Monday, August 13, 2007
Rainbow
After most of June and July being a complete washout, the weather seems to be showing some signs of getting around to summer. This means that most showers are followed by bright sunshine - Emma and I spotted this while walking down South Street a few weeks ago.
Graduation and alumni weekend - a double header
The 29th June 2007 marked my second Durham graduation. I've written about how the first was a big let-down, so this time I wasn't expecting as much but it turned out really well. I met my parents in town and we went to Oldfields for lunch which was really nice - the food was great and we were there at the same time as Matt and his entourage and Nick from Engineering.
After that Matt and I walked over to Palace Green to gown up. For some reason they had a multitude of PhD gowns there, but only a select few sizes of hat - this resulted in Matt and I having hats that shifted around a lot over the afternoon. We filed over to the Castle where we met up with the other graduands - along with the other PhD and undergraduate chemists we were also paired with historians. The PhD chemists were split between those from my year who had managed to get submitted in time and those left over from the year before. This included Carl and Lue so there was a total of 4 Trevs' chemists getting their PhDs.
After we were paraded across to the cathedral we were seated in the EXTREMELY narrow seats. They were connected together but clearly weren't meant to be used by adults when in this configuration. With us all rammed in the temperature started to go up dramatically and the gowns and hats didn't help at all. As the ceremony started the historians were called up first. Once again it was quite fun to watch the different techniques used to shake Bill Bryson's hand. Some people looked embarrassed to be there and tried to get off the stage as quickly as possible without looking Bill in the face, others sneaked in the two-hand shake. As our cramped conditions became almost unbearable the historians seemed to keep on coming. Finally they were finished and attention turned to the chemists. Once again as we got ever-closer to the front of the queue the nerves began to appear - were our hats on straight (a new problem since the first graduation), how many steps were there and could we navigate them without falling over and most importantly of all you had to go up at the right moment
and hope they pronounced your name right. right. There were no major foul-ups and when we got back to the seats I decided to leave a spare seat to alleviate the cramped conditions. This seemed to throw a lot of people off as they weren't sat where they had been before. Bill Bryson gave his speech, which although funny was pretty short and apparently an almost word-for-word repeat of his speeches from previous years.
After we got out of the cathedral we all managed to stay in roughly the same place so we got in a lot of group photos and then we tracked down Bill Bryson and got our picture taken with him. We bumped in Maggie and our college tutor John which was nice and a lot of our chemistry friends turned up to see us. All in all it was a lot better than the chaos of 2003.
After this we bundled off the parents and handed back the gowns (our graduation was the last of the week so we couldn't wander around town in the gowns) and headed over to the New Inn. This day also marked the start of Trevs' alumni weekend so the New Inn slowly started filling up with familiar face from recent years. Eventually we dragged ourselves up the hill and into the bar. We got chatting to various people and after a few hours went out to experience Love Shack for the first time - it was pretty rammed and we didn't get back until about 3am. The next day brought the relief of brunch and then a free day until the formal. Alumni weekend is all about the drinking these days - the only events are the buffet in the bar on the Friday and the formal/late license on the Saturday. We turned up to the drinks reception and found a surprisingly large number of 1999 matriculants there.
We had a really good formal chatting to those around us at the table. Afterwards we slipped back into our old formal routine of mingling and chatting to people, dancing round the bar and ending up on the cobbles chatting to even more people. We had an amazing night and the best part was that although I had looked forward to seeing certain people - Matt, Mel, Alan, Brett and Sarah etc. it was really fun chatting to all those people that Matt and I used to chat to in the bar and formals like Gareth and Fran. It was really good to catch up with all those people that I will probably only hear from very rarely.
The next day, absolutely everyone I saw looked like death warmed up. Which was amusing. All in all the weekend was absolutely amazing and the only bad point was that it had to end. Roll on next year (although no more graduations for me now.)
After that Matt and I walked over to Palace Green to gown up. For some reason they had a multitude of PhD gowns there, but only a select few sizes of hat - this resulted in Matt and I having hats that shifted around a lot over the afternoon. We filed over to the Castle where we met up with the other graduands - along with the other PhD and undergraduate chemists we were also paired with historians. The PhD chemists were split between those from my year who had managed to get submitted in time and those left over from the year before. This included Carl and Lue so there was a total of 4 Trevs' chemists getting their PhDs.
After we were paraded across to the cathedral we were seated in the EXTREMELY narrow seats. They were connected together but clearly weren't meant to be used by adults when in this configuration. With us all rammed in the temperature started to go up dramatically and the gowns and hats didn't help at all. As the ceremony started the historians were called up first. Once again it was quite fun to watch the different techniques used to shake Bill Bryson's hand. Some people looked embarrassed to be there and tried to get off the stage as quickly as possible without looking Bill in the face, others sneaked in the two-hand shake. As our cramped conditions became almost unbearable the historians seemed to keep on coming. Finally they were finished and attention turned to the chemists. Once again as we got ever-closer to the front of the queue the nerves began to appear - were our hats on straight (a new problem since the first graduation), how many steps were there and could we navigate them without falling over and most importantly of all you had to go up at the right moment
and hope they pronounced your name right. right. There were no major foul-ups and when we got back to the seats I decided to leave a spare seat to alleviate the cramped conditions. This seemed to throw a lot of people off as they weren't sat where they had been before. Bill Bryson gave his speech, which although funny was pretty short and apparently an almost word-for-word repeat of his speeches from previous years.
After we got out of the cathedral we all managed to stay in roughly the same place so we got in a lot of group photos and then we tracked down Bill Bryson and got our picture taken with him. We bumped in Maggie and our college tutor John which was nice and a lot of our chemistry friends turned up to see us. All in all it was a lot better than the chaos of 2003.
After this we bundled off the parents and handed back the gowns (our graduation was the last of the week so we couldn't wander around town in the gowns) and headed over to the New Inn. This day also marked the start of Trevs' alumni weekend so the New Inn slowly started filling up with familiar face from recent years. Eventually we dragged ourselves up the hill and into the bar. We got chatting to various people and after a few hours went out to experience Love Shack for the first time - it was pretty rammed and we didn't get back until about 3am. The next day brought the relief of brunch and then a free day until the formal. Alumni weekend is all about the drinking these days - the only events are the buffet in the bar on the Friday and the formal/late license on the Saturday. We turned up to the drinks reception and found a surprisingly large number of 1999 matriculants there.
We had a really good formal chatting to those around us at the table. Afterwards we slipped back into our old formal routine of mingling and chatting to people, dancing round the bar and ending up on the cobbles chatting to even more people. We had an amazing night and the best part was that although I had looked forward to seeing certain people - Matt, Mel, Alan, Brett and Sarah etc. it was really fun chatting to all those people that Matt and I used to chat to in the bar and formals like Gareth and Fran. It was really good to catch up with all those people that I will probably only hear from very rarely.
The next day, absolutely everyone I saw looked like death warmed up. Which was amusing. All in all the weekend was absolutely amazing and the only bad point was that it had to end. Roll on next year (although no more graduations for me now.)
The working world
So it's been what - 9 weeks? I've been living the working life back up in Durham. For the first month I stayed with my former housemate Ollie in deepest darkest Gilesgate. Amazingly, following 5 years of being lazy (getting up-wise anyway) dragging myself up at 7.20am every morning hasn't been too bad. My journey to work only took 20 minutes, but half of that was simply getting from Gilesgate to the New Inn - from there it's fine. Straight away I joined up with my prospective housemates Emma and Barry to find some more permanent accommodation. We took in new town houses (all with problems despite being new). In the end we found a flat in the brand new apartments on South Street where the old city library used to be. For £66/week it's ours for 6 months - completely furnished (and we are taking plush here - LCD tv, dishwasher new beds and bedding). Sure enough there are some issues (no shower and the dishwasher has "issues") and the landlords are pretty slow but there haven't been any real problems yet. Parking is an issue, but my journey to work has been reduced to 15 minutes including a walk up the hill to my car.
The job. Well I'm sure it hits everybody when they first start a new job - I spent the first day thinking how much I hated it and how I was going to quit and go back to trying to get a lab-based job. Of course, these thoughts have just about passed and I now see it as a tremendous opportunity. To bring people who don't know up to speed, I'm working for Thorn Lighting (one of the UK and Europe's biggest lighting firms) in a small team (just 3 people!) alongside teams from Durham university (including my PhD supervisor) and Sumation from Cambridge/Japan to work out a path to bringing out a commercial white-light OLED. There's plenty of competition - in Europe there's Philips and Osram, in the US there's UDC, Eastman-Kodak and GE and in the Far East Konica-Minolta.
I'm starting to understand several things about how the real world works. Firstly it's absolutely full of people over-exaggerating everything. The reason for this is simple - money. If you are trying to get money out of someone for your project they are more likely to give it to you if you play up what your work could lead to. At the moment the in-thing in research grant applications is climate change - simply find a way of getting that phrase into a research proposal and people will fall over themselves to give you cash. In our case, apparently our team has "a substantial number of chemists and physicists" working on it - in reality we've got 2 and a half chemists and 3 physicists. Likewise when it comes to reporting results everyone will be very selectve about what they report - for example konica-minolta have reported a white-OLED with a luminous efficiency of 64 lm/W which is very good, but there is no mention of the lifetimes which leads us to believe that it simply dies after a few hours - not the most useful thing ever then. Our main European rivals, the Olla project, have showcased 15cm squared tiles of light, but on closer inspection you can tell it's made up from smaller panels.
Secondly, it's not what you know - it's who you know. A lot of our job seems to be networking with other people in the industry and keeping our fingers in various pies. It almost seems like our future careers depend on it. Our project has a budget of £3.3 million over 3 years, but other projects in the US and Europe are having millions poured into them fairly regularly. It seems fairly clear that our parent company, Zumtobel, isn't particularly interested in taking this project further than the initial 3 years. My guess is they'll listen to our report, but with new production plants costing over £10m they'll simply buy in products from other companies and our team will be cut loose. My aim is to move on to the company I originally wanted to work for: CDT/Sumation. Sumation is the name for the chemistry wing that is a joint venture between CDT and the Sumitumo chemical company of Japan. In fact, just a few weeks ago Sumitomo acquired the rest of CDT for $285m. The position of senior chemist seems like it would be ideal for me - input into the chemistry on all Sumations projects, the prospect of travelling to Japan for work exchanges and meetings, worldwide travel to various conferences and trade shows and being very visible in the OLED community that is becoming more important every year.
One of the benefits of having worked in Durham for so long is that I can see through all the BS we're being fed. The trouble we've got is that Sumation are banging out new materials at a rate of knots but they refuse to tell us what they are (and as a chemist that is really frustrating) where as Durham aren't quite as quick. Having worked alongside them for the last 4 years I know when they are taking us for a ride. I get the feeling there is a lot of sitting around going on. Academia simply wants to get in money and do the work they want to do and it's partially our job to make them do what we want them to do. Thankfully since they are so close to us we can easily keep an eye on them. It's sad that I've realised this as I used to think that industry was unreasonably demanding but it turns out that academia is fairly unfocussed. It means I can't look at academic research the same as before - sort of like how Christmas changes when you "know" about Father Christmas.
Moments of excitement so far: getting my corporate credit card (haha!), the team meetings (especially the meals out - the last one was at Bistro21), going anywhere in my boss' car (a beefy Volvo S80 that he frequently rags - 80mph in 3rd gear anyone?) and our trip over to Manchester in the company Zafirer - a naughty 1.9 turbo diesel estate that loves to cruise at 90...
So 9 weeks in and 50% of the time I'm really excited about the possibilities this job may lead to (both for the technology/science and my own career) and 50% of the time I'm bored cos we've don't have so much to do at the moment (hence these updates). I'll report more in due course. In the mean time, here's a partial team photo.
L-R Igor (Durham chemist), Tom (Sumation chemist), Torsten (Sumation chemist), Andy (Durham physics supervisor), Ben (Durham physicist just back from Singapore), me, Fernando (Durham physicist), Olivier (Thorn physicist) and Geoff (Thorn supervisor).
The job. Well I'm sure it hits everybody when they first start a new job - I spent the first day thinking how much I hated it and how I was going to quit and go back to trying to get a lab-based job. Of course, these thoughts have just about passed and I now see it as a tremendous opportunity. To bring people who don't know up to speed, I'm working for Thorn Lighting (one of the UK and Europe's biggest lighting firms) in a small team (just 3 people!) alongside teams from Durham university (including my PhD supervisor) and Sumation from Cambridge/Japan to work out a path to bringing out a commercial white-light OLED. There's plenty of competition - in Europe there's Philips and Osram, in the US there's UDC, Eastman-Kodak and GE and in the Far East Konica-Minolta.
