Photos online

Wow - it's been a busy update day (alternatively, a slow work day). I've finished setting up my MSN space and am hosting my complete range of photos there. Hopefully those of you on my MSN contact list will see them and any updates from MSN. It may also boost the readership of this to more than 4 (including myself). Have a look!

Bryce Group Christmas Dinner

Somehow, despite the fact that it was me organising it, my research group's Christmas dinner has been sorted for a long time. After abandoning the idea of Lumley Castle, we settled on Oldfields on Claypath. Menus were obtained, food selections made, bookings made and then rearranged. Finally yesterday arrived and we all (well, most of us) trudged down to the restaurant. Eventually the 2 that had blatantly forgotten turned up and all was well.

Starters arrived and my policy of bringing the list of what people ordered paid off straight away. My starter consisted of a salmon fillet cured with Pernod and dill to give a full flavor - the fact that it was cured instead of cooked gave it a unique texture. The other starter that looked good was the goats cheese on a pimento muffin pictured. The main course brought me a confit of beef - very tender and on a pile of crushed garlic potatoes. Other options included pork, salmon or a very unusual style turkey - and escalope encrusted with a cranberry coating.

Finally, the moment most of us had been waiting for, the arrival of the chocolate torte with strawberries and blueberries. The fork just glided through it and it was the perfect way to finish. All that was left was to finish the wine and give Martin and Hazel the present we had bought for them.

As the post docs and Martin went back to the lab, several of us took up residence at the Swan & 3 to enjoy and afternoon of drinking. We finally left at about 7.30. Overall, it was agreed that it had been better than the previous year (at the King's Lodge) where the food had been a bit bland (although the table of drunk women behind us provided some entertainment) and at least as good as the year before (at The Pumphouse). Sadly, it's almost certainly my last group dinner although, hopefully we'll organise some more socials next year. And this time, actually go on them.

Christmas Formal

Wow - my final Christmas formal. We managed to secure an SSC table and with the exec on high table, we were sat on the regular exec table.
My pleas for the bar to provide our wine were heeded resulting in 12 bottles between 8 people drinking - I think only 2 bottles were left at the end. Chrismas formal is the only formal that I look forward to for the food and it didn't disapoint. We had a lot of food and for once there was more than one pig in a blanket and stuffing ball each. As don't normally sit together at formal there was a lot of banter and it is nice to have the change.

The only disapointment: the usual box of Lindor chcolates we get was replaced this year by a small chocolate mint that had blatantly been aquired as surplus stock from somewhere else. James was sat with the rest of the exec and we got some good photos of him looking pretty grumpy. After the main course, he came down to join us on low table. Adam continued his quest to steal everyone's shift and was working the bar after formal hence the high wine:SSC ratio. We were also boted by Morven who despite, predicting wouldn't be able to make it even to the end of the formal was in attendance from the beginning.

Due to 2ps being banned, we had to make e most of what we had so anything became fair game - small tinsel trees, the gifts from crackers - just about anything. Thanks to the efforts of Matt Smith, our table was decorated far more than the others: mini trees and absolutely massive party poppers helped the night along.

It's pretty hard to believe that so much time has passed since we sat together for the first time in March at Handover formal and spent those days bonding (ie drinking) in Derbyshire last Easter. It doesn't seem like we've acomplished much, but we have - longer opening, new cocktail lists and menus, chip & pin (hassle that it is), higher wages, 35ml shots... It's really sad that we've only got one term left. Although I'm glad to be finishing this year, I'd really love to stay on the SSC or another year.




After the meal we headed to the bar. Alan came up to college and we had a great time chatting to various people in the bar before we headed down to Rixies with Brett - very quiet at first but soon filled up with Trevs people. Somehow we ended up queuing in the Dirty Shop for about an hour at 2.30 in the morning. The walk back was very frosty aswell.

