No, I won't fix your computer...

I'm a geek. There's no getting around it. I know about computers and the internet, electrical items like PVRs, TVs and the like and, of course, science. In fact, I have a Ph.D. in the latter. So how did it happen? Why did it happen? It pretty much happened because I just wanted technology to work the way I wanted. When I was 10 I got a NES. It was so simple, just pop in the cartridge and press the power button. When we finally got a PC, it was back in the days of DOS. Getting games to work was surprisingly hard work. Firstly you had to know the DOS commands - even simple things like "cd games" and "cd\" had to be learnt. Then there was memory management... Those who know about DOS days will know all about memory management. It wasn't just how much memory you had, it was all about how it was assigned. There was base memory, expanded memory, XMS and EMS. All this was controlled by two files that were run when your computer booted. I spent many days going through them with a fine tooth comb trying to free up as much memory as possible. Was this fun? Not really, it was dull and time consuming and all I wanted was was to play my games. If you recognise this kind of screen, you'll know the kind of thing I'm talking about. By the time Windows '95 came out, you no longer had to worry about all that stuff, but now you had to manage with games that still wanted DOS. Not only that, but with the added burden of Windows, there was a constant need to avoid start-up programs and even desktop wallpapers as they sucked up precious computing resources. Once again, there was a whole heap of little tweaks that would bit-by-bit improve performance. As before, all this wasn't particularly fun, but if I wanted to get my games to work (short of buying a new computer which I couldn't even remotely afford) they were necessary. Of course, these days computers are so powerful you don't have to worry about trying to scrounge every last KB of memory and MB of disk space.

Likewise, about 6 years ago I moved to a smartphone made by the then-little known manufacturer HTC. It ran Windows mobile 2003, and again had the potential to be tweaked. This time, not to coax more performance out of it, but to enable more functionality in the form of applications. Again, this wasn't a simple process and beyond adding TomTom for satnav, I didn't really customise it much more as it was such as hassle.

Today, there tend to be two types of people - those who want to tinker with everything and those who just want things to work. Since moving to Apple products, I'm sort of now straddling the divide - I understand all the ins-and-outs of the technology, but I know that specifications aren't everything and how easy things are to use are just as important. Of course, manufacturers are willing to market the Hell out of both sides. Apple prides itself on it's user friendliness and slogan "it just works." It tends to hide specifications away from the public for things such as it's iPhone and iPad products and just show the speed and UI off to entice people in. Other manufacturers tend to push specifications a lot more and this can lead intense rivalries between fans of certain companies or products. These fanboi battles have become a lot more commonplace and intense thanks to the internet and various discussion forums. At the heart of these battles seems to be a built-in desire to defend what you have bought to reassure yourself that you made the right decision. Over the years manufacturers have pushed certain specifications to grab attention.

The bit-wars
In the early 90s a new generation of games console was unleashed to replace the incumbent systems of the times. The Master System was replaced by the Megadrive and eventually the NES was replaced by the SNES. While the old systems were 8-bit, the new machines were 16-bit. This essentially meant the graphics were better but it was a hard sell to justify getting a new console to your parents. The next generation brought 32-bit and even "64-bit" consoles to try and get gamers' cash. Strangely, bits haven't been mentioned again since the late 90s. This AVGN video about the Atari Jaguar (the first "64-bit" console) says everything...


The megapixel wars
Early digital cameras were quite low quality things. 0.3 megapixel sensors meant that although photos looked good on monitors at the time, they weren't really suited to printing out decent sized pictures. As technology improved we quickly got to 2 megapixels at which point excellent quality 5x7" photos could be obtained. At 5 megapixels, 8x10" became realistic and at 7-8 megapixels, even 20x30" became possible. At this point, it's unlikely the average consumer would need any more than this, but the manufacturers went further and soon 12 megapixel cameras appeared and were marketed as being better. Unfortunately they were often worse because although more pixels should mean more detail, the size of the sensor didn't change. this meant the pixels became much smaller. The outcome of this was they were more susceptible to noise (sometimes called grain). Every generation the cameras gained improved sensitivity and processing to reduce noise and improve image quality, but this was all but cancelled out by the shrink in pixel size. Thankfully, the manufacturers realised this was a loosing battle and the megapixel wars stopped. In cameras. They have now started up again in mobile phones. Once again people seem to be taken in by this. In mobile phones there is an added futility to it all as often the lens itself won't be very good so all the megapixels in the world wouldn't help. Thankfully some manufacturers are learning. Indeed, Apple's iPhone4 shipped with "only" a 5 megapixel camera, but had a high quality sensor so produced high quality images.