I'm starting to understand several things about how the real world works. Firstly it's absolutely full of people over-exaggerating everything. The reason for this is simple - money. If you are trying to get money out of someone for your project they are more likely to give it to you if you play up what your work could lead to. At the moment the in-thing in research grant applications is climate change - simply find a way of getting that phrase into a research proposal and people will fall over themselves to give you cash. In our case, apparently our team has "a substantial number of chemists and physicists" working on it - in reality we've got 2 and a half chemists and 3 physicists. Likewise when it comes to reporting results everyone will be very selectve about what they report - for example konica-minolta have reported a white-OLED with a luminous efficiency of 64 lm/W which is very good, but there is no mention of the lifetimes which leads us to believe that it simply dies after a few hours - not the most useful thing ever then. Our main European rivals, the Olla project, have showcased 15cm squared tiles of light, but on closer inspection you can tell it's made up from smaller panels.
Secondly, it's not what you know - it's who you know. A lot of our job seems to be networking with other people in the industry and keeping our fingers in various pies. It almost seems like our future careers depend on it. Our project has a budget of £3.3 million over 3 years, but other projects in the US and Europe are having millions poured into them fairly regularly. It seems fairly clear that our parent company, Zumtobel, isn't particularly interested in taking this project further than the initial 3 years. My guess is they'll listen to our report, but with new production plants costing over £10m they'll simply buy in products from other companies and our team will be cut loose. My aim is to move on to the company I originally wanted to work for: CDT/Sumation. Sumation is the name for the chemistry wing that is a joint venture between CDT and the Sumitumo chemical company of Japan. In fact, just a few weeks ago Sumitomo acquired the rest of CDT for $285m. The position of senior chemist seems like it would be ideal for me - input into the chemistry on all Sumations projects, the prospect of travelling to Japan for work exchanges and meetings, worldwide travel to various conferences and trade shows and being very visible in the OLED community that is becoming more important every year.
One of the benefits of having worked in Durham for so long is that I can see through all the BS we're being fed. The trouble we've got is that Sumation are banging out new materials at a rate of knots but they refuse to tell us what they are (and as a chemist that is really frustrating) where as Durham aren't quite as quick. Having worked alongside them for the last 4 years I know when they are taking us for a ride. I get the feeling there is a lot of sitting around going on. Academia simply wants to get in money and do the work they want to do and it's partially our job to make them do what we want them to do. Thankfully since they are so close to us we can easily keep an eye on them. It's sad that I've realised this as I used to think that industry was unreasonably demanding but it turns out that academia is fairly unfocussed. It means I can't look at academic research the same as before - sort of like how Christmas changes when you "know" about Father Christmas.
Moments of excitement so far: getting my corporate credit card (haha!), the team meetings (especially the meals out - the last one was at Bistro21), going anywhere in my boss' car (a beefy Volvo S80 that he frequently rags - 80mph in 3rd gear anyone?) and our trip over to Manchester in the company Zafirer - a naughty 1.9 turbo diesel estate that loves to cruise at 90...
So 9 weeks in and 50% of the time I'm really excited about the possibilities this job may lead to (both for the technology/science and my own career) and 50% of the time I'm bored cos we've don't have so much to do at the moment (hence these updates). I'll report more in due course. In the mean time, here's a partial team photo.
L-R Igor (Durham chemist), Tom (Sumation chemist), Torsten (Sumation chemist), Andy (Durham physics supervisor), Ben (Durham physicist just back from Singapore), me, Fernando (Durham physicist), Olivier (Thorn physicist) and Geoff (Thorn supervisor).
Sunday, June 03, 2007
once more unto the breach
Once again I find myself packing to move. This time it's not so bad as it's only for an intermediate month-long period where I'll be living with Ollie and Rich. After that I'll move in with Emma and Barry for 6 or 7 months and beyond that who knows? Essentially I have two lists - one of things I'll need for a month and a second for things to bring up later when I'm more settled. Back in 1999 I had no idea what to pack for 9 weeks of term but over the next 4 years I became adept at cramming almost everything I would need during term into my parents' car (plus me and my parents). In 2003 I had to pack for 3 solid years of being away which wasn't too bad as I tried to shrink down the number of things I needed. This time I'm adopting my minimalist approach and have got it down to a suitcase, a box, a bag and my PC. Yep - my guitars are staying put for now. It still feels weird as this is the 3rd time I'm "leaving home" and as I try to extract and pair all my socks from the airing cupboard and decide which clothes to leave behind it strikes me that this could be the last time.
So I probably won't update this site for a month or so as I'll probably be limited to having the internet at work, but you never know.
So I probably won't update this site for a month or so as I'll probably be limited to having the internet at work, but you never know.
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Whatever happened to...chocolate edition
As Cadburys promotes its new creme egg dairy milk bar it's got me thinking that the chocolate industry is afraid of taking risks. What was the last NEW chocolate bar that you can remember being launched? It's a tough one and I'd have to say it might have been the Nestle Maverick bar from 1997. Since then, it seems that every new release has been on the back of the old Cadbury Dairy Milk (cdm) bars. Certain "new" releases have simply been the withdrawal of an old favourite to be replaced with another cdm flavour. Old favourites have such as caramel and wispa have been withdrawn to be replace by cdm with caramel and cdm bubbly and cdm varieties such as biscuit, mint chip, double choc, wafer and even creme egg have appeared. It just seems Cadbury isn't willing to take the time to come up with and develop new brands beyond the classic cdm. 
What's even more upsetting is that offshoots of the discontinued bars (such as the fantastic wispa gold) have had no replacement. It isn't just Cadbury who are doing it - Nestle and Mars play the same tricks too - Nestle bring out various updates of aero and kit-kat whilst Mars gets ample use out of the Mars and Galazy lines.
And don't get me started about standardising names. If it was called Snickers everywhere else in the world - why launch as Marathon in the UK?! Same goes for starburst/opal fruits. Turning the classic smarties cylindrical tube to a hexagonal tube - what was that about?
But does anyone remember the following discontinued range of treats:
Vice Versas - white chocolate centres with a brown sugar coating or, well - vice versa. They were supposed to target galaxy minstrels but ended up being cancelled, relaunched years later and then discontinued again...
Pretzel flips - here's an odd one.
Salted mini pretzels covered in milk chocolate or white chocolate fudge. They appeared, got us hooked and then vanished into the night.
Cadbury's astros - the supposed alternative to M&Ms. The packaging screamed "cigarette box" and the centre biscuit was very unpleasant if it went soggy.
Cabury jestives - an ordinary chocolate digestive not enough? how about with Cadbury milk chocolate? how about with cdm chunks in the biscuit too. They single handedly turned the world of chocolate-coated biscuit snacks on its head. Just about pipping chocolate hob-nobs to the "best biscuit" prize these have suddenly disappeared to be replaced with very dull regular Cadbury chocolate digestives. Boo!
Still, I'm sure I remember seeing the old Fry's Turkish delight advert on tv in the last couple of years. I'm guessing the old Cadburys fudge adverts won't get that treatment - "a finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat." Quite.
What's even more upsetting is that offshoots of the discontinued bars (such as the fantastic wispa gold) have had no replacement. It isn't just Cadbury who are doing it - Nestle and Mars play the same tricks too - Nestle bring out various updates of aero and kit-kat whilst Mars gets ample use out of the Mars and Galazy lines.And don't get me started about standardising names. If it was called Snickers everywhere else in the world - why launch as Marathon in the UK?! Same goes for starburst/opal fruits. Turning the classic smarties cylindrical tube to a hexagonal tube - what was that about?
But does anyone remember the following discontinued range of treats:
Vice Versas - white chocolate centres with a brown sugar coating or, well - vice versa. They were supposed to target galaxy minstrels but ended up being cancelled, relaunched years later and then discontinued again...
Pretzel flips - here's an odd one.
Salted mini pretzels covered in milk chocolate or white chocolate fudge. They appeared, got us hooked and then vanished into the night.Cadbury's astros - the supposed alternative to M&Ms. The packaging screamed "cigarette box" and the centre biscuit was very unpleasant if it went soggy.
Cabury jestives - an ordinary chocolate digestive not enough? how about with Cadbury milk chocolate? how about with cdm chunks in the biscuit too. They single handedly turned the world of chocolate-coated biscuit snacks on its head. Just about pipping chocolate hob-nobs to the "best biscuit" prize these have suddenly disappeared to be replaced with very dull regular Cadbury chocolate digestives. Boo!
Still, I'm sure I remember seeing the old Fry's Turkish delight advert on tv in the last couple of years. I'm guessing the old Cadburys fudge adverts won't get that treatment - "a finger of fudge is just enough to give your kids a treat." Quite.
PhD - over and out
Most people will tell you that a PhD takes three years. These people are wrong. Even if you were to finish your thesis and hand it in on the last day of the three years (like Matt did) it just won't go away. A few months later there's the viva, then you have to find the drive to do your corrections and get them approved followed by the arduous task of printing and binding multiple copies and finally the trip to submit them. On paper it all sounds like nothing compared to three years of work followed by writing a book, but it's really not that straight forward. A lot of supervisors will push their students really hard during the three years and then leave them to their own devices with the writeup. This means, if you aren't careful it can drag on and on and could even turn into something that just seems like it will never end. After all my issues during my final year, the one thing I clung on to was my determination to have the write up finished by Christmas. I'd seen far too many people not submit until the following summer - even Amy form my group who seemed to have nearly finished writing when she left took 8 months to submit. Thankfully, due to my ruthless efficiency at writing I managed that feat with a good two weeks to spare (in fact, if it hadn't been for a mix up with my supervisor I would have been done and dusted within 5 weeks of leaving). The plan back in September '05 was to start planning the write up over Easter and start writing soon after in the spare hours I had during the day. Those who know me will know what I think about plans...and sure enough Easter came and went with no planning done at all. It got to the start of July and I was starting to get worried as not only had I not started writing, but I hadn't started planning yet. The new plan became to have the literature review done and the rest planned out by the time I left. This time I exceeded expectations and left having completed 4 and a half out of seven chapters. Oh - and the Edison quote from the start - that took a few days of searching to decide on.
Halfway through my second year I was found my life and my chemistry were going pretty well and I told my lab-mate Carl that I wasn't scared of the idea of the viva. He didn't believe me but as the time drew closer I was actually terrified - not of the viva, but about how little work I'd done for it. Once it was done I was sent away with a list of typos and a couple of figures to tweak and 10 days later I had an approved thesis. With "the worst" behind me I took my foot off the gas pedal which was a mistake. I hunted around for the best paper to print on (which is so anal for something that is going to sit on a shelf for eternity). This was where I started to run into problems. The university "insists" on certain standards for the layout of a thesis - all the official guidelines tell us to ensure that our theses conform to BS4821. Unfortunately this standard was withfrawn in the 1990s and there is nowhere on the web that will tell you what the damn thing actually said! The graduate school weren't very helpful either; "we don't have a copy in Durham - Newcastle University library may have a copy." Well that's very helpful. Eventually I just decided to print it the way I'd done it. Thankfully I could get it bound at Birmingham university. Durham must be the only university in the country to not have a binding service. Even the local pronaprint won't touch theses. I mean come on - the library must do a shedload of binding with all the journals it gets not to mention the money to be made from the many thousands of students needed theses, projects, dissertations and reports binding. No wonder Durham seems to be leaking money all over the place. The final hurdle was sorting out the attached CD. I had three different sets of instructions on the requirements for CDs - it's as if the grad school simply forgot they'd already written requirements for CDs and wrote new ones. Twice. Eventually I just picked one and went with it.
This had taken nearly three months from the date of my viva - it should have been done in about a week. I imagined all sorts of grand things happening when I finally submitted my hardbound copies, but all that happened was the lady at the grad school desk simply took them off my and wandered off - I had to call her back just to get a receipt. A bit underwhelming. The thing is, Matt who handed in his thesis to be assesed in September only handed in his hardbound copies about a week before me in the end. My advice to anyone writing up - don't slack off once you get the viva out of the way - I was fairly well organised and it still took me three months to finish up everything - just go for it and finish it off. As it is my PhD has taken me 3 years, 6 months, and 25 days from start to finish (and I still have to sort out all the graduation stuff). I feel really sorry for all the physicists who have had their funding extended to 4 years - if they drag their feet over the write up even a little their PhD will consume half a decade of their life - more if the write up drags on and that's really scary. This is just training, not our life's work!