Doves

It's been a busy few days - first up was the Doves concert at the Newcastle Academy. I'd never been before, but it's a very nice venue with good views from just about everywhere - even the bars. As usual, with the PA set up for the main band the support act, Polytechnic, sounded pretty bad and we were unable to hear anything they said. Their set lasted 45 minutes which was a bit long considering the muffled sound they were producing. Eventually Doves took to the stage 25 minutes later and proceded to play out several songs from Some Cities and a collection from The Last Broadcast. Starting with Snowden and Sky Starts Falling and even performing seemingly gig-unfriendly tracks such asWhere We're Calling From. After seeing Weezer live up to their reputation of not speaking or even moving, I was a bit apprehensive that Doves would be the same. They certainly aren't too talky, with Jimi conversing with the crowd only when absolutely neccessary (such as when Pounding had to be abandoned 30 seconds in due to Jez breaking a string), but they were certainly very lively. The light show was very good, mathing the style of music, creating silouettes of the band on stage. Rousing versions of Caught By The River and Last Broadcast went down a storm.

After 70 minutes, a rousing performance of The Cedar Room, the band retired off stage before a couple of things that I've never seen before. Firstly, a video showing them leave, be limo'd to a pub 2 doors down the road, drink and read the paper for a few minutes, before being limo'd the 12 feet back to the venue, handing their coats to some aides nd going through the stage door - sure enough ey reappeared and then swapped instruments with Jimi taking to the drums allowing Andy to take vocal and harmonica duties for an impressive version of Here it Comes from Lost Souls. This arrangement continued for a couple more songs before they finished with Some Cities and the song everyone had been waiting for - There Goes the Fear. The major disapointments were the lack of Satellites, Words and 2 that were always unlikely to appear: Firesuite and B-Side Valley.

As the lights went up it revealed a pretty wide demographic of fans present - from teenagers all the way up to middle aged couples. One of us even spotted their French lecturer there. Doves obviously appeal to a wide audience and their style of understated but rewarding music explains it. Overall we had a great time - for the people from home - I was almost trapped behind the tallest man in the world, but managed to move...

Sadly we didn't get any photos. And for some reason there was noone selling unofficial t-shirts outside afterwards - what's the world comming to?

Why you should always read the small print

With the Xbox 360 being in such demand at the moment, it was only natural that lots of people put their preorders to good use and decided to flog their sought-after consoles on eBay for a vast proft. Of course, there are always some that rely on the stupidity or impulses of others. Have a look at this eBay auction for what appears to be a Premium Xbox 360 pack. Check the price, read right to the end of the description. Now check the price again... Oh dear.

EDIT: eBay appear to have pulled the auction description, but there are some screen shots over at The Register.

Random Phone Pictures

I've finally got around to clearing my phone of all the pictures clogging it up. It's pretty amazing how much I use it - when phone cameras became popular I always scoffed that I'd never use one, especially as they had low resolutions, bad lenses and no flash/zooms. To be fair, some modern phones sort out most of these problems, but my Orange SPV C500 has only a bad VGA lens, no flash and the inability to take good pictures in anything other than ideal lighting. Yet, for some reason I find I'm using it a lot. Here are a few of the better pictures I've extracted:


First up are a couple of sunset shots - The first is from over the summer and was taken from the back of a car going up the A1 (at speed). The slow response time of the lens gives the forground a nice motion blurred effect. Of course - this was entirely an accident as the phone offers no camera adjustments except to tell it what the lighting conditions are.


The next one was taken more recently since the clocks went back (end of October) when sunset moved forward to around 4pm.

Moving on to some of the more odd things you see around Durham.
First up is a rugby club social that happened to br going on in St. Cuth's when we were in there in early November. Not only were they all dressed as girls, one of the drinking games involved drinking "general contributions" from a shoe whilst all the rest of the team chanted "Boot, boot, boot". Very random.


Second is a fresher rite-of-passage at Trevs' formals. Once the freshers are introduced to the 2p in the glass games, it will inevitably escalate until someone is 2p'd whilst holding the gravy...

The final 3 pictures (for now) are a picture of my friend, Lue at the Durham City Beer festival over the summer.
Again, due to the crapness of the shutter speed, all the people in the background apear blurred and fast moving (most people who've been to beer festivals will agree that noone moves particularly fast). Lue's left Durham to write up his thesis and I wish him well. A lot more of my friends than I first realiased left last year, Lue was one of the last to leave in mid September.