The business of nostalgia

Sorry it's bit a while since I've updated this blog. I try to write about things that interest me or things that are an event in my life that I'd like to keep a record of - preserving a great deal of my thoughts and memories for the ages. Unfortunately, for the last few weeks and months I've been in a weird state. I've been unable to transcribe what I wanted to write into words. In fact, as I type this, there are several posts sitting, unfinished as I suffered a block. I'm going to have another go now with a post about nostalgia.

In early January, the BBC showed a series of programs looking at the last decade and investigating the trends that emerged. One of the major trends was a reluctance of people to grow up and their desire to cling to their childhoods. Certainly nostalgia has become a big business as companies realise that money can be made from this desire. Weirdly this seemed to coincide with my time as an undergraduate. It always seems that trends have followed what I'm interested in. It may be that most of the time, it's in fact me following trends, but this time it definitely seemed the market trend followed on from my thoughts. Anyway, it's apparently commonplace to reminisce about your childhoods at university - it makes sense as everyone is roughly the same age so their pop-culture memories are likely to be the same. My friends and I talked about toys we used to play with and television shows we used to watch. Films aren't really included as they were available on video or on TV again and again. The real nostalgia-inducers were TV shows. In 1999, DVD hadn't taken off and was still expensive and there were very few TV VHS sets. Naturally we got talking about shows such as the A-Team, Knightrider and ThunderCats and other shows from the 80s. We even went so far as to set up a college society: Trevelyan Alternative Movie Plus Animated Cartoon Society (TAMPACS). At this point in history, several things were about to happen that would explode this nostalgia out of college rooms and into the mainstream. The first was the gradual rise of DVD. With it's simplified manufacturing procedure, the costs would rapidly fall so entire runs of TV shows became affordable. The second was the internet. For the first time, people could virtually gather in chatrooms and forums to reminisce and people began converting old VHS recordings into digital video and slowly, in this still pre-YouTube age of dial-up internet, it became possible to hear the opening and closing themes and even see the opening and closing titles of all those half-remembered childhood favourites. This was a chance to post your half-remembered parts of a forgotten show and Over the next few years there was an explosion of 80s tv shows released onto DVD riding the nostalgia wave. It wasn't just tv shows that enjoyed this collective desire to relive the past - retro gaming became big as a whole heap of 80s and 90s games came back onto the market in the various virtual console stores and retro compilation sets.

This is where the second part of this post comes in - how this nostalgia affects us. Most of these retro things such as forgotten TV shows, primitive video games and even music are from fairly sharply defined parts of our past. A further good example of this is magazines. In today's world, we have the internet with it's up to the minute news and information from around the world. However, back in the 90s I got most of my information about things I liked from magazines that, by their nature were out of date by the time they hit the news stands. I used to read a couple of console magazines religiously for about 4 years or so: Mean Machines (which became Nintendo Magazine System) and SuperPlay. They were published monthly and I used to read them from cover to cover, even if certain games didn't appeal to me. Although I still have the physical copies of these magazines, they have long since been boxed up in the attic. However, there is a Mean Machines archive and over Christmas I found a torrent for a complete set of SuperPlay scans. Reading back through these magazines gave me shots of pure nostalgia - and not just of reading the magazine, but memories of what was going on at that time. And it's occasionally some really random things that my mind has associated with these things. For example, when I see the November 1991 issue of Mean Machines, it really reminds me of the day I went to buy the magazine. I can picture walking into town (despite the fact that I have walked that same route thousands of times, I can still remember that day, for no particular reason) and buying it. It had the Megadrive game F22 Interceptor featured on the cover and came with a free model of MM editor Julian Rignall. I remember getting home and flicking through the magazine while I watched an episode of Star Trek: TNG. I can't remember what episode it was but I'd know it if I saw it again. Similarly, the issues of MM and SP I took with me to India are burned into my mind as they were all I had to entertain me over the weeks we were there. Moving on to TV shows, when I was about 9 or 10 there was a repeat of a show called Star Fleet on ITV every Saturday over lunchtime. I remember seeing it for the first time and going outside to play in the garden afterwards - it was when we still had a small rose tree on the small lawn. For months after that, I would try to make Lego models of the X-bomber and other ships from the show. Both times I remember it airing, I had the same problem - it finished its run when we were in India and our rubbish video could only record for two weeks (and it failed to do that most of the time!) so I never saw the end of the story. This would have been in 1990 at the latest. As the years passed by I forgot about Star Fleet, but eventually it came back to me at university and, thanks to the internet, I found the themes, intro videos and eventually the full series and all these memories came flooding back. In fact when I ordered the series as a series of VHS rips, when it arrived, I watched all 24 episodes in one go - something I'd never done before. Finally a rare example of a film. It was early December 1989 (I was 9) and one Saturday morning I began watching what I thought was a short animation. It started out in a small mining town and involved pirates and the government chasing these kids. Then we were shown a robot that had fallen from the sky which subsequently woke up. Eventually the action moved to a floating island and the pirates turned out to be good guys. It was epic at the time and it completely sucked me in. I didn't see that film again for over ten years. In fact it passed almost out of my memory except for occasionally remembering that sketchy outline, with the robot that fell from the sky being particularly memorable. Finally in 2002, I joined the DVD Forums and got involved in one of those "can you name this film?" threads. It turned out the film was Laputa: Castle in the sky - one on the early Studio Ghibli films. As luck had it the Studio Ghibli collection was in the process of being released in on DVD and within 6 months I had a region 3 DVD of Laputa winging its way to me. Watching it brought back all the memories: later on that Saturday, I went to see Father Christmas at the local village hall (which was odd as we normally went to a department store grotto with school) and I can still remember the small present I was given (a toy car). In fact, I could still pick that car out from all my others.