More advice? Ok - here's something I really wish someone had said to me along the way. Everyone needs to feel special at some point. I guess when you start a PhD you're really excited and feel different from our friends who left university after their degrees, but after a while it seems like everyone around you is doing a PhD too and it can feel like what you're doing is fairly common. I don't have the actual figure, but I hazard a guess that maybe 1% (if that) of the UK population has a PhD - what we're all doing is something amazing that very few people will ever get the chance to do and what you yourself is doing is probably something that a handful of people on Earth will be working on. I hope that gives you some kind of comfort in the struggle ahead.
The sad thing is that even though it's the 21st century, all the British Library will keep is a microfilm record of the title and contents pages. If someone wants a copy, then the BL will have to ring up Durham and some poor gimp will have to go and dig the thesis out of the depository and photocopy it. Wouldn't it have just been simpler for the BL to ask for a copy in PDF format? I know I'm potentially loosing royalty fees by doing this, but if you want a read of my thesis just click the link below.
clicky
Over the last few years I've been as happy as I've ever been, as unhappy as I've ever been and every point in between. I've always managed to get on with my work. I lot of people drop out, a lot of people take an age over the write up and lots more finish and then never want to do the subject again. I am not one of these people.
Halfway through my second year I was found my life and my chemistry were going pretty well and I told my lab-mate Carl that I wasn't scared of the idea of the viva. He didn't believe me but as the time drew closer I was actually terrified - not of the viva, but about how little work I'd done for it. Once it was done I was sent away with a list of typos and a couple of figures to tweak and 10 days later I had an approved thesis. With "the worst" behind me I took my foot off the gas pedal which was a mistake. I hunted around for the best paper to print on (which is so anal for something that is going to sit on a shelf for eternity). This was where I started to run into problems. The university "insists" on certain standards for the layout of a thesis - all the official guidelines tell us to ensure that our theses conform to BS4821. Unfortunately this standard was withfrawn in the 1990s and there is nowhere on the web that will tell you what the damn thing actually said! The graduate school weren't very helpful either; "we don't have a copy in Durham - Newcastle University library may have a copy." Well that's very helpful. Eventually I just decided to print it the way I'd done it. Thankfully I could get it bound at Birmingham university. Durham must be the only university in the country to not have a binding service. Even the local pronaprint won't touch theses. I mean come on - the library must do a shedload of binding with all the journals it gets not to mention the money to be made from the many thousands of students needed theses, projects, dissertations and reports binding. No wonder Durham seems to be leaking money all over the place. The final hurdle was sorting out the attached CD. I had three different sets of instructions on the requirements for CDs - it's as if the grad school simply forgot they'd already written requirements for CDs and wrote new ones. Twice. Eventually I just picked one and went with it.
This had taken nearly three months from the date of my viva - it should have been done in about a week. I imagined all sorts of grand things happening when I finally submitted my hardbound copies, but all that happened was the lady at the grad school desk simply took them off my and wandered off - I had to call her back just to get a receipt. A bit underwhelming. The thing is, Matt who handed in his thesis to be assesed in September only handed in his hardbound copies about a week before me in the end. My advice to anyone writing up - don't slack off once you get the viva out of the way - I was fairly well organised and it still took me three months to finish up everything - just go for it and finish it off. As it is my PhD has taken me 3 years, 6 months, and 25 days from start to finish (and I still have to sort out all the graduation stuff). I feel really sorry for all the physicists who have had their funding extended to 4 years - if they drag their feet over the write up even a little their PhD will consume half a decade of their life - more if the write up drags on and that's really scary. This is just training, not our life's work!
More advice? Ok - here's something I really wish someone had said to me along the way. Everyone needs to feel special at some point. I guess when you start a PhD you're really excited and feel different from our friends who left university after their degrees, but after a while it seems like everyone around you is doing a PhD too and it can feel like what you're doing is fairly common. I don't have the actual figure, but I hazard a guess that maybe 1% (if that) of the UK population has a PhD - what we're all doing is something amazing that very few people will ever get the chance to do and what you yourself is doing is probably something that a handful of people on Earth will be working on. I hope that gives you some kind of comfort in the struggle ahead.
The sad thing is that even though it's the 21st century, all the British Library will keep is a microfilm record of the title and contents pages. If someone wants a copy, then the BL will have to ring up Durham and some poor gimp will have to go and dig the thesis out of the depository and photocopy it. Wouldn't it have just been simpler for the BL to ask for a copy in PDF format? I know I'm potentially loosing royalty fees by doing this, but if you want a read of my thesis just click the link below.
clicky
Over the last few years I've been as happy as I've ever been, as unhappy as I've ever been and every point in between. I've always managed to get on with my work. I lot of people drop out, a lot of people take an age over the write up and lots more finish and then never want to do the subject again. I am not one of these people.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
Unknown Quantity
So as I mentioned a few weeks ago I've been listening to our old Unknown Quantity CDs again. For those that don't know, Unknown Quantity was the name of the band I was in at school. Ever since I was young I was fascinated by the guitar and eventually I started going to a guitar group class after school in Bromsgrove. Unfortunately I was only 10 at the time and I had a full-sized classical guitar so my hands were far too small so I got really frustrated and mostly just messed around with my friend. Once I was going to KES my parents made me take classical lessons which I hated so I never practised. Grade exams were a major stress and eventually I failed grade 2. Initially I thought this was the end of my guitar "career" but a few years later one of my friends at school took up the electric guitar and began playing during lunch periods in the class room. Suddenly I realised that playing guitar didn't have to be about studying and learning pieces I had no interest in. I went back to my classical and with the help of "the internet" I started learning chords and spent a week or so moving from one to another until it became second nature. Two of my friends, James mentioned that he played the drums and Phil subsequently took up the guitar. In a few months we were sitting around and James said "so I suppose we should have a band practice then" and Unknown Quantity was born.Eventually we found a permanent bassist in another friend, Raj. A little over a month later we were playing our first gig.
The gigs came every so often but over the summer we concentrated on writing our own songs. Thankfully we had Phil, who in addition to being a fantastic singer was fairly adept at writing songs. At the end of August 1998 we booked into Junction 7 studios in Great Bar for three days to record our first CD, The End EP. The name was us trying to be clever as it meant our first releaes would be called The End. We bought 200 CDs and actually managed to sell about 2/3 of them and so the following summer we returned with more ambitious songs for four days. This time around the name caused us some problems. 
We rejected naming it after a song and other titles suggested were Funky Monks (after the sound engineer Dennis suggested that the backing vocals on the first track sounded like monks) and Snake: 357 (during the recording we were getting our first experience of Snake on the Nokia 5110 and 357 was our best score). It's a good job we didn't go with that 'cos 357 is a rubbish score. Eventually we settled on The Blue EP after the cool (and at the time unusual blue colour of the writing side of the CDs). The gigs kept on coming including one at The Flapper & Firkin the day before Idlewild played there. We also made it into the NME gig listings. A few years ago James and I worked out the tracklist for a "greatest hits" CD and amazingly, the two EP names came together to give The Blend - perfect. The tracks from The Blend are available to download by clicking the links below.The way things used to be
The first track on both The Blue EP and The Blend is a pretty short track. Phil left recording the vocals until last to get a more rough, raspy tone and the backing vocals over the second verse and outro were described by Dennis as sounding "like monks". I'm still happy with the funky wah-outro.
Simple minds
A track from The Blue EP that came together from two different ideas - the rocky intro and chorus and the palm-muted verses. The backing vocals and extra guitar overdubs were a result of our experience recording The End EP. This is one song where I'd really like to go back and record a different lead track - more subtle during the verse and faster during the solo. To those that are interested, the effect on Phil's voice in the chorus came from a Zoom 505 pedal with BL-distortion at a gain of 1/30. So, even those cheap multifunction pedals got some use.
Receipt
This is the big one. One of the first songs we wrote. Whilst Phil wrote the lyrics for all the other songs, I pitched the main lyric for this one - If life came with a receipt would you take it back? (at Selly Oak station, 1998). This actually became a fan favourite early on and is still a very good song. When recording The Blue EP we recorded a new version of Receipt with more overdubs and keyboard, but it didn't sound as good as the original - even with the mysteriously loud drum beat at 3.40'.
Nearly
People can say things that ruin songs. My roommate at Trevs told me that someone had ruined the Radiohead song Lucky for him by getting him to associate the line "I'm on a roll" with Thom Yorke standing on a giant loaf of bread. For us it was Dennis with some of his takes on our songs' lyrics. "Nellie? Who's Nellie?" he asked after hearing the chorus of this song where Phil bellows out "Nearly!" A finger picked opening leads to a nice 3 chord progression. I'm still happy with the solo although I should have been more adamant that it be turned up in the mix. "It's REM-like" said Dennis - "needs more balls" says I. We added more to the song afterwards and I still love the non-linear fashion of it.
Without You
This resulted from Phil and James messing around. Phil was playing Climbing up the walls by Radiohead and James kept telling him to "go higher" resulting in the A-D-E-G chorus sequence. This is one of the tracks that underwent the biggest transformation in the studio. Dennis encouraged us to break away from the same sound all the way through the record and as such we played around a lot with this one. The start is the result of hitting the body and necks of our guitars with everything from our hands to coins as well as the use of a Ugandan thumb piano that Phil's sister had lent to us. The lazy-dreamy lead guitar uses a heap of reverb whilst the overdriven guitar effect that comes in on the chorus was achieved by James lying on the floor and plugging in my guitar just as I played the chord. It took a lot of takes as I kept moving my guitar and it's only just occurred to me that it would have been a lot simpler to plug the other end of the lead into the amp instead. Finally the snare drum was given an echo which gave the impression of bats flapping around your head. Thankfully, we learnt to achieve most of these effects when we played live. It's under 3 minutes, but it's almost the perfect angst-song about loss.
Is it real?
After The End EP we took it easy on new songs and by the time we played the Farce & Firkin this was the only thing we had come up with. It's a playful pop song with a catchy start-stop rhythm part. The lead part almost wrote itself, but by the time it came to record the song for The Blue EP I still hadn't completely figured the solo. The one you hear on the CD is largely improvised and ends with a nice harmonising with the bridge-lead part. Unfortunately, for the life of me I can't remember how to play this at all.
Set on you
I longed for us to come up with a song or cover whereby when we played live Raj and James could start off and then I would come on and join in and then finally Phil would arrive. Instead we used the This Life theme as our opening to every gig. The verses of Set on you are based around a chord progression from that theme and the Fraggle Rock-esque chorus came from an idea I had floating around. Dennis' comment: "I will sit on you? What?"
R-song (remix)
This was the first song we wrote together. Phil had come up with the chords and lyrics and at one band practice we tried playing along for about 10 minutes and then pouring over the results listening for parts we liked. Amazingly, the first bit of lead I played was a hit (although it took me a while to remember what I'd actually played). The song became known as Our song as it was the only song of our own and later shortened to R-song. However, at this point we didn't have a bassist so when we played our first gig we simply played the song without bass. When we tried it in the studio it simply sounded wrong and anaemic without the bass so Dennis suggest we loose the drums and make it lo-fi. As a result James recorded a tambourine track and the lead was heavily compressed and lowered to create a very dreamy texture hence the (remix). Unfortunately, Dennis decided to fade the song out despite the fact that it had an ending. There are a lot of other songs that do this, but it's something I don't like - if a song has an actual ending, then let us hear it.
Back on track
There are some songs that have a moment - a split second where the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. The bit in Fix you by Coldplay where the drums and piano come in on the outro is a good example. Back on track is the song on The Blue EP that has our "moment". At 2.19' the smooth overdriven guitar chords make way for a return to the picking melody of the intro, but heavier complete with the pacing drumbeat. That makes no sense, but you'll understand when you hear it. James and I spotted (heard?) the potential when we were listening to one of the many run-throughs and worked on making it really stand out. In the studio, Phil decided to add the keyboard parts that we'd never really heard as a part of the song and, unlike the remix of Receipt, they worked really well. The end of the solo has got one of those "what happened there?" moments where the note is cut and then reappears as a harmonic. When planning set lists for gigs we always put Back on track after several quieter songs as it was a way of getting back on track with the heavier songs. One of my favourites.
The End
Title track from The End EP and in my opinion a bit of a mess. How I know that is because most of my lead part was improvised from basic ideas. Lyrically too I don't think this was among our best. The thing I do love though is Phil's guitar tone. The studio had an old Marshall 4040 stack, but Phil had just acquired a Marshall jtm610 - a 60w valve amp with 3 10" speakers. We nicknamed it "the big one" as it was absolutely massive. In the lull after the first chorus you can hear it sustain the rhythm guitar before it suddenly roars back into life at 2.08 - one of our favourite "moments" from The End EP.
