Houches or Chamonix, and decided to start of at Les Houches as it would give us slightly longer on the slopes between being dropped off and picked up by the bus. The bus trip to Les Houches took us straight out of Switzerland, as Geneva is right on the border, and into France, and then up into the French Alps towards Mount Blanc. As we headed higher we got above the cloud cover and the weather cleared to give a really bright day. The view into the Alps was fantastic and the mountains started to surround us as we travelled further into them. After a drive of about one hour with Mount Blanc looming over us we got to Les Houches. We were then slightly shocked and a bit a anxious about our choice of ski resort. The rather warm weather had meant that this has been one of the worst winters for snow in the Alps, and the bottom of the slopes at Les Houches showed this up. There was hardly any snow at all. One of the skiing World Cup events was supposed to have been hosted there, but had had to be cancelled due to lack of snow, but there we were and we had to make the most of it. The only way was up.

We put on our ski gear and headed for the ski lift hoping that as we ascended the snow situation wouldn't look as bleak. Now I'm a complete beginner at snow boarding - I'd never done it or anything like it before - so at the bottom of the slope spacetimewaster tried giving me some pointers. Due to my novice state I wanted to head for the green beginners slope at the top of the mountain. This required heading up three sets of ski lifts, which in themselves are a bit of a challenge to get on and off for a beginner. When we got to the top of the mountain at just under 2000m in altitude the snow situation was looking a lot better, however I still had to make it the from the ski lift to the beginner slope, which was a couple of hundred metres away. Under spacetimewaster's (who is rather good at skiing) guidance I slid and fell, and slid and fell, and slid and fell my way over to it. In some points I managed to stay upright for metres at a time, although a large fraction of my bruises arose from this period. The beginners slope at this resort was very short, but was good practice for me to get going. My main challenge on this slope was getting back to the top on the ski lift which was a tow. With this you put the tow between your legs and it pulls you up the slope, which is harder for snowboarders than skiers. The look of exasperation on the guy who operated the thing after my seventh or so failed attempt to make it up the tow without falling over became quite amusing - I did attempt to apologise in French, with more and more conviction, several times. Finally, however, I got the hang of the thing - it's all about keeping your centre of balance over the middle of the board. The best thing about Les Houches was the views it gave over Mount Blanc - over lunch at the restaurant we had an absolutely fabulous and clear view of the mountain and all its glaciers. It's one of those views you wish you could see every day. The temperature was surprisingly warm as well and we had to strip off out outermost layer when having lunch. In terms of learning how to snowboard the day was pretty successful despite all the bruising. We left for the bus back to Geneva quite happy with our day. That night in Geneva we went for dinner at a, very popular, Chinese retaurant, which had the quickest table service I've ever seen - we were probably in and out of the place in about 25 mins! We then hung out with all Geneva's youthful posse's by going on the bumper cars at a fair set up in the town - out of all the rides there were actually three separate dodgems - the main difference being the type of music being blasted out of each!

The next day was also a ski trip. It again involved getting up stupidly early - which I was none to pleased with at the time. We decided to take the bus slightly further into Chamonix this time - Chamonix having several different ski resorts to go to. As I was still fairly novice at the whole sliding down snowy slopes thing we decided to go to Flegere which had a couple of green (aka beginner) runs. Arriving at Flegere (after going up the cable car) we found a lot more snow than we'd seen the previous day at Les Houches. We also found that the green slope was actually quite a challenge. It started off with a narrow and fairly steep winding path, which for the beginner is very daunting. This lead onto a good wide slope, which enabled me to experiment with my turning skills, and was a lot of fun to go down. I still had a lot of falling over, but it was accompanied by an increase in confidence and ability - I also got a lot better at handling the ski lift. The day again had impressively nice weather affording nice views of Mount Blanc (from a different angle this time). That night I went to bed with racing down the slopes dominating my mind.

I'd though that two days of snowboarding could well have done me in - indeed it had left me battered and bruised - but I still was having enough fun to subject myself to a third morning of the early start. We were getting to know the staff at the bus station by now and also recgonised some of the other ski enthusiasts who had been on the bus the last couple of days. As it had been good to us the day before we decided to go back to Chamonix and Flegere for another go. This allowed me to improve a bit more and add in some toe edge to heel edge, and back, turns to my repertoire. It was great fun again and involved slightly less (proportionally) falling down - I did, however, manage to take a skier out by ploughing straight into them and wind myself (adding bruised ribs to my injuries). There had also been a fresh fall of snow the night before, which helped turning on the board and also in breaking falls. I managed to get down and learn the main green slope pretty well (although still without fail stacked-it at the bottom).

Overall I really enjoyed my Alpine snowboarding experience and would love to do it again. This might have to be substituted by some dry ski slopes, or if possible some actually proper snow in Scotland!

Heidi hi

I'm now back from my first proper holiday away in ages. I've been on lots of trips for work over the last few years, but very few have actually involved taking much time out to for non-work related activities. This trip away was different as it was entirely non-work related and the plan was to just have fun (I only checked my work emails twice in a whole five days!) So sit back and relax as I regale you with what I got up to in Switzerland - this could be a long post (or I might split it into two).