Moving on, we come to a picture of one of the post-docs from my lab, Mustafa, attempting to drill a hole in one of our work desks so we could feed some cables through. Despite the holesaw being broken (the drill bit turned but the hole saw didn't), he kept at it - which required him to not only clamber onto the desk but also swear a lot.

Finally we have a picture of me taken a couple of weeks ago sporting my SSC shirt shortly after a bar shift sitting in my small, but cosy room.


We have just entered the last week of term (it's gone so fast despite me thinking it would drag) and there are loads of things comming up: some friends and I are going to see Doves in Newcastle on Sunday, then it's Christmas formal (the best food formal of the year) on Monday and I'm sitting with the rest of the SSC which always provides many laughs. Tuesday will bring our lab group's Christmas lunch at Oldfields followed by the pub and then we are trying to organise an MCR meal out later in the week. Hopefully I'll be able to post a load of photos soon.

Monkey Ball - Freestyling

Those of you with any knowledge of gaming must have heard about the Monkey Ball series. Created by Sega and first appearing on the Gamecube (I never thought I see the day that Sega games appeared on a Nintendo console). The game plays like a modern version of Marble Madness, but given a 3rd person perspective and a dose of typical Japanese quirkiness you find yourself guiding a monkey inside a hamster-style ball through puzzle filled levels. I originally bought it over a year ago, but it sat gathering dust as My friend Matt and I frantically tried to finish Mario Kart: Double Dash. Once we'd got bored of that though, we turned our attention back to Monkey Ball.
Incredibly simple to learn - the entire main game is controlled with only 1 analogue stick to tilt the landscape to get the ball to move - but almost impossible to master with later stages becoming fiendishly difficult: sort of a modern day Tetris. One evening we found this web site which offers videos of so called Monkey Ball "world records". We downloaded the file and sure enough the video (it's about 90mb) contained every level being completed in a ridiculous time with an absolutely phenomenal amount of control on display. Instead of progressing through a level as the designers intended, these super players veer off coarse, hitting edges and causing their monkey to soar over most of the obstacles. Matt and I named these techniques freestyling. By this point, I had acquired Monkey Ball 2, offering more levels to challenge us. Again, there was a video (~170mb) of this game being completed quickly. Again the amount of skill on display is outrageous, but we have been learning from it - weaving left and right at the start of levels coming off the ramped sides builds up speed to allow some pretty naughty jumps, although we have nowhere near the skill of these guys. The music for these videos is pretty cool (although we can't quite explain the presence on Enya on there).
Our alumni friend, Brooks also has the games so when he comes up at weekends, we often get some 3 player action going. In addition to the regular game, Monkey ball offers up to 12 bonus games including racing, target (try to fly your ball on a target to get points), fight (giant punching gloves attached to the ball), golf (with some crazy courses), bowling (again with the option for some weird lanes), billiards, boat (row your ball down a river coarse), shot (a virtua cop style game), dogfight (aerial combat), soccer, baseball and tennis. All these subgames have extra features to unlock: in fact whilst "researching" this blog entry I've managed to unlock the second stage of crazy bowling...

Monkey Ball 2 features a single player "story" mode tacked on to the original level-after-level style. This again demonstrates the surrealness of the Japanese designers and I really pity who ever had the unenviable task of translating the game into English. Suffice to say it features an evil Monkey, Dr Bad-Boon (sigh), attempting to steal all the bananas fro our hero Monkeys and also marry Meemee - one of the playable characters. World 7 sees Bad-Boon returning home for a bath even though he's being chased by the Monkeys. Truly bizarre.
The down side of course that now we are world 7/10, the levels are (almost)impossible so the amount of swearing and bad language that comes out my room would make a sailor blush. Mind you, we though the world 6 levels had us beaten as well...