Touch
This is the song that shows how far we'd come in the year since The End EP. Although Phil had the first ideas for the song in 1998 (I first heard the basic idea after the ridiculous "challenge of management" course we went on). Over the year it evolved with James creating the drums from a sequencing program we bought for him. Although we used minidisc to carry the track to the studio we had to use the old-fashioned 3.5mm jack cable to get it on and off the MD in the first place so we were a bit anxious about whether it would be good enough quality. Thankfully Dennis gave it the thumbs up and we were in business. Originally there was supposed to be a slide guitar part over the second verse, but the action on our guitars was too low and it just sounded awful. The remnants of this can be heard behind the "I am there" line. Dennis nearly (Nellie!) ruined the song again by saying "Posh girls don't say 'I'm cuming,' they say 'I'm there'" - thankfully I managed to get past that. The lead part in the second verse is based on REMs Drive the unfortunate triangle beat at the end (which we hated pretty much straight away) was our homage to OK Computer. Even the "yip-yip-yeah"s are likeable and the effect on Phil's voice is a "bathroom reverb". This song is by far my favourite - it sounds different and adventurous and for once I was actually fascinated by the lyrics. Depending on how you read them the song takes on radically different tones. Taken at face value the lyrics such as "I would reach for the sky, but I couldn't touch you" conjure up the impression of a love song, but if you dig a little deeper, it can also take on a much creepier interpretation as a song about stalking; "when your world falls apart...I am there." I guess the meaning depends on your outlook, but I frequently flit between the two ideas.
Fade Away
This was Phil's pet solo project. He wrote and performed it himself and was keen to use multiple vocal tracks to harmonise which led to much more on The Blue EP. In fact, when playing live, the rest of the band sometimes joined the audience for this song. Dennis' comment to the line "You shattered my fears" was "what was that? You shat on my face?"...
There are so many more memories - manhandling Phil's "big one" around (it was the heaviest thing known to man), arriving at the Bromsgrove battle of the bands (with James covered in Disney plasters) to find most of the crowd consisted of people wearing hoodies with slogans such as "I am the god of fuck" and thinking "oh dear...", meeting the PA guy at a gig who introduced us to his assistant whose first contribution to the conversation was to break wind very loudly (we may have gone to KES, but we weren't above fart jokes), the really nerdy time vs rock graphs we use to draw when planning set lists (OK this was normally me and Phil) and that's before all the tales from the studio such as Phil walking through Birmingham with £400 in his shoes (Dennis wanted cash payment and Phil was afraid of getting mugged) and the time we first went to look around the studio; Dennis told us that he had helped other bands out and gave us the example of a band who had the lyric "there's a knock at the door" followed by a few snare drum hits. Dennis told us he'd convinced them to change the lyric to "there's a door at the knock" to "shake things up a bit" which seemed ok to us. Then about two hours later we suddenly though "What?!?" 
The biggest thing though was the end of the first day at the studio when we went into the sound booth to hear what we'd done on Receipt. Upto this point we'd only heard ourselves via a tape recorder that changed the pitch on playback and had an auto-levelling microphone (so when the drums came in the volume of the other instruments went down) and even just hearing the basic track (drums, bass and one guitar) was absolutely amazing. We knew we'd done something special as it sounded not only amazing, but very professional too. A little known fact is that Receipt and Without you made it into the mp3.com top100 (with Without you reaching #52).Sadly we haven't actually played together since we recorded The Blue EP as we've been scattered around the country ever since. Next year however I'd love to get back together and play a gig in August/September to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of The End EP. Whether or not this happens remains to be seen.
Friday, March 23, 2007
Printers of the (near) future
As someone who recently had to print out nearly 800 sides worth of theses I know how monotonous it is waiting for the printer to get through a large job. A colour laser printer took 45 minutes to print 120 colour pages - not exactly quick. In addition, anyone who has ever printed off an A0 poster from a plotter will testify that they're not quick (at around half an inch per minute it always results in the yearly battle between chemistry and biology finalists at Durham).
However Memjet, a startup company, is claiming to have invented printers that can print 4x6" photos at 30 photos/minute, A4 colour at 60 page/minute and large scale posters at 1 foot/second. It sounds good on paper (sorry), but they've released a video showing the printers in action and the demonstrations have been witnessed by third parties too. The most incredible thing though is the price - a regular A4 printer is going to cost under $200...
However Memjet, a startup company, is claiming to have invented printers that can print 4x6" photos at 30 photos/minute, A4 colour at 60 page/minute and large scale posters at 1 foot/second. It sounds good on paper (sorry), but they've released a video showing the printers in action and the demonstrations have been witnessed by third parties too. The most incredible thing though is the price - a regular A4 printer is going to cost under $200...
Friday, March 09, 2007
'06 AKA the music post
All the links in the following post got to videos. I've tried to link to live performances where possible. If you enjoy some of the new bands I encourage you to join Pandora (if you don't live in the US simply enter 90210 as the zip code) and discover even more!
Before I became a massive film fan, my biggest passion was music. At school I was pretty much just into British indie. My school wasn't exactly awash with people going out and discovering unknown bands so we pretty much followed what Jo Whiley and Steve Lamaq offered up for us: so we went through Blur, Oasis, the Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, Garbage and the album that everyone born from 1978-1984 seems to have been issued with: Alanis Morisette - Jagged Little Pill. In fact the more adventurous of us were fans of Radiohead and the real music fans were the ones who tracked down all the Oasis B-sides...
The fantastic thing about university was that I was suddenly thrown into the mix with people from all over the country, and indeed, the world. This brought a whole new selection of music that I'd never considered. My next door neighbour for example was also a massive Radiohead fan and gave me a tape with a load of b-sides. He broadened my taste in rock by introducing me to bands such as Faith No More, Limp Bizkit, The Lemonheads and rock outfits like Soulfly and Orgy. Then my friend on the adjacent landing introduced me to Moby. At the time Play had been out for over a year and had done nothing in the charts so when a group of us went to see him live it was before he hit the big time and the gig was in the wonderfully intimate venue of Newcastle student union. Within weeks he was playing Wembley. Also that year I discovered Muse and, with some advice from a friend from home, Coldplay and Doves. In the second year I was finally introduced to Pink Floyd who I'd never have got into otherwise. Honestly, I think most people get into these old bands through their parents but mine don't seem to like modern music so I've had to do all the leg (or ear) work myself. The third year brought about the discovery of Ben Folds Five and Lemonjelly.
Moby with Feeling So Real at Glastonbury 2000
It's along time since these discoveries and so many "next big thing" bands have dropped away. My friend told me to look through an old copy of Select magazine from my first year and see the bands that had vanished. Sure enough whatever happened to: Travis (ok they have a new album due soon), JJ72, Feeder, Gomez, Nine Inch Nails, Embrace and Supergrass?
I've written before about the power of the internet and how it's shrinking the world. With sites like Youtube and Pandora it's very easy to find new music. 2006 for me was the year of the foreign band. Being English it's easy and a bit arrogant to assume that the only music that's worth listening to is in English. However it's pretty liberating to realise the most countries have their own music scene. Right at the start of the year we were exposed to Norweigan music as an acoustic session kicked off at the bar we happened to be in in Oslo one night. I got into "Scando-rock" and now own albums by Poor Rich Ones (Norway), Kent (Sweden) and Sigur Ros (Iceland) - click the links for some videos.
Kent and Den döda vinkeln (the dead angle)
Given I was in Japan for 2 weeks I was a bit disappointed with how little Jpop I actually heard. In fact the only songs I heard were the 2 from the film Nana - and that was on the flight over. All was not lost however as I was bitten by the bug as soon as I imported the DS game Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. The whole game is based around 15 Jpop songs from the last 20 years or so; from some I'd heard before (The Blue Hearts and L'arc en Ciel) to the kitsch girl group with a constant revolving door of members: Morning Musume (warning: this link leads to very cheesy Jpop) and reliable indie groups B'z and the Yellow Monkey. A combination of Pandora and Youtube led me to pick up several albums - a couple by L'arc en Ciel and a couple by Yaida Hitomi who really puts me in mind of a cross between Natalie Imbruglia (in that her songs are very catchy and a cut above generic pop and she has a very capable backing band), Alanis Morisette (similar voice) and Garbage (the backing band, Diamond Head, are all studio producers).
Yaiko and the amazing Over the Distance
I'm still trying to track down some B'z and Yellow Monkey albums and I'd love to get hold of some X Japan. X Japan are the band that started the whole visual kei movement in Japan and are sort of a cross between Megadeath, Guns n' Roses and the Scorpions. They vary between speed rock, power ballads and classical-esque songs and were huge influences on a wide range of western artists.
X Japan with the power ballad Endless Rain.
As I've mentioned (again and again) the soundtracks to various Zach Braff productions (Garden State and Scrubs) have been an invaluable source of new music inspiration. So far I've discovered Colin Hay, Imogen Heap and Frou Frou, Josh Radin, The Shins, The Postal Service, Rhett Miller and Cary Brothers. Late 2006 brought another Braff-created OST for the film The Last Kiss. Once again it features a cross of well known bands (Snow Patrol, Coldplay, Turin Breaks and Aimee Mann) and less known artists (Josh Radin, Athlete, Rachel Yamagata and Remy Zero). Its very much a stripped back album and Chocolate by Snow Patrol is about as rocky as it gets. However, there are some amazing songs such as Radin's duet with Schuyler Fisk Paperweight and Ray LaMontagne's Hold You In My Arms.
Josh Radin and Schuyler Fisk duet on Paperweight - the most beautiful song I've heard in ages.
So, since getting into music in the mid 90s, I just needed to get to university to develop an ear for music beyond indie. My 1st year roommate told me "When I met you you were indie-boy." Now my tastes have broadened to nearly all extremes. At the moment I'm very fond of acoustic singer songwriters such as Colin Hay and Josh Radin, but at the same time I love rock bands such as Black Stone Cherry and Muse. From the samples of Lemonjelly and the Go! Team to the urgency of the nu-metal/hip hop Jay-Z/Linkin Park crossover Collision Course. I can even just about take jazz and country music now too.
LemonJelly with The Staunton Lick
Linkin Park vs Jay-Z with Jigga What/Faint
It seems weird, but modern indie seems to have gone too mainstream. Bands like The Kaiserchiefs, Snow Patrol and The Killers are prime Radio 1 fodder. The weird thing is they are very middle of the road. Snow Patrol's last album Final Straw is very good up to about track 8, but it just keeps going and the good momentum it built up is lost and whenever I've seen them playing, the singer always seems heavily out of tune which doesn't help. The Killers too had a great 7 or 8 songs on their first album, but the rest of it along with the few songs I've heard off Sam's Town just don't appeal. Even old favourites such as Weezer are putting out very iffy albums - I honestly can't remember the last time I listened to the 2nd half of Make Believe. It seems like a lot of bands have forgotten how to make an album and instead just bundle a load of songs together on a CD.
The best thing happening in indie at the moment is Bloc Party. I got into them late last year (about 18 months late). When I first heard them I didn't like it but there was something about it that kept me coming back for another listen.
Bloc Party's tv debut with Helicopter
Muse are the other big British band of the moment. I was actually a bit disappointed with Absolution - there were some great songs like Time Is Running Out and Hysteria but there were a lot of forgettable songs. I got my first taste of 2006's Black Holes and Revelations in my ryokan room in Tokyo via the music video for Supermassive Black Hole. The sound was so different to anything they'd done before and was skirting into Prince territory - no bad thing. When the album came out a lot of people were disappointed, myself included. Sure tracks such as Knights of Cydonia were instant classics but Supermassive... was the only song with a new sound, Soldier's Poem completely broke the flow of the album and there weren't any songs that jumped out at you in the way something like Cave or Plug-in Baby did. However, over time the album really grew on me and it's down to the subtleties in the tracks. Take a song like Map Of The Problematique: it's the same 4 chords all the way through but little things like the step-filter on the introduction and the background guitar lines really make the track stand out.
Map of the Problematique by Muse
Perhaps drifting a bit from indie are Doves who are quite happy to ignore genres and just release their songs. Their albums drift between indie and chill-out with ease and I'm always looking forward to what they will produce next.
Doves on Jools Holland with Pounding
I don't know what bands and artists are going to attract my attention next. Thanks to the web the chances are they may not even have been heard of in this country. For example, The Fray are just launching their album over here, but I heard current single How To Save A Life a year ago via a Scrubs episode.
Finally I have to mention a few more albums I'm really eager to pick up. Fred Deakin, half of LemonJelly, has released a 3CD mix album called Triptych which sounds pretty amazing and I still have to pick up the new Shins album, Wincing The Night Away. I've heard very mixed reports about the new Bloc Party album but I'll give it a go.