I've always been someone that can remember small things like this. On several occasions my friends have looked quizzically at me and asked "how do you remember stuff like that?" I don't know if other people experience the same experience when it comes to nostalgia, but I suspect they do. What makes it a completely unique experience from person to person, is that the memories triggered by nostalgia will always be different. Even people who experienced something together will have individual memories about it.

What is different in this day and age, is it's unlikely my story will be repeated - now there is such an abundance of retro and nostalgia businesses that everything from TV shows, to video games seems permanently available - from YouTube, through to DVD boxsets and virtual consoles means peoples' long-forgotten cult memories won't be so long-lost any more!

Visual tagging of music and it's manipulations

Something that I've touched on several times is music and what trends I've gone through over the years. What I want to focus on now is how music can affect us, how it binds itself to fragments of our lives and how we can be fairly easily emotionally manipulated by music. There are several links in this post to tracks on Spotify, so if you don't have an account (or got hold of a free account), you'll have to make do with the YouTube links. Of course, all the examples I'm going to give are highly personal as you'd expect. The upshot, aside from maybe discovering some new music, is that these tracks will probably illicit no (or completely different) emotional responses.

Unless you watch a lot of the music channels, music is - by definition - an aural experience. The upshot of this is that when we begin to link music with sights, thoughts and feelings we experienced with the times when we acquainted ourselves with the music. Here are some examples from various points through my life from my Spotify "memories" playlist (in no particular order):

Kent - 400 Slag

(It's Swedish before you start thinking anything else!) From 2006, I first picked up on this song from my beloved Pandora (before the feed to the UK was killed) and the album was the first one I bought as a result of Pandora. It's a long, moody intro and the singer has a really smooth voice which is a bit melancholic. The fact that the song is in Swedish means that you really focus on the melody - especially the sweeping choruses. While it's not the best song on the album, it's a song that takes my mind back to 2006 and sitting in my room in House 3 at Trevs. I think the best way to describe that entire year would be nihilistic: I feel I was living without purpose. What should have been a really fun and exciting year just past me by. While the song perhaps sets a depressing picture, I don't really see it as such - just as an aural passport back to that ridiculous room right next to the boiler (which never turned off).

T'Pau - China in your hand

Obviously this is an old one. When I was younger, I went to a swimming club on Thursdays. I was quite good at swimming, especially breaststroke, but I just wasn't competitive. Also, I lacked stamina and I found myself always struggling by the end of the sessions. I didn't know anyone else that went, so combined with my crippling shyness, I didn't have any friends there either. I also found some of the exercises (such as backstroke leg-kicks) fairly claustrophobic (I guess cos I could see where I was going and my ears were underwater meaning I couldn't hear anything and I felt disoriented). All this meant I really didn't look forward to going at all. The session began at 7.30 which meant I just had time to see who was number one of Top of the Pops before I had to go. I guess T'Pau was one of the most catchy tracks from that era and the two things are linked.