Nanotechnology - Beware the Hype

Chemistry isn't really the most glamorous of the sciences. Tough to get your head around at school and even harder to understand at degree level, chemistry is in dire need of some positive press. National Chemistry Week has just ended here in the UK and I bet hardly anyone realised. The work of chemists is invaluable to the way we live our lives today - everything from the clothes, we wear, the food we eat, all our entertainment mediums and the drugs that have prolonged our life expectancy. So you'd expect that chemists would be well received members of community and children would actually want to be chemists when they grow up.

Unfortunately, it isn't like that at all. The overwhelming perception of chemists is that when they're not arsing around in white coats, they're polluting the planet, torturing animals or mercilessly ripping off third world countries. Quite how this has happened isn't too apparent, but by and large the only thing you read about in the news are the bad sides of chemistry: testing drugs on animals, massive plants bellowing out smoke, drugs with bad side effects... but this rant isn't about that.

The one positive we're getting as chemists is in the form of nanotechnology, but even that is about to go wrong. Yesterday we received a talk from Professor Tony Ryan (right) on nanotechnology. Despite looking like Sam from Lord of the Rings, Ryan is one of the UK's most high profile chemists and presented the 2002 Royal Institute Christmas Lectures - the only time in the 10 years or so I've been watching them that chemistry was featured. His group at the University of Sheffield are working on synthetic muscles, but the first part of his talk was about the dangers of hyping up these new ideas with no science to back them up.

The term was coined by the Japanese in the 70s to suggest synthesis and analysis on an atomic or molecular level. The bandwagon started it's roll to the current-day expectation when in the early 80s, Eric Drexler released the book Engines of Creation. His imagery of "Grey Goo" - a vision of a future where nanobots escaped the labs and endlessly replicated and broke all matter down.
He predicted that Star-Trek-esque machines would be able to assemble anything atom by atom if we knew which atoms were needed where... The worst thing that could happen did: the popular press and a bunch of pseudo-scientists cottoned on to it. Cue the setting up of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in 1991, which to this day has manufactured precisely bugger all save for some pretty computer images of "molecular machines".

Even such widely read magazines as Time Magazine ran cover stories picturing small machines the size of a human blood cell that would one day be able to swarm around our bodies in their trillions patching us up, performing surgery at a microscopic level and keeping us healthy. Of course, most A-Level students could tell you straight away that these just won't work and aren't feasible. Look at the picture and despite their seeming well intentioned ideas, it don't doesn't hang together. Let's forgo the fact that anything as small as proposed (in the fashionable "human hair" units - I guess 10^-9m would intimidate most people) would never be able to have such intricate detail and think back to basic chemistry and physics. At the microscopic levels, any science student will tell you that small particles move randomly due to Brownian Motion. Given that you can see particles displaying this phenomenon on a macroscopic level - you can imagine how unsteady these robot surgeons would be. If something is going to operate on my insides I rather it didn't shake around randomly... Moving on, most people will have heard of Van der Waals forces - instant spontaneous polarisations that make small molecules stick together. For a machine this small, all that would happen is that not only would they stick together, they'd also attract all the gunk that normally floats around our bodies - essentially getting lost in the biological gunk that makes us up.

What Professor Ryan brought home to us was that politicians read these kind of books and magazines. I'd never thought about this much before, but it's true - to pretty much guarantee funding for research all you have to do is mention nanotechnology and people will be falling over themselves to give you money without really understanding where it's going. Indeed, my research group is part of the Durham Nanomaterials project. The problem is that the 1980s were actually a long time ago (scary) and so far not much has been delivered. Journals are full of "promising" materials, but not much has made it to market.


My field of OLEDs has long been touted to replace LCD screens, but despite being on the verge of release for the last 5 years we're not really inundated with thin flexible, low powered screens. In fact, in the mean time LCD technologies have improved drastically and alternative technologies such as SED as gearing up for launch early next year in Japan. The public expects, and pretty soon, the policy makers are going to wonder where all their money went and chemistry won't even have the white knight of Nanotechnology to promote itself.

Meanwhile, Drexler and his apostles have been attacking anyone who dares to doubt his vision of nanomachines that can outperform nature, including Nobel Prize winner Richard Smalley. That nature has created nanoscale machines suggests that we one day might get close, but after all, nature has had several billion years to get things right...