That's part 1 done. Part 2 will be about why music is so important to me. It'll probably appear here rather than this blog (there you go Lue - something will appear there).
Before I became a massive film fan, my biggest passion was music. At school I was pretty much just into British indie. My school wasn't exactly awash with people going out and discovering unknown bands so we pretty much followed what Jo Whiley and Steve Lamaq offered up for us: so we went through Blur, Oasis, the Manic Street Preachers, Stereophonics, Garbage and the album that everyone born from 1978-1984 seems to have been issued with: Alanis Morisette - Jagged Little Pill. In fact the more adventurous of us were fans of Radiohead and the real music fans were the ones who tracked down all the Oasis B-sides...
The fantastic thing about university was that I was suddenly thrown into the mix with people from all over the country, and indeed, the world. This brought a whole new selection of music that I'd never considered. My next door neighbour for example was also a massive Radiohead fan and gave me a tape with a load of b-sides. He broadened my taste in rock by introducing me to bands such as Faith No More, Limp Bizkit, The Lemonheads and rock outfits like Soulfly and Orgy. Then my friend on the adjacent landing introduced me to Moby. At the time Play had been out for over a year and had done nothing in the charts so when a group of us went to see him live it was before he hit the big time and the gig was in the wonderfully intimate venue of Newcastle student union. Within weeks he was playing Wembley. Also that year I discovered Muse and, with some advice from a friend from home, Coldplay and Doves. In the second year I was finally introduced to Pink Floyd who I'd never have got into otherwise. Honestly, I think most people get into these old bands through their parents but mine don't seem to like modern music so I've had to do all the leg (or ear) work myself. The third year brought about the discovery of Ben Folds Five and Lemonjelly.
Moby with Feeling So Real at Glastonbury 2000
It's along time since these discoveries and so many "next big thing" bands have dropped away. My friend told me to look through an old copy of Select magazine from my first year and see the bands that had vanished. Sure enough whatever happened to: Travis (ok they have a new album due soon), JJ72, Feeder, Gomez, Nine Inch Nails, Embrace and Supergrass?
I've written before about the power of the internet and how it's shrinking the world. With sites like Youtube and Pandora it's very easy to find new music. 2006 for me was the year of the foreign band. Being English it's easy and a bit arrogant to assume that the only music that's worth listening to is in English. However it's pretty liberating to realise the most countries have their own music scene. Right at the start of the year we were exposed to Norweigan music as an acoustic session kicked off at the bar we happened to be in in Oslo one night. I got into "Scando-rock" and now own albums by Poor Rich Ones (Norway), Kent (Sweden) and Sigur Ros (Iceland) - click the links for some videos.
Kent and Den döda vinkeln (the dead angle)
Given I was in Japan for 2 weeks I was a bit disappointed with how little Jpop I actually heard. In fact the only songs I heard were the 2 from the film Nana - and that was on the flight over. All was not lost however as I was bitten by the bug as soon as I imported the DS game Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan. The whole game is based around 15 Jpop songs from the last 20 years or so; from some I'd heard before (The Blue Hearts and L'arc en Ciel) to the kitsch girl group with a constant revolving door of members: Morning Musume (warning: this link leads to very cheesy Jpop) and reliable indie groups B'z and the Yellow Monkey. A combination of Pandora and Youtube led me to pick up several albums - a couple by L'arc en Ciel and a couple by Yaida Hitomi who really puts me in mind of a cross between Natalie Imbruglia (in that her songs are very catchy and a cut above generic pop and she has a very capable backing band), Alanis Morisette (similar voice) and Garbage (the backing band, Diamond Head, are all studio producers).
Yaiko and the amazing Over the Distance
I'm still trying to track down some B'z and Yellow Monkey albums and I'd love to get hold of some X Japan. X Japan are the band that started the whole visual kei movement in Japan and are sort of a cross between Megadeath, Guns n' Roses and the Scorpions. They vary between speed rock, power ballads and classical-esque songs and were huge influences on a wide range of western artists.
X Japan with the power ballad Endless Rain.
As I've mentioned (again and again) the soundtracks to various Zach Braff productions (Garden State and Scrubs) have been an invaluable source of new music inspiration. So far I've discovered Colin Hay, Imogen Heap and Frou Frou, Josh Radin, The Shins, The Postal Service, Rhett Miller and Cary Brothers. Late 2006 brought another Braff-created OST for the film The Last Kiss. Once again it features a cross of well known bands (Snow Patrol, Coldplay, Turin Breaks and Aimee Mann) and less known artists (Josh Radin, Athlete, Rachel Yamagata and Remy Zero). Its very much a stripped back album and Chocolate by Snow Patrol is about as rocky as it gets. However, there are some amazing songs such as Radin's duet with Schuyler Fisk Paperweight and Ray LaMontagne's Hold You In My Arms.
Josh Radin and Schuyler Fisk duet on Paperweight - the most beautiful song I've heard in ages.
So, since getting into music in the mid 90s, I just needed to get to university to develop an ear for music beyond indie. My 1st year roommate told me "When I met you you were indie-boy." Now my tastes have broadened to nearly all extremes. At the moment I'm very fond of acoustic singer songwriters such as Colin Hay and Josh Radin, but at the same time I love rock bands such as Black Stone Cherry and Muse. From the samples of Lemonjelly and the Go! Team to the urgency of the nu-metal/hip hop Jay-Z/Linkin Park crossover Collision Course. I can even just about take jazz and country music now too.
LemonJelly with The Staunton Lick
Linkin Park vs Jay-Z with Jigga What/Faint
It seems weird, but modern indie seems to have gone too mainstream. Bands like The Kaiserchiefs, Snow Patrol and The Killers are prime Radio 1 fodder. The weird thing is they are very middle of the road. Snow Patrol's last album Final Straw is very good up to about track 8, but it just keeps going and the good momentum it built up is lost and whenever I've seen them playing, the singer always seems heavily out of tune which doesn't help. The Killers too had a great 7 or 8 songs on their first album, but the rest of it along with the few songs I've heard off Sam's Town just don't appeal. Even old favourites such as Weezer are putting out very iffy albums - I honestly can't remember the last time I listened to the 2nd half of Make Believe. It seems like a lot of bands have forgotten how to make an album and instead just bundle a load of songs together on a CD.
The best thing happening in indie at the moment is Bloc Party. I got into them late last year (about 18 months late). When I first heard them I didn't like it but there was something about it that kept me coming back for another listen.
Bloc Party's tv debut with Helicopter
Muse are the other big British band of the moment. I was actually a bit disappointed with Absolution - there were some great songs like Time Is Running Out and Hysteria but there were a lot of forgettable songs. I got my first taste of 2006's Black Holes and Revelations in my ryokan room in Tokyo via the music video for Supermassive Black Hole. The sound was so different to anything they'd done before and was skirting into Prince territory - no bad thing. When the album came out a lot of people were disappointed, myself included. Sure tracks such as Knights of Cydonia were instant classics but Supermassive... was the only song with a new sound, Soldier's Poem completely broke the flow of the album and there weren't any songs that jumped out at you in the way something like Cave or Plug-in Baby did. However, over time the album really grew on me and it's down to the subtleties in the tracks. Take a song like Map Of The Problematique: it's the same 4 chords all the way through but little things like the step-filter on the introduction and the background guitar lines really make the track stand out.
Map of the Problematique by Muse
Perhaps drifting a bit from indie are Doves who are quite happy to ignore genres and just release their songs. Their albums drift between indie and chill-out with ease and I'm always looking forward to what they will produce next.
Doves on Jools Holland with Pounding
I don't know what bands and artists are going to attract my attention next. Thanks to the web the chances are they may not even have been heard of in this country. For example, The Fray are just launching their album over here, but I heard current single How To Save A Life a year ago via a Scrubs episode.
Finally I have to mention a few more albums I'm really eager to pick up. Fred Deakin, half of LemonJelly, has released a 3CD mix album called Triptych which sounds pretty amazing and I still have to pick up the new Shins album, Wincing The Night Away. I've heard very mixed reports about the new Bloc Party album but I'll give it a go.
That's part 1 done. Part 2 will be about why music is so important to me. It'll probably appear here rather than this blog (there you go Lue - something will appear there).
Wednesday, February 21, 2007
Minimalist lifestyles
Something that's become apparent to me since I got home is the relatively small amount of stuff I regularly use. I mean, most of my friends who were in my year would have got houses in 2002 whilst I've been living out of one room. And anyone who saw my room in House 3 at Trevs will know how small that was. But instead of seeing this as a drag it's really liberating. I've been trying to help my parents clean out our house and the amount of crap they keep for no reason is unbelievable. By living in such a small environment for so many years I've become accustomed to streamlining my stuff. I still find it really hard to throw things away - especially things with nostalgia value but you've got to do it. It's like 5 minutes of anguish after you bin it and that's it - you don't miss it. Matt and I coined the term minimalist lifestyle to reflect the lifestyle we've been living. I really love the idea of having one suitcase of clothes, a backpack of other items, a laptop and one trunk for shipping other things. In fact, when it looked like I might spend 6 months in the US teaching I was really excited to try out my ideas. Buy a laptop, put all my films into a 240-disc wallet, have all my music on my ipod, a suitcase of clothes and perhaps a trunk with slightly bulkier stuff. I used to think about taking a guitar as it's become so important in my life, but after seeing this I probably wouldn't even need one of those.
(watch all the way through cos when I saw it I thought "blah blah, whatever," but the sound is so good that I'm going to have to get this). My parents have filled the house with books but I love the idea of ebooks - Sony have already introduced their e-reader. Instead of shelves and shelves of books, imagine a device about the area of an A4 piece of paper that can hold as many books as you can fit onto a memory card. My friend Spike seems to have taken the opposite view. He moved to Australia for 3 years and decided to take as much of his stuff with him as possible to the point that one of his trunks had problems at customs due to the antique pistols in them...
I know that I'll probably get overrun with important documents and end up with a house full of crap, but it's nice to dream.
(watch all the way through cos when I saw it I thought "blah blah, whatever," but the sound is so good that I'm going to have to get this). My parents have filled the house with books but I love the idea of ebooks - Sony have already introduced their e-reader. Instead of shelves and shelves of books, imagine a device about the area of an A4 piece of paper that can hold as many books as you can fit onto a memory card. My friend Spike seems to have taken the opposite view. He moved to Australia for 3 years and decided to take as much of his stuff with him as possible to the point that one of his trunks had problems at customs due to the antique pistols in them...
I know that I'll probably get overrun with important documents and end up with a house full of crap, but it's nice to dream.
Durham, vivas and camera phones
The thing I remember most about my graduation is what an anticlimax it was. No, let me go further than that - it was a massive let down. The week leading up to it was severely lacking in atmosphere in college - everyone seemed worn down and tired and as soon as people's parents arrived that was it. In addition to having to get up at 6.30am to get to Palace Green in time for the 7am gown fitting (read: no hot water in college) as we came out from the ceremony all my friends scattered and everything got muddled into a big confusing mess - then it was over. When I walked back to my office after my viva a little over ten days ago I was feeling the same thing. I'd been anticipating this moment for nearly 4 years - 3 years of work and half a year of writing had been wrapped up and "OK'd". In my 5th year I remember thinking that this moment would fill me with sheer elation. It didn't.
In the days and hours leading up to the viva I was actually starting to get really worried about how un-worried I was about it all. After all, this was the test to determine whether the last 3 years of work had been up to the right standard. I did a shockingly low amount of revision. I know Matt spent 2 months revising if I'm honest I think I probably did about a weeks worth. In fact, when I read my thesis through the night before it was actually the first time I'd read it since handing it in. The viva itself was incredibly quick only 1hr45 which is shorter than the average. To my surprise my external examiner started off my telling me that they had been really impressed by my thesis and didn't see any problems with it. Straight away this knocked me off balance as it was the last thing I expected. It felt awful as I took a long time to answer some of the questions and there were some (it felt like most of them) where I had to say "I'm not sure". Looking back, all the questions I struggled on were on pretty simple things and all the questions I breezed through involved the complex stuff. Thankfully there were only a few mistakes and I struggled through a couple of mechansims. At 1hr40 my external examiner said he was done. I couldn't believe it was over, but then invited my internal examiner to ask some questions. I settled down and figured I was only half way through, but amazingly there was only one more question. I couldn't believe it when they asked me to step outside. The deliberation took less than a minute and then I was a doctor.