Radiohead - Lucky

At this point in my life, I still cling to the belief that the best album I have ever heard is OK computer by Radiohead. To my mind no other album went on such a journey from the raucous, confused and fuzzy opening of Airbag through to the chilled out, lethargic The Tourist. It could be argued that perhaps 2007's In Rainbows finally surpassed it, but being a guitar fan, I think OK Computer still just about stands out as their best for me. Now, the year was 2007 1997 (oh dear, that's a long time ago now!), and several of my friends who were into Radiohead were really excited about the release of OK Computer. Obviously at the time I was very impressionable and I immediately looked to see if any of my compilations had any of their songs as I wasn't familiar with them at all. I found that I had a CD with the track Just. It was a song that I'd skipped in the past as it was an immediate song. In fact, the intro to Just is a very confusing and intimidating beginning to a song. It seems strange now to say that a song intimidated me, but it did. I began to be intrigued by their style. Radiohead seem to be a very polarising band. In 1997, even more so. People either loved them or hated them. Thom Yorke's vocal style is very distinct and can take getting used to. After hearing Paranoid Android (the lead single from OK Computer) for the first time - and not being overly familiar with the band - it left me a bit cold, but there was something about the song nagging at me to go back to it. As OK Computer was released, Woolworths did it and The Bends for £20. I snapped them both up and set about listening to them. A week later I went on a family holiday to Rhodes which involved a night flight and arriving very early in the morning. The song that has perhaps the most immediacy is Lucky. It's a very desolate song, with the constant ringing of the guitar strings heard in the intro carrying on in the background all the way through the song almost like crickets. The tremelo effect of the lead guitar coming in and out throughout in the background and the choral synthesiser effects and backing vocals in the chorus all add to create a unique audio landscape. Travelling by bus across Rhodes from the airport at 5 am, I had my walkman playing this song when I peered through the curtains and saw a desolate rocky, barren desert outside. The view just perfectly fit with the music and this link has stayed in my mind ever since.

Hans Zimmer - Like a dog chasing cars

Back to 2008 and the release of The Dark Knight. I'd really enjoyed Batman Begins in 2005 as a great example of how far comic book movies had come in the last 10-15 years. Gotham was now a believable, gritty, crime-ridden city rather than the pantomime neon or overly Gothic creations seen before. Rumours were that The Dark Knight was even better but nothing could have prepared me for it. We drove down to Bradford to see the film at the IMAX screen. It was a pretty horrid day by the time we got there - overcast, raining and cold. The weather fit completely with the tone of the film. It was epic. Constantly tense, the music served to alternate between the schizophrenic, tension of the strings which marked out the Joker's presence, to the bursts of heroic theme which quickly transitioned back to a tension-raising version. By two thirds of the way through the film I felt completely emotionally drained. If anything, the film was too much to take in. This track I've chosen will always remind me of sitting in that cinema and being so overwhelmed with what was happening and the feelings carried over with me for days and are retained on repeat viewings.

Moby - Look back in

At the end of my 3rd year at Durham I felt quite depressed. The majority of my friends had finished their degrees and I knew the next year would be a very different experience. During that summer I began to rediscover some albums by listening to them in the dark. I suddenly found that effectively shutting off my visual inputs left me free to concentrate more on the music and let my mind wander to wherever the music took it. This short track from the album 18 was the one track that summed up this very reflective period in my life. It's very short at under 3 minutes in length, but has a dreamlike quality to it. The title - Look back in - captured how it made me feel: looking back over the last three years. I just wish it was a little longer. A lot of people didn't like the album 18 as they felt it was simply a poor rehash of Play, but there are a lot of really nice chilled out tracks such as One of these mornings and In this world.

So there you have it - some really wide ranging examples of a small selection of music that instantly transports me somewhere in my mind. I'm sure everyone has their own examples and I encourage you to think about them and use a service like Spotify to create playlists of them to send some emotional, nostalgic chills down your spine.

Of course, people know that music can act in this way and seek to take advantage of it. The obvious example is with soundtracks. As with my Dark Knight example, music can emphasise the impact of the moving pictures. It's hard to do, but try and find a dramatic scene from a film or show with and without the backing music and often it won't have the same impact without the music. Obviously, here the music is tailored specifically for the scene and scored to maximise any points or moments the director desires. A slightly less unique approach is that employed by advertisers. They know that music has the power to get straight through the logical part of your brain and wedge itself straight in the emotional part, which is exactly what they want so you don't question exactly why you need a new *thing* - you just want it! Often times, simplified, cut down arrangements can often get through to people. A good example of this is the John Lewis Christmas campaigns. Here are the 2008 and 2009 adverts





Both feature stripped back versions of famous songs. The irony is that the Sweet Child Of Mine cover was released as a single, but didn't actually work as a song as it's far too dull an arrangement to sustain interest beyond the runtime of the advert. The piano is one of the best solo instruments to achieve this effect of conjuring up the required emotion. I'll finish this off with a piano arrangement of a suite of music from one of my favourite films, Laputa: Castle in the Sky. Regular readers may remember that this film features large portions of silence, which Disney didn't think Western audiences would be comfortable with, so they actually commissioned the original composer to re-score these previously silent passages when the film came to be released in the West!