Last Sunday, along with spacetimewaster, I set off for Geneva. We were going to be staying with our friend Helen, who has a flat in Geneva as she's working at CERN at the moment. This meant that we had free accommodation, and along with our cheap easyJet flights, would mean we didn't spend too much overall. The free accommodation had a downside though - the flat was a studio flat and as such had very little space to accommodate two guests, but we made do. Upon arriving in Geneva we made our way across the city to the old town where we were going to be staying. By the time we'd dropped of our stuff it was getting quite late, but as we'd not eaten yet we headed out into the city centre for some food. We'd been promised some Fondue as our first meal, but the fondue restaurant we tried was closed. Finding the next closest eatery I had some flammenkueche which at the time of ordering I didn't really know what it was. It turned out to be a sort of pizza with a creamy, rather than tomato, sauce, and was quite nice. In the restaurant I also had my first opportunity to test out some of my rusty GCSE level french - I asked for a beer.

After dinner we returned to the flat to sort out sleeping arrangements. I took the two seater sofa, whilst spacetimewaster took the floor. It wasn't the most comfortable of situations, but was manageable, and as I said, it was free.

The next day we planned a bit of sightseeing around the city. To start off with we tried a local bakery to get some breakfast, but this was closed - a fact we'd see quite often that day - apparently after an exhausting Sunday of being closed, many shops decide to stay closed on the Monday to! We did find ourselves a Pattiserie to serve our needs after a short walk around though. The weather on Monday wasn't great with a dull start and a fair bit of rain in the air, but we headed out hoping things would clear. Our first stop was a local park which contained several huge chess and draughts boards. Here spacetimewaster and I had an epic draughts encounter, which he won by a slim (well ok maybe it wasn't that slim) a margin. This lead to us getting slightly damp in the rain, but we carried on with our tour of the town. Our next stop took us to the Jet d'eau, a huge fountain on in Lake Geneva that can reach height of nearly 150 m. You can walk out along a jeti up to, and passed, the fountain, so we went along it to get a closer view of the rather impressive jet. The wind determines where most of the water from the fountain lands and when we walked past most of it was directed into the lake, but a strong spray still cover the jeti, meaning we added to our wetness from the rain by running under the spray. After lunch we decided that a boat trip on the lake would be a nice relaxing afternoon past-time. The boat was quite large and at the ticket office we were told that they needed at least 15 people onboard or it wouldn't sail - this being a Monday Geneva was dead and there were only the three of us and another couple waiting for the boat. The time it was supposed to sail passed and still no-one else turned up... until after about 10 mins a small family of four arrived. Despite there only bing nine people in total the boat's crew took pity on us (and our pleading faces) and said they'd do the trip. We then had a pleasant hour long boat ride across Lake Geneva taking in some of the sights along the shore of the lake. For dinner that night our plan was again for fondue. The strange Monday opening hours again scuppered our plans and instead we went to a restaurant in the Old Town that specialised in chicken - and when I say specialised I mean they only did chicken dishes - but it was very good. We then stopped of for a drink in a nice little cafe called the Demi Lune Cafe.

On Tuesday things around town seemed a little more lively and everything was open. spacetimewaster and I were left to our own devises in the morning and spent the time visiting the Cathedral to got up it's tower. This gave some good views of the city, although I have to say that the Cathedral wasn't one of the most impressive I've seen. The Cathedral did have some interesting history behind it, due to Geneva being one of the hotbeds of the Reformation and the Cathedral being the church adopted by the leading reformer John Calvin. After our dip into Christian history we went for a general wander and came across, in particular, a cool little shop selling antique scientific equipment like telescopes, microscopes, medical tools etc. All the stuff in there was great and if I had the money and the space I'd have loved to have bought it all. One of our plans for the trip was to try a bit of skiing, so later that afternoon we went along to a ski hire shop. Wanting to look cool and all I opted for hiring a snowboard rather than skis.

That evening we did our first winter sport and went on the outdoor ice rink in Geneva. It wasn't too busy so we got fairly free reign of it. There were a few attempts at going backwards, although I've not really mastered the art yet, and one fall. After two days of missed attempts we finally got to have our fondue. It was melted cheese and bread galore! The fondue was really good and is definitely a nice food experience as the whole ripping up bread and dipping it into cheese on a big fork adds something to the event. That night we went to bed with the prospect of an early morning start to head out to the slopes for a days skiing. I'll get onto that in my next post...

Over the Alps

This afternoon I'm heading off for a short holiday out in Geneva. There should be a bit of skiing/snow boarding, a bit of ice skating, a trip to CERN, and probably some fondue. This means I'll have a short break from blogging, but will tell people of my travels when I return - the tales will probably involve cheese, chocolate, pocket knives and cuckoo clocks and other stereotypically Swiss items.

Into the fourth round

Watford came back from a goal down to put in a 4-1 win over Stockport in the third round of the FA Cup. It nice to see us put in a few goals for once and it's something I'd like to see us reproduce in the league - unfortunately most Premiership teams are a bit harder to score against that teams from the mid-table of League 2. The draw to see who we'll be taking on in the next round is tomorrow. I'm hoping for another lower league team to try and give us a decent cup run as it's pretty much a certainty that we'll be relegated at the end of the season.