It didn't really feel over. I've come to realise I need to let go of it - in the last 15 months or so I've just about made myself physically sick worrying about my work - why didn't my reaction work? Would it mean I fail or have to do more lab work? It felt like I was running out of time and starting to panic. My PhD has been such a large part of my life for the last 3 and a half years. I brought it home with me, I'd go into the lab in the evenings and weekends if I needed to. In the last year especially I tried to keep my mind on work to see if I could turn my run of luck around. I just assumed that it was like this for everyone - but of course it's not. In the "real world" people really can leave their jobs at work. To me I feel really disappointed with my last year's work, but taking my work as a whole it looks ok. As predicted, all the congratulations I got was of the "we expected you to pass" variety rather than the "wow I'm so happy for you" variety.
So yes, the feeling of elation was missing but at least I got to see my friends again. On my first night back I met up with Brett and Tim and went out for some (ok, quite a few) drinks. The next day I went out for lunch with the girls from my group which is always nice. My biggest regret about my PhD was not being able to get my group out more often. Apart from Christmas meals I think it may have only happened 3 times in 3 years and the shame was we had a good time when we did make it out. Oh well. In addition to the chemistry crowd, Matt had made the journey up from London and Alan was around too. I even managed to get Kate from my lab out for a bit too. The night followed the tried and tested path of the New Inn followed by pizza, Jimmy Allen's, Chase and Klute. It was like I'd never left - how I've missed the dodgy green double vodka-pseudo Red Bulls in Klute. The next day I met up with the chemists again and went for lunch in the new section of the Gala complex and then in the evening had a night in Trevs with Matt and Emma. The nostalgia of Pizza Perfect was in attendance (along with the piss-poor free Lambrini) and the next day I went to dinner at Khairul's house with the chemists after which we sat around and chatted. It was simple moments like this that I miss so much. We had about 10 PhD chemists (and Lou) sat around in their sitting room talking - something that we'd done a load before and not really something that would seem that special - but once you leave it's so rare you actually see 5 of your friends.
I have to mention mobile phones again - my small camera's screen has packed in and I didn't fancy hauling my Canon round so I relied on my friends' camera phones. My phone may be able to tell me about the public transport networks in every city in the world and have sat-nav, but the camera is just rubbish. The photos in this post have come straight from Emma's phone - armed with a Carl Zeiss lens and xenon flash. I'm seriously impressed with the quality - especially the ones from Klute. I may have to invest soon.
Just as when I went up in December it felt like I'd never left and all the things I've loved about my PhD came back whilst talking to people. I've met people from Australia, Germany, France, Thailand, Japan, China, Malaysia, Holland and loads more countries, I've loved every minute of teaching the undergraduates, I've travelled to the USA and Japan to see some of the top people in my area talk, I've learnt to take nothing at face value, I still feel young and even though I was really scared about my work there was never a moment when I didn't love it and that's the most important thing. A lot of people my age already hate their jobs and a lot of others are indifferent to them. Even at my hight of failures I was always excited to go into work to see if my reaction had worked. Now, if only I could feel excited about my result - I've got 4 months until graduation #2.
In the days and hours leading up to the viva I was actually starting to get really worried about how un-worried I was about it all. After all, this was the test to determine whether the last 3 years of work had been up to the right standard. I did a shockingly low amount of revision. I know Matt spent 2 months revising if I'm honest I think I probably did about a weeks worth. In fact, when I read my thesis through the night before it was actually the first time I'd read it since handing it in. The viva itself was incredibly quick only 1hr45 which is shorter than the average. To my surprise my external examiner started off my telling me that they had been really impressed by my thesis and didn't see any problems with it. Straight away this knocked me off balance as it was the last thing I expected. It felt awful as I took a long time to answer some of the questions and there were some (it felt like most of them) where I had to say "I'm not sure". Looking back, all the questions I struggled on were on pretty simple things and all the questions I breezed through involved the complex stuff. Thankfully there were only a few mistakes and I struggled through a couple of mechansims. At 1hr40 my external examiner said he was done. I couldn't believe it was over, but then invited my internal examiner to ask some questions. I settled down and figured I was only half way through, but amazingly there was only one more question. I couldn't believe it when they asked me to step outside. The deliberation took less than a minute and then I was a doctor.
It didn't really feel over. I've come to realise I need to let go of it - in the last 15 months or so I've just about made myself physically sick worrying about my work - why didn't my reaction work? Would it mean I fail or have to do more lab work? It felt like I was running out of time and starting to panic. My PhD has been such a large part of my life for the last 3 and a half years. I brought it home with me, I'd go into the lab in the evenings and weekends if I needed to. In the last year especially I tried to keep my mind on work to see if I could turn my run of luck around. I just assumed that it was like this for everyone - but of course it's not. In the "real world" people really can leave their jobs at work. To me I feel really disappointed with my last year's work, but taking my work as a whole it looks ok. As predicted, all the congratulations I got was of the "we expected you to pass" variety rather than the "wow I'm so happy for you" variety.
So yes, the feeling of elation was missing but at least I got to see my friends again. On my first night back I met up with Brett and Tim and went out for some (ok, quite a few) drinks. The next day I went out for lunch with the girls from my group which is always nice. My biggest regret about my PhD was not being able to get my group out more often. Apart from Christmas meals I think it may have only happened 3 times in 3 years and the shame was we had a good time when we did make it out. Oh well. In addition to the chemistry crowd, Matt had made the journey up from London and Alan was around too. I even managed to get Kate from my lab out for a bit too. The night followed the tried and tested path of the New Inn followed by pizza, Jimmy Allen's, Chase and Klute. It was like I'd never left - how I've missed the dodgy green double vodka-pseudo Red Bulls in Klute. The next day I met up with the chemists again and went for lunch in the new section of the Gala complex and then in the evening had a night in Trevs with Matt and Emma. The nostalgia of Pizza Perfect was in attendance (along with the piss-poor free Lambrini) and the next day I went to dinner at Khairul's house with the chemists after which we sat around and chatted. It was simple moments like this that I miss so much. We had about 10 PhD chemists (and Lou) sat around in their sitting room talking - something that we'd done a load before and not really something that would seem that special - but once you leave it's so rare you actually see 5 of your friends. 
I have to mention mobile phones again - my small camera's screen has packed in and I didn't fancy hauling my Canon round so I relied on my friends' camera phones. My phone may be able to tell me about the public transport networks in every city in the world and have sat-nav, but the camera is just rubbish. The photos in this post have come straight from Emma's phone - armed with a Carl Zeiss lens and xenon flash. I'm seriously impressed with the quality - especially the ones from Klute. I may have to invest soon.Just as when I went up in December it felt like I'd never left and all the things I've loved about my PhD came back whilst talking to people. I've met people from Australia, Germany, France, Thailand, Japan, China, Malaysia, Holland and loads more countries, I've loved every minute of teaching the undergraduates, I've travelled to the USA and Japan to see some of the top people in my area talk, I've learnt to take nothing at face value, I still feel young and even though I was really scared about my work there was never a moment when I didn't love it and that's the most important thing. A lot of people my age already hate their jobs and a lot of others are indifferent to them. Even at my hight of failures I was always excited to go into work to see if my reaction had worked. Now, if only I could feel excited about my result - I've got 4 months until graduation #2.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Thursday, February 08, 2007
Belief
So it's come down to this. I'm sat in the university library. In just under 18 hours I'll be going into my PhD viva. It's essentially the last hurdle to the completion of the work that began all those years ago in 2003. Essentially an examiner from another university (Strathclyde) and an examiner from Durham will spend around 3 hours discussing my thesis and work with me. This boils down to them asking lots of questions to test my knowledge of the subject and related areas.
I'm not overly nervous, but I'm getting the feeling I used to get before exam results - I'm pretty sure it's going to be OK, but what if it's not?. Everyone I've seen has offered up a "Good luck, I'm sure you'll be fine." but I just feel like I need someone to go further than that and tell me that they believe in me and that I will get through this and perhaps even more important be proud of me when/if I do well. Otherwise what is it? - just another piece of paper to stick on the wall and a couple more letters after my name. Being a doctor seemed a really cool thing to be three years ago, but now I can't quite remember why...
So - come on me!
I'm not overly nervous, but I'm getting the feeling I used to get before exam results - I'm pretty sure it's going to be OK, but what if it's not?. Everyone I've seen has offered up a "Good luck, I'm sure you'll be fine." but I just feel like I need someone to go further than that and tell me that they believe in me and that I will get through this and perhaps even more important be proud of me when/if I do well. Otherwise what is it? - just another piece of paper to stick on the wall and a couple more letters after my name. Being a doctor seemed a really cool thing to be three years ago, but now I can't quite remember why...
So - come on me!
Sunday, February 04, 2007
My problem with...education
So, by this time next week I will hopefully have passed the final hurdle to become a doctor. This is just about the end of the education chain in the this country and I've been thinking about all the problems it has. This is mostly coming from a science point of view, but it's probably very similar for other subjects. I was always told that staying in education would boost your options and get you onto the employment ladder at a higher level.
So anyway, I arrived at uni with a high A grade in chemistry. I was weary but at the same time confident that I'd be ok. At A-level it seemed like a single straight path towards the goal and as such progress was steady. A degree on the other hand is more akin to trying to get to the centre of a circle taking many different paths at once. Many different courses ran at the same time apparently bearing no relationship to each other in the least. Where as A-levels are designed to a national curriculum, degrees are made up of what each university decides is relevant and taught be people whose job isn't to teach. Lectures are just that: lectures. There is no effort to make sure the audience understood the content. It becomes so easy to get fixated on individual courses and forget what it all means. For example, most people will recognise the chemical structure of benzene - a hexagon whose vertices represent a carbon atom and the edges of which represent bonds. It's all too easy to forget that in reality these lines aren't really there - they are just a cloud of electrons that's holding the atoms together. In one course we learn how molecules in a fluid stretch, twist and concertina. Other course make no mention of this at all, but it still happens. All the courses are linked, but no one tells you that.
The biggest problem though is that, unlike subjects like maths and physics where it's entirely possible to get near-perfect marks, chemistry's questions can have very vague answers. It becomes a common struggle to keep getting decent grade. In other subjects you can cover up on or two bad modules and still get a high degree, but in chemistry it always felt like one mess up would drag you down. Nowhere was this felt more than in the practical classes. Arguably this is what chemistry is all about. All the courses simply showed reactions as being A + B goes to C with some explanation of how. What they didn't tell you was how to get A and B into the right states to interact and how to separate C from the mixture of A, B and other assorted crap. The reaction is the easy part - it's the separation and purification that causes all the headaches. I can still remember the fear that ran through lab sessions. People would go to demonstrators if their reaction was a slightly different colour from their friends', people would worry about which layer was the organic layer in extractions and absolutely no one knew how to work the vacuum pump trolleys. As the second year came it got worse - 2-day experiments brought the prospect of getting to the end of nearly 12 hours of lab work and then loosing your product at the end. There were good demonstrators and bad demonstrators. I remember one who told me that if we didn't operate the vacuum pumps correctly they would "blow up and take your legs off". Not really what you want to hear. Another demonstrator would quite happily wreck your experiment and then cheerfully proclaim "oh well, there's still time to start again." The grading system didn't exactly work wonders either. We got a memo from a lecturer saying it was actually against university policy to give grades as opposed to marks but they were going to do it anyway. Getting back a lab report with A+ initially seemed pretty good, but then you realised that was only 15/20 with absolutely no indication of where the last 25% had been dropped. In a subject like chemistry, every mark counts. Worse still, it now transpires that natural scientists can actually finish their degree (incorporating chemistry) without setting foot in a chemistry lab. How has that happened? When I started my PhD and went back into labs as a demonstrator I saw the fear again. I also tried to be helpful. I tried to explain to people why they were adding what they were adding. Once you know it makes sense and will help you with every other reaction, but there were still a lot of demonstrators who would simply fob the students off with non-committal answers.
My main beef though is with opportunities after university. Far too many people are lured into accountancy and other such mass graduate-employers. There always seems to be worries that not enough people are taking sciences, but I'm finding it pretty hard to get a decent job. The area I'm into is growing rapidly and there is a lot of money in it. Just apparently not in the UK though. One of my friends from my group recently left chemistry after a 3 year post-doc stint to take up teaching. I've got nothing against people teaching if they want to do it, but I get the feeling people are being driven to it by a lack of opportunities. My friend had basically reached the end of apparent career path in the UK and made the switch. The teaching adverts all about helping to develop the next generation of world-class students. But what happens when these world-class students reach the end of their education? What if they are forced back to teaching? How does that benefit anyone? It brings up a thought that sometimes keeps me awake. How many Einsteins and Schrodingers have not lived up to their potential cos they chose a different path from the one where their talents lay. Imagine if you yourself had done a different degree or taken a different job. Would you have changed the world? It's that kind of thinking that does your head in.