Well that's just great...

Tonight I went out with some friends for a pair of birthdays to the Chinese restaurant in Durham and very nice it was too. However, after the meal we all got given fortune cookies. Everyone else had really affirmative fortunes (such as Positive thinking yields positive results) but mine actually manage to insult me... here's a picture of the offending item - I did manage to see the funny side, but I wonder...

Just what exactly are they saying about me??

Colin Hay - A Follow Up

It's been over a month since I started listening to Colin Hay. Starting with his more recent albums, Going Somewhere and Man At Work and moving on to some of his older works that I've finally tracked down on the Durham University network.

Going Somewhere is folk guitar at it's simplest - one man and his guitar. Hay's voice is pretty unique and soothing and his songs all tell stories. For example, the opener, Beautiful World is all about taking joy from the simplest of things:

My my my, it's a beautiful world/I like swimming in the sea

even though the world isn't perfect:

She says she doesn't love me, but she enjoys my company/For now that's good enough for me

Title track, Going Somewhere features a very catchy guitar progression and vocal hook, whilst My Brilliant Feat combines a playful melody with some touching lyrics about someone whose 15 minutes are long gone. One of the stand-out tracks though is Waiting for my Real Life to Begin - known to anyone who saw the Scrubs episode My Philosophy. Presented here as a solo guitar piece, the song is an anthem for those whose lives haven't amounted to anything yet, but who live on in hope that one day they will:

Any minute now my ship is comming in/ I'll keep checking the horizon

When I awoke today nothing happened/But in my dreams I slew the dragon

And you say "be still my love/open up your heart and let the light shine in"/Well don't you understand I already have a plan?/I'm waiting for my real life to begin

On a clear day I can see/See a very long way

In this, my 7th year at university I know the feeling of waiting for something to come along and change my life all too well. The album "finishes" with Maggie a very happy sounding track which becomes sadder in tone until you realise what story is being told... The US special edition is rounded off with an acapella version of I don't know why from a live performance and then radio edits of Waiting for my real life... and the song I just don't think I'll ever get over you which you may know from the fantastic and oft-mentioned Garden State OST. A simple guitar quietly announces the track before Hay's voice - sounding even more resigned and world-weary than usually - comes in:

And when I'm done I feel like talking/Without you here I have less to say/I don't want you thinking I'm unhappy/What is closer to the truth/That if I lived till I was 102/I just don't think I'll ever get over you

Despite being a beautifully lehthargic song of resignation and acceptance, this radio edit clocks in at just 4:31. The full verison is available to the album Transendental Highway.

Man @ Work is something of an odd-ball: it combines classic Men At Work reworkings, with alternate versions of some of Hay's best solo songs and a few new compositions. An alternate version of Beautiful World (that is actually how it was originally recorded) containing a full band (including a wonderfully minimalist slide guitar part) but oddly misses out the verse about "Marie" which to me sums up the whole song. Next up is an acoustic version of the best known Men At Work song: Down Under: sounding suitably laid back compared to the 80s version yet still playful enough to be raise a smile. Continuing the 80s theme is an acoustic version of Overkill as featured in the Scrubs season 2 premiere performed by Hay in cameo. The song was perfect for the episode in which all the characters have fallen out and aren't talking to each other:

I can't get to sleep/I think about the implications/Of diving in too deep/And possibly the complications/Especially at night/I worry over situations/I know will be alright/It's just overkill

Storm in my Heart returns to a fuller band sound with a very springy beat. Waiting for my Real Life... makes another appearence - for the original full band version (without the final lines) you'd need to get a hold of the fantastic Topanga. Some new recordings with a destinctly regae sound follow before a completely new recording of Down Under finishes the album in style with another regae-ish sound and brass section boosting to give a completely different feel to the previous version.

I'm still listening to the rest of the back catalogue, but if you want some excellent folk/singer songwriter/easy listening yet involved songs I fully recommend you track down some of Hay's albums.