Bring out the white paint

The inevitable has finally happened. England have lost the Ashes to Australia in a 5-0 whitewash for the first time since the 1920-21 Ashes. After a very poor start in the first two tests by England, there was about a day of hope garnered from some decent performances in the third test, which England then went on to manage to lose. The fourth test we managed to lose by a whole innings! And the fifth test... well what was the point really! Obviously the Australians deserve a lot of praise and respect as they're bloody good at the game. With some of their oldest, and best, players retiring after this tournament they had a bit of a point to prove. Still I'd have hoped we'd have managed at least one draw! I think the enthusiasm about English cricket generated after the 2005 Ashes win has all but ebbed away now. I very much doubt any of our players will be in line for BBC Sports Personality of the year come December.

Global (in)significance

I set myself up a technorati account so I can now see where my blog places in the overall scheme of things - there's a link to this in my sidebar. For those not in the know technorati is a sort of search engine for blogs (making use of things like the Google blog search). As with most search engines it can sort things via how many links there are to a blog from other blogs - this allows you to rank your blog. I'm currently ranked at number 725841 in the worldwide blog league table, but I want to do better damn it ;) You can help me out by linking to me in your very own blogs!

Shoe day

Now I know many girls revel in buying shoes, but not being a girl I have a generally different attitude towards this activity. However I do need shoes and therefore do occasionally have to shop for them. Today was my annual shoe day (and when I talk of shoes I'm really only referring to trainers).

I find the January sales are often a good time to buy shoes, so I ventured out around some of Glasgow's various shoe emporiums. The first place I went was Foot Locker. I wasn't too impressed by them. The ground floor of the shop seemed mainly concerned with selling clothes and a selection of their most expensive shoes, which was not what I was looking for. The selection of shoes in the sale were hidden away upstairs and as such I couldn't even be bothered to look at them - I just assumed that there wouldn't be any real bargains. Next I tried out the Original Shoe Co.. Again this shop seemed to be saturating its foyer with clothing rather than the footy items I wanted. I was mainly after a new pair of running shoes to replace my very scaggy and holey old pair. This shop had a quite decent selection of more casual trainers, but was completely lacking in running shoes. I left disappointed and empty handed. Immediately next door I came to Schuh. Now Schuh seemed to be only interested in selling shoes, rather than clothing, which was a good start. They also had the best selection of shoes, although again it was generally the casual trainer rather than the running shoe. I made notes of some of nicer pieces of footwear, but again left in search of the running shoe.

I've known this from previous experience and therefore should have probably ordered my shop search slightly differently, but the best places for a good trainer bargain during the sales are actually the sports stores. So I went into a large JJB Sports and low and behold my running shoe needs were amply fulfilled. There were a very decent selection of sales offers with 30%-50% off normal price. I was quickly served by a cheerful assistant and I went away with fairly decent pair of Adidas trainers.

Having found the cheap sale item I was after I went back to Schuh for to treat myself to something nicer. I was pounced on by several sales staff who seemed to be outnumbering the customers by a high proportion. After fending off the first few advances whilst I had a bit more of a look about my eyes settled on a pair of New Balance trainers. I did the usual short walkabout in them and decided to take them. That ended my yearly shop for shoes.

From the length and content of this post it may sound like I actually enjoyed this shopping experience, but I must insist that that's not the case. I would much prefer to have walked into the first shop and found two reasonably priced and nice trainers and then been done with it. I'll leave the joy of the shoe shopping experience to the girls.

Party time

Hello 2007, nice to make your acquaintance!

This year started off as usual. I was drunk!

New year's eve (or Hogmanay as my Scottish brethren call it) was a top night this year. It was my least planned venture for some time, but everything fell into place come the night despite the weather's best efforts to try and ruin everyones evenings. After a very damp and cold walk into the west end the warmth and dryness of Curler's offered the opportunity for a pint - and to dry off slightly. This was followed by another wet walk down to Balbirs for a curry with several friends including jakeybob and ellielabelle. This is a fairly new Indian restaurant in Glasgow's west end and is tucked away slightly off the main roads. It's a nice place though and is huge on the inside with hundreds of staff to deal with your every whim. The food was very good to.

I then benefited from a friends misfortune of being ill by nabbing his ticket to the festivities on Ashton Lane. After drinks in three of the bars we ventured briefly outside to celebrate the actual coming of the new year (the bells as these Scots call it). Last year in Ashton Lane this was marked by I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) by the Proclaimers but not so this year, and things were actually fairly subdued - probably down to the weather and the fact that everyone seems to have a cold at the moment.

I then got a lift up to jakeybob and ellielabelle's flat where a poker session was underway. This carried on for many hours until about 8am and was accompanied by a lot more drinking. All-in-all it was a great evening and totally unexpected at that.

Unfortunately it's now the end of the holiday's and work beckons tomorrow. Well I say it's the end of the holidays, but in fact I'm away for a week in Geneva this coming Sunday.