So anyway, I arrived at uni with a high A grade in chemistry. I was weary but at the same time confident that I'd be ok. At A-level it seemed like a single straight path towards the goal and as such progress was steady. A degree on the other hand is more akin to trying to get to the centre of a circle taking many different paths at once. Many different courses ran at the same time apparently bearing no relationship to each other in the least. Where as A-levels are designed to a national curriculum, degrees are made up of what each university decides is relevant and taught be people whose job isn't to teach. Lectures are just that: lectures. There is no effort to make sure the audience understood the content. It becomes so easy to get fixated on individual courses and forget what it all means. For example, most people will recognise the chemical structure of benzene - a hexagon whose vertices represent a carbon atom and the edges of which represent bonds. It's all too easy to forget that in reality these lines aren't really there - they are just a cloud of electrons that's holding the atoms together. In one course we learn how molecules in a fluid stretch, twist and concertina. Other course make no mention of this at all, but it still happens. All the courses are linked, but no one tells you that.
The biggest problem though is that, unlike subjects like maths and physics where it's entirely possible to get near-perfect marks, chemistry's questions can have very vague answers. It becomes a common struggle to keep getting decent grade. In other subjects you can cover up on or two bad modules and still get a high degree, but in chemistry it always felt like one mess up would drag you down. Nowhere was this felt more than in the practical classes. Arguably this is what chemistry is all about. All the courses simply showed reactions as being A + B goes to C with some explanation of how. What they didn't tell you was how to get A and B into the right states to interact and how to separate C from the mixture of A, B and other assorted crap. The reaction is the easy part - it's the separation and purification that causes all the headaches. I can still remember the fear that ran through lab sessions. People would go to demonstrators if their reaction was a slightly different colour from their friends', people would worry about which layer was the organic layer in extractions and absolutely no one knew how to work the vacuum pump trolleys. As the second year came it got worse - 2-day experiments brought the prospect of getting to the end of nearly 12 hours of lab work and then loosing your product at the end. There were good demonstrators and bad demonstrators. I remember one who told me that if we didn't operate the vacuum pumps correctly they would "blow up and take your legs off". Not really what you want to hear. Another demonstrator would quite happily wreck your experiment and then cheerfully proclaim "oh well, there's still time to start again." The grading system didn't exactly work wonders either. We got a memo from a lecturer saying it was actually against university policy to give grades as opposed to marks but they were going to do it anyway. Getting back a lab report with A+ initially seemed pretty good, but then you realised that was only 15/20 with absolutely no indication of where the last 25% had been dropped. In a subject like chemistry, every mark counts. Worse still, it now transpires that natural scientists can actually finish their degree (incorporating chemistry) without setting foot in a chemistry lab. How has that happened? When I started my PhD and went back into labs as a demonstrator I saw the fear again. I also tried to be helpful. I tried to explain to people why they were adding what they were adding. Once you know it makes sense and will help you with every other reaction, but there were still a lot of demonstrators who would simply fob the students off with non-committal answers.
My main beef though is with opportunities after university. Far too many people are lured into accountancy and other such mass graduate-employers. There always seems to be worries that not enough people are taking sciences, but I'm finding it pretty hard to get a decent job. The area I'm into is growing rapidly and there is a lot of money in it. Just apparently not in the UK though. One of my friends from my group recently left chemistry after a 3 year post-doc stint to take up teaching. I've got nothing against people teaching if they want to do it, but I get the feeling people are being driven to it by a lack of opportunities. My friend had basically reached the end of apparent career path in the UK and made the switch. The teaching adverts all about helping to develop the next generation of world-class students. But what happens when these world-class students reach the end of their education? What if they are forced back to teaching? How does that benefit anyone? It brings up a thought that sometimes keeps me awake. How many Einsteins and Schrodingers have not lived up to their potential cos they chose a different path from the one where their talents lay. Imagine if you yourself had done a different degree or taken a different job. Would you have changed the world? It's that kind of thinking that does your head in.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
bits 'n' pieces
So here's what's been happening recently.
I went down to Newbury a few weeks ago to meet up with some school friends. Good times (and the apparently near-mythical "cheese and potato" dish from the local curry house) were had. We finally made it to James' favourite end-of-night venue, Liquid (for the Durham people, think Rixies, but with southern prices). Accenture pays for James to stay in a very nice new flat complete with broadband and Sky.
I finally got a date for my viva which is the 9th February at 2pm. One way or another I'm going to be absolutely hammered by about 9pm that night and with a bit of luck I might actually be a doctor.
I finally got my hands on a Wii today. I'll put up some videos of me flailing around later. Originally the controls were a let down and after all the hype I was almost as disappointed as when I found out that the free bottle of wine from Pizza Perfect was in fact Lambrini (it's not wine!!!!!), but thankfully a few tweaks of the sensitivity setting and I'm getting respectable scores in Wii bowling and Wii golf.
To complete my list of 2006 films I received and watched Little Miss Sunshine over the weekend. It's absolutely fabulous and fully deserves its Oscar nominations that were announced today. See it as soon as you can - it's got the line "Get me some porn; get me something really nasty too; I don't want any of that airbrushed shit." from the families grandfather so how can it be bad?
The UK pound is on a rampage and is so close to reaching the fabled £1=$2 mark. Unfortunately even if it does I'm too poor to go on a spending spree (or any kind of spree for that matter) and it also means that the 30,000-odd yen I've still got (value at time of purchase £150) is now worth considerably less...
My parents have picked up a bit of steam in tidying the house (it still feels very topsy turvy to say that). They seem to think that an hour a week will do it and for most people this might be true. However, if I were to say that whilst cleaning out a kitchen cupboard I found an OPEN packet of naan bread mix with a best before date of 1983 (yes that should read eighty three) you can maybe see the problem.
Finally, I've started listening to the Unknown Quantity "best of" album The Blend again. For those that don't know, Unknown Quantity was the name of the band I was in at school. We played quite a few gigs and recorded 2 CDs - and in 1998 that was pretty good going. It still fills me with wonder that we managed to do and I think those CDs probably still stand s the achievement I'm most proud of - 1st class degree? so what - nobody cared but me, but people actually seemed to like the songs. I'll try and find some hosting to share the songs and dig out the old photos in the next few days. So I'll finish with my one contribution to the lyrics: if life came with a receipt, would you take it back?
I went down to Newbury a few weeks ago to meet up with some school friends. Good times (and the apparently near-mythical "cheese and potato" dish from the local curry house) were had. We finally made it to James' favourite end-of-night venue, Liquid (for the Durham people, think Rixies, but with southern prices). Accenture pays for James to stay in a very nice new flat complete with broadband and Sky.I finally got a date for my viva which is the 9th February at 2pm. One way or another I'm going to be absolutely hammered by about 9pm that night and with a bit of luck I might actually be a doctor.
I finally got my hands on a Wii today. I'll put up some videos of me flailing around later. Originally the controls were a let down and after all the hype I was almost as disappointed as when I found out that the free bottle of wine from Pizza Perfect was in fact Lambrini (it's not wine!!!!!), but thankfully a few tweaks of the sensitivity setting and I'm getting respectable scores in Wii bowling and Wii golf.
To complete my list of 2006 films I received and watched Little Miss Sunshine over the weekend. It's absolutely fabulous and fully deserves its Oscar nominations that were announced today. See it as soon as you can - it's got the line "Get me some porn; get me something really nasty too; I don't want any of that airbrushed shit." from the families grandfather so how can it be bad?
The UK pound is on a rampage and is so close to reaching the fabled £1=$2 mark. Unfortunately even if it does I'm too poor to go on a spending spree (or any kind of spree for that matter) and it also means that the 30,000-odd yen I've still got (value at time of purchase £150) is now worth considerably less...
My parents have picked up a bit of steam in tidying the house (it still feels very topsy turvy to say that). They seem to think that an hour a week will do it and for most people this might be true. However, if I were to say that whilst cleaning out a kitchen cupboard I found an OPEN packet of naan bread mix with a best before date of 1983 (yes that should read eighty three) you can maybe see the problem.
Finally, I've started listening to the Unknown Quantity "best of" album The Blend again. For those that don't know, Unknown Quantity was the name of the band I was in at school. We played quite a few gigs and recorded 2 CDs - and in 1998 that was pretty good going. It still fills me with wonder that we managed to do and I think those CDs probably still stand s the achievement I'm most proud of - 1st class degree? so what - nobody cared but me, but people actually seemed to like the songs. I'll try and find some hosting to share the songs and dig out the old photos in the next few days. So I'll finish with my one contribution to the lyrics: if life came with a receipt, would you take it back?
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Futurology
It's the start of the New Year and the CES has just finished in Las Vegas so I thought I'd give a quick prediction about what new technologies and gadgets we'll start using in our everyday lives this year. Who knows: if these predictions come true and the chemistry/OLED don't take off maybe I'll have found my life's calling.
There are very few new technologies that become standard inside of 10 years. Back in mid 90s the "cutting edge" of technology was a Sony camera with a 640x480 resolution (0.3 megapixels) that was large enough to include a floppy disc drive to store pictures. Today it's hard to even find a film camera. In fact, phones such as the SE K800i and Nokia N73 have Carl Zeiss equipped 3.2 megapixel cameras that produce better pictures than a lot of dedicated cameras. Suddenly you could take as many photos as you wanted (batteries and memory cards permitting) and only print the good ones. But you were still left with physical prints which had to be stored in albums. There's no point in photos if no one can see them, so whilst 2006 saw the rise of sites such as Flickr you still need to be at a computer to see the photos. Digital photo frames are simply LCD screens incorporated into a frame surround that can be set to display digital pictures and film clips. This lets one frame display several pictures for set amounts of time. Most include memory card slots so photos can be taken directly from the camera and some even feature wifi so photos can be downloaded from sites such as Flickr. At the moment the screens have pretty high ppi values but low screen sizes. The most common is 7" which is roughly equivalent to a 6"x4" photo. Not exactly large. Having been spoilt by the cheap, high quality prints Matt and I got last summer I'd hope for 8"x10" (~12") screens at a decent price soon. I've been tracking the prices of digital photo frames for a couple of years now and they are fast approaching the threshold of "impulse buy". They used to be £250, but prices have now fallen below £40. I'm going to predict that - like DAB radios a couple of years ago - these will be a very popular present at Christmas.
First there was cash. Then came cheques - a "convenient" way to avoid carry large amounts of cash. Next came magnetic strip cards and most recently chip and pin. However this year will see the rolling out (in London at least) of the next form of payment - contactless. The technology is based on RFID chips that can be built into just about anything. Although the technology was first trailed in the UK in the mid 90s it broke through with the Octopus card in Hong Kong - the card allowed people to pay for transport and at some shops simply by waving a card over a detector. The idea was rolled out as the Suica card in Tokyo and the Oyster card in London and similar schemes in several other countries. Dealing in cash actually costs UK business a lot of money each year, so businesses will encourage the adoption of the system. The system is likely to be implemented as replacement debit card although the chip could be built into anything from ipods to phones. The idea is that if you want to buy things over £10 you need to use chip and pin, but for purchases under £10 simply waving the card near the reader will deduct payment from your account and obliterate queues in shops. For security, every tenth transaction will need a pin number, but any intervening chip and pin purchases will reset the counter. The National roll out will begin in London this summer and spread to the rest of the UK by 2008. The banks have stated that they want the 2012 Olympics to be the first cashless Olympics. Bit of a weird thing to want, but ok. As someone who never has enough cash on them this is a fantastic development. Cash is for poor people.
What does this even mean?!? This is one technology that will become ubiquitous without anyone realising. Put simply this is 3.5G mobile phone technology. 3G sort of died a publicity death - all the networks tried to advertise their collective £22bn investment with look - you can do really jerky video calls! Most of my friends with 3G phones tried it once and then never again. However, the real benefit of 3G (and the thing that allows the video calls to take place) is the increased data rate. Where as the internet access of 2G phones was the equivalent of a dial up modem, 3G phones cruised along at 384kbps - about 2/3 the speed of a residential broadband link in 2004. Still not particularly quick then, but with the introduction of HSDPA much of the country will be covered by a network allowing speeds of 3.6Mbps initially (roughly the same as the speed of today's residential broadband lines - fast enough to download an episode of 24 in ~12 minutes) and companies have promised that this will reach over 20Mbps by 2010 - fast enough to download that 24 episode in less than 5 seconds. It may sound as thrilling as a glass of tap water, but it may be the beginning of the end of the need for a fixed phone line. At present, if you want internet access you need either a BT phone line or cable - both of which have a monthly line rental. On top of this you then need to pay for your broadband. However, with a nationwide HSDPA network you could get rid of your fixed line and instead connect your phone or HSDPA router to your computer and get the same speeds (or even faster) that we get today. Add in an SIP socket on the router to allow free landline calls and free geographical numbers and BT will rue the day they sold O2. After my previous rant about data charges, more operators have started unlimited data plans. The latest is X-series from 3 which charges from £5/month for unlimited access including Skype and orb/sling access. Later in the year we may see the introduction of HSUPA (3.75G) which allows faster uploads.