All change

So. After ten years (with a nine month break in the middle) I'm finally leaving Durham. No, I've finally left Durham. How did this happen? Where am I now? Let me explain. For the past 2 years and 9 months I've been employed by Thorn Lighting and their parent company Zumtobel. The employment was on a fixed contract for the duration of the TOPLESS project (a 3 year project to develop white light-emitting polymer materials for lighting applications). Until Christmas last year I wasn't really thinking about the end of my contract. I was vaguely confident that more money would be forthcoming - either from Thorn or from Durham University to continue our promising work in the field of high-triplet hosts and novel soluble blue phosphorescent emitters. However, no such money materialised and although it looks like a Thorn-led follow-up to TOPLESS will gain public funding, it will most likely be mostly engineering-based with the chemistry/materials development handled outside the project. This situation meant that all the Durham-based workers (a total of 5) were facing the dole. Thankfully just about everyone manage to find alternate employment. I was fortunate that a job opened up at CDT in January and this time, after a 4 hour interview (with no breaks!) I was offered the job (3rd time's the charm). Of course this meant I was suddenly facing 3 weeks until I was due to start in Cambridge. This meant I had to tie up (or try to tie up) and hand over my work in Durham (i.e. lumping it onto other chemists), find somewhere to live in an unfamiliar city, pack up and move south. In the end I got a lucky break with packing the stuff up as we were able to negotiate a much cheaper extra months extension to our rent. This means I've still got a lot of stuff up in Durham for now.

It was pretty surreal packing up and coming home for Easter as it felt just like any other Easter, but I wouldn't be going back north to Durham, but east to Cambridge. Finding somewhere to live was interesting as Cambridge seems to be a city full of shared houses where you rent rooms rather than finding a flat between a few of you. This is in complete contrast to Durham where the onus is on renting out complete properties. Anyway I found a nice laid back house just off Chesterton Road which is a nice 35 minutes walk to work and 15 minute walk to the town centre. Hopefully these numbers will drop substantially once I bring my bike from home (assuming it hasn't fallen apart).

Having been in Durham for so long (and 6 years in the same lab/department) going into CDT was a complete change. Bigger fumehoods, different protocols, not knowing where anything is or how to submit samples for analysis. And this is just the chemistry - the meetings are a blur of acronyms - even for someone with 6 years OLED experience it's been a struggle to adapt, but I'm getting the hang of it. The work load started off light and has now ramped up to a level I'm still comfortable with - several targets and regular meetings/updates and polymers to be made. It's hard to believe I've just finished my third week. There are several other new starters on the chemistry side and there will likely be a few more in the next few months, but even so the company (at least the Cambridge office) is a lot smaller than I realised. This is mainly down to a lack of physical space of both desks and lab space. Everyone's really friendly and helpful and I'm sure before long I'll feel like I've been there for years.

Cambridge is really nice (it helps that I've arrived just as the weather is getting warmer). The tourists can be a bit much, but they tend to congregate around the town centre and the colleges in particular where everything is pedestrianised so it never feels too cramped. I haven't been punting yet, but I'm assured there will be company trips down the river to Grantchester over the summer and some evening punting sessions. I've just about figured out how to navigate around the different parts of the city (Google maps helps a lot), now I just have to remember where everything is!

I guess it still hasn't really sunk in that I've left Durham - it's all happened so quickly. I really miss everyone there and hopefully I'll be able to go back up for some weekends to see everyone and find out how they're all doing. It's always interesting to see how people get on when you leave - most of the time they don't even notice after a few weeks!

Anyway, my job is a permanent position (unless it turns out that I'm rubbish and get fired!) so hopefully there shouldn't be any more sudden changes unless I instigate them. And finally I have a pension (how grown up). The dental insurance means I might actually see a dentist for the first time in ages and I have the option of private health care too. Not too shabby.

Hopefully I'll start to feel the photography vibe again in my new surroundings which will enable to post some pictures of my new surroundings.

It's also a bit weird without most of my gadgets - my TV and other AV stuff will likely spend the next few months at my parents and once again I am living the minimalist lifestyle.

Anyway - till next time (and I'll try and update a bit more often!)