Sort of linked to the above. A few years ago GPS systems were featured in car adverts as an "optional extra". This extra usually cost nearly the same as the rest of the car. Since then there has been an explosion in stand alone "sat-nav" products. Systems such as TomTom still command a ridiculous price premium, whilst cheaper Garmin systems can readily be had for about £100. The main aim of CSR - one of the biggest wireless chip manufacturers - is to produce a GPS chip that costs $1. The size of the chips has been brought down to a few millimetres square and they are finding there way into many new devices. My GPS unit is about the same width and depth as my phone, but 2/3 the length. The chips are now so small that the forthcoming Nokia N95 "superphone" has a GPS chip built in. In addition there are already other phones with this technology such as the Orange M700 about to be unleashed. By the end of the year it seems likely that all the mid-to-high end phones from HTC, Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson will have HSDPA and GPS. No doubt operators will cut deals with various navigation software developers to let people use their mobiles for navigation, but it goes further than finding out how to drive the 5 miles to the cinema. Imagine you're trying to meet up with someone but don't know where they are. You can simply transmit your GPS location to them so they can find you easily. Need to know where the nearest cashpoint is? Your phone will guide you. Fancy some food? Your phone will let you know what's available in the area and then guide you to your chosen restaurant. No longer will blokes have to fear asking for directions cos soon we won't need to.
Ever since I got my NES back in 1990 I've been a Nintendo fan. At the time you were either a Nintendo fan or a Sega fan or a just rich kid who could afford both. After the SNES I left the console scene behind just as the Playstation was about to take gaming out of the teenagers' rooms and into the lounge of the 20-something. In my 5th year I decided to pick up a Gamecube as they were on the way out so I thought all the good games would get cheap (that and I wanted Mario Kart). Ironically, even though the cube did die out pretty soon afterwards, this just made the games rarer and more expensive whilst PS2 and xBox games are frequently £2. Anyway, games like the 2 Super Monkey Ball games and Pikmin got me back into gaming, so I was interested in the "next generation" consoles. However, whilst Microsoft and Sony raced ahead in their battle to beef up their consoles, Nintendo went another way. The new console, Wii, would be based around a controller originally meant as a cube add-on. Whilst Sony and Microsoft attempted to shove in the fastest cpus and latest gpus into their new behemoths, Nintendo was quite happy to let their console simply amount to a slightly updated Gamecube. However, whilst the other machines are certainly very powerful, most of that power simply goes on the HD graphics. The games themselves are just prettier versions of the same games everyone's seen before. In the meantime, Nintendo's Wii has come up with a brand new way to play games. Targeting the dreaded "over-30s" market as much as the traditional audience Nintendo realised that games should be fun to play. Even I'm a bit confused when handed a gamepad with 3 joysticks and 10 buttons. The Wii controller is simple. You wave it around and the built in motion sensor knows. Want to swing your character's tennis racquet? Just swing the controller - put on spin and control the power of the shot. Likewise for a golf club, baseball bat or even sword. Suddenly everything is a lot simpler. And it seems to be working. Word of mouth is spreading. Forums are crawling with talk of people's parents buying Wiis for themselves and stock is hard to track down - in the UK most online stores sell out within half an hour of stock being advertised. Compare this to the PS3's dodgy Japanese launch and underperforming US sales and Nintendo might just pull something special off.
I've got nothing against the PS3 - I just think gaming should be fun rather than a chore.Provided Nintendo avoids one pitfall, then Wii could end up in a LOT of homes this year. The crucial point is that Nintendo continues to ship good games for the system. It comes with a game called Wii Sports (except in Japan) that offers tennis, golf, baseball, boxing and bowling games. However, these are pretty limited (and baseball is actually just about the world's dullest game) so if Nintendo aren't careful the Wii won't gain the momentum that will make it one of the most talked about gadgets of the year. Now, if only I could get hold of one...I'll leave you with the E3 teaser:
Digital photo frames
There are very few new technologies that become standard inside of 10 years. Back in mid 90s the "cutting edge" of technology was a Sony camera with a 640x480 resolution (0.3 megapixels) that was large enough to include a floppy disc drive to store pictures. Today it's hard to even find a film camera. In fact, phones such as the SE K800i and Nokia N73 have Carl Zeiss equipped 3.2 megapixel cameras that produce better pictures than a lot of dedicated cameras. Suddenly you could take as many photos as you wanted (batteries and memory cards permitting) and only print the good ones. But you were still left with physical prints which had to be stored in albums. There's no point in photos if no one can see them, so whilst 2006 saw the rise of sites such as Flickr you still need to be at a computer to see the photos. Digital photo frames are simply LCD screens incorporated into a frame surround that can be set to display digital pictures and film clips. This lets one frame display several pictures for set amounts of time. Most include memory card slots so photos can be taken directly from the camera and some even feature wifi so photos can be downloaded from sites such as Flickr. At the moment the screens have pretty high ppi values but low screen sizes. The most common is 7" which is roughly equivalent to a 6"x4" photo. Not exactly large. Having been spoilt by the cheap, high quality prints Matt and I got last summer I'd hope for 8"x10" (~12") screens at a decent price soon. I've been tracking the prices of digital photo frames for a couple of years now and they are fast approaching the threshold of "impulse buy". They used to be £250, but prices have now fallen below £40. I'm going to predict that - like DAB radios a couple of years ago - these will be a very popular present at Christmas.
Contactless payments
First there was cash. Then came cheques - a "convenient" way to avoid carry large amounts of cash. Next came magnetic strip cards and most recently chip and pin. However this year will see the rolling out (in London at least) of the next form of payment - contactless. The technology is based on RFID chips that can be built into just about anything. Although the technology was first trailed in the UK in the mid 90s it broke through with the Octopus card in Hong Kong - the card allowed people to pay for transport and at some shops simply by waving a card over a detector. The idea was rolled out as the Suica card in Tokyo and the Oyster card in London and similar schemes in several other countries. Dealing in cash actually costs UK business a lot of money each year, so businesses will encourage the adoption of the system. The system is likely to be implemented as replacement debit card although the chip could be built into anything from ipods to phones. The idea is that if you want to buy things over £10 you need to use chip and pin, but for purchases under £10 simply waving the card near the reader will deduct payment from your account and obliterate queues in shops. For security, every tenth transaction will need a pin number, but any intervening chip and pin purchases will reset the counter. The National roll out will begin in London this summer and spread to the rest of the UK by 2008. The banks have stated that they want the 2012 Olympics to be the first cashless Olympics. Bit of a weird thing to want, but ok. As someone who never has enough cash on them this is a fantastic development. Cash is for poor people.
HSDPA
What does this even mean?!? This is one technology that will become ubiquitous without anyone realising. Put simply this is 3.5G mobile phone technology. 3G sort of died a publicity death - all the networks tried to advertise their collective £22bn investment with look - you can do really jerky video calls! Most of my friends with 3G phones tried it once and then never again. However, the real benefit of 3G (and the thing that allows the video calls to take place) is the increased data rate. Where as the internet access of 2G phones was the equivalent of a dial up modem, 3G phones cruised along at 384kbps - about 2/3 the speed of a residential broadband link in 2004. Still not particularly quick then, but with the introduction of HSDPA much of the country will be covered by a network allowing speeds of 3.6Mbps initially (roughly the same as the speed of today's residential broadband lines - fast enough to download an episode of 24 in ~12 minutes) and companies have promised that this will reach over 20Mbps by 2010 - fast enough to download that 24 episode in less than 5 seconds. It may sound as thrilling as a glass of tap water, but it may be the beginning of the end of the need for a fixed phone line. At present, if you want internet access you need either a BT phone line or cable - both of which have a monthly line rental. On top of this you then need to pay for your broadband. However, with a nationwide HSDPA network you could get rid of your fixed line and instead connect your phone or HSDPA router to your computer and get the same speeds (or even faster) that we get today. Add in an SIP socket on the router to allow free landline calls and free geographical numbers and BT will rue the day they sold O2. After my previous rant about data charges, more operators have started unlimited data plans. The latest is X-series from 3 which charges from £5/month for unlimited access including Skype and orb/sling access. Later in the year we may see the introduction of HSUPA (3.75G) which allows faster uploads.
Personal GPS
Sort of linked to the above. A few years ago GPS systems were featured in car adverts as an "optional extra". This extra usually cost nearly the same as the rest of the car. Since then there has been an explosion in stand alone "sat-nav" products. Systems such as TomTom still command a ridiculous price premium, whilst cheaper Garmin systems can readily be had for about £100. The main aim of CSR - one of the biggest wireless chip manufacturers - is to produce a GPS chip that costs $1. The size of the chips has been brought down to a few millimetres square and they are finding there way into many new devices. My GPS unit is about the same width and depth as my phone, but 2/3 the length. The chips are now so small that the forthcoming Nokia N95 "superphone" has a GPS chip built in. In addition there are already other phones with this technology such as the Orange M700 about to be unleashed. By the end of the year it seems likely that all the mid-to-high end phones from HTC, Nokia, Motorola and Sony Ericsson will have HSDPA and GPS. No doubt operators will cut deals with various navigation software developers to let people use their mobiles for navigation, but it goes further than finding out how to drive the 5 miles to the cinema. Imagine you're trying to meet up with someone but don't know where they are. You can simply transmit your GPS location to them so they can find you easily. Need to know where the nearest cashpoint is? Your phone will guide you. Fancy some food? Your phone will let you know what's available in the area and then guide you to your chosen restaurant. No longer will blokes have to fear asking for directions cos soon we won't need to.
Wii
Ever since I got my NES back in 1990 I've been a Nintendo fan. At the time you were either a Nintendo fan or a Sega fan or a just rich kid who could afford both. After the SNES I left the console scene behind just as the Playstation was about to take gaming out of the teenagers' rooms and into the lounge of the 20-something. In my 5th year I decided to pick up a Gamecube as they were on the way out so I thought all the good games would get cheap (that and I wanted Mario Kart). Ironically, even though the cube did die out pretty soon afterwards, this just made the games rarer and more expensive whilst PS2 and xBox games are frequently £2. Anyway, games like the 2 Super Monkey Ball games and Pikmin got me back into gaming, so I was interested in the "next generation" consoles. However, whilst Microsoft and Sony raced ahead in their battle to beef up their consoles, Nintendo went another way. The new console, Wii, would be based around a controller originally meant as a cube add-on. Whilst Sony and Microsoft attempted to shove in the fastest cpus and latest gpus into their new behemoths, Nintendo was quite happy to let their console simply amount to a slightly updated Gamecube. However, whilst the other machines are certainly very powerful, most of that power simply goes on the HD graphics. The games themselves are just prettier versions of the same games everyone's seen before. In the meantime, Nintendo's Wii has come up with a brand new way to play games. Targeting the dreaded "over-30s" market as much as the traditional audience Nintendo realised that games should be fun to play. Even I'm a bit confused when handed a gamepad with 3 joysticks and 10 buttons. The Wii controller is simple. You wave it around and the built in motion sensor knows. Want to swing your character's tennis racquet? Just swing the controller - put on spin and control the power of the shot. Likewise for a golf club, baseball bat or even sword. Suddenly everything is a lot simpler. And it seems to be working. Word of mouth is spreading. Forums are crawling with talk of people's parents buying Wiis for themselves and stock is hard to track down - in the UK most online stores sell out within half an hour of stock being advertised. Compare this to the PS3's dodgy Japanese launch and underperforming US sales and Nintendo might just pull something special off.
I've got nothing against the PS3 - I just think gaming should be fun rather than a chore.Provided Nintendo avoids one pitfall, then Wii could end up in a LOT of homes this year. The crucial point is that Nintendo continues to ship good games for the system. It comes with a game called Wii Sports (except in Japan) that offers tennis, golf, baseball, boxing and bowling games. However, these are pretty limited (and baseball is actually just about the world's dullest game) so if Nintendo aren't careful the Wii won't gain the momentum that will make it one of the most talked about gadgets of the year. Now, if only I could get hold of one...I'll leave you with the E3 teaser:
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