Predictions for the technology hits of 2008

I think I did pretty well in my predictions for 2007, so here are some things I think will start to become big in 2008:

"small" computers

For some reason, even though technology is shrinking, the outward appearance of PCs hasn't changed since the early 90s. Although the classic ATX format has the increasingly popular microATX offspring, most PCs sold by Dell and PC World still retain the "big box" appearance of the tower case. In the old days this was due to the fact that everything, from a printer port to sound needed an add-in card. These days all these add-ins are integrated onto the motherboard itself. In fact, unless you want a graphics card for gaming there is no need for any add-in cards. Sadly at the moment these cards suck up a lot of power and generate a lot of heat which work best with large cases. Several years ago several companies - led by Shuttle - designed small form factor (SFF) systems utilising clever thermal management to enable modern processors and graphics cards to fit in small shoe-box sized boxes. The downsides were the cost and the amount of noise they generated (larger fans that are quieter don't physically fit). As the price of PCs fell dramatically, these systems looked even more expensive and now only Shuttle still offer a range of them and even these are getting bigger in an effort to support the latest, fastest graphics cards. In the last 2 years it has once again fallen to Apple - populiser of the MP3 player - to release the Mac Mini. This is a super small computer that runs almost silently. It achieves this by having an external power supply which doesn't need a cooling fan, use of special low power (but still quick) processor and integration of all the features such as graphics, sound, wifi, usb etc onto the motherboard. Apple have even managed to squeeze in a DVDR/W drive. But where to go from here? At Apple's Macworld conference later this month it is expected that a new Mac Mini will be unveiled - it may get a name change but it is expected to use the new Intel chipsets to further improve power efficiency and improve performance. If the performance is improved so that the new HD formats can be played from it, combined with Apple's desire to have a machine sitting under your TV from which you buy films from iTunes to watch on your TV, we may end up with a very capable (except gaming) weenie machine.

In the world of laptops too, prices have fallen significantly with once exception: lightweight laptops. If you don't mind lugging round 3 kg of laptop then you can get a decent one for £400, but if you want true portability the price rockets to around £1000. That was until Asus came out with the EEE PC. Made from old chips that Asus got for cheap, the laptop is close to 1 kg and costs only £220. People may scoff at the specs - a Celeron 900 processor that is underclocked, a 7" screen and only 4Gb of storage but they're missing the point. You can install Windows on it and the hard drive is a solid-state drive which is much faster than a traditional hard drive. The included Linux system boots in 15 seconds. The storage can be boosted with USB sticks or SD cards (which go upto 32 Gb these days). There's a built in webcam and microphone, vga output and wifi built in so the EEE PC is a truly mobile PC. The device has been so popular that it was sold out for most of December. This means that other manufacturers will take notice and begin to prep their own microlaptops. In the next few days Asus will be releasing details about their 2nd gen EEE, rumoured to include an 8.9" 1024x600 screen (compared to a cramped 800x480 on the original) and built in wireless broadband (WiMAX in the US and perhaps HSDPA in the EU).

I'm not that hopeful that small PCs will catch on this year, but the EEE PC will ensure people start to take notice.

E-paper

I mentioned this in my review of last year's predictions. It consists of a layer of balls that are white on one side and black on the other. Applying voltage across them cause them to align. Thus you can create images. The displays are bistable - they only consume power when they are changed so once an image has been set it will remain that way even when the batteries run out. At the moment the technology is used for text-based displays. The Motorola F3 is a cheap, long-lasting mobile phone and things like the Sony Reader promise to revolutionise the book. E-paper is much easier to read, appearing like regular paper - it isn't backlit so it doesn't strain your eyes over long periods. The Sony reader allows you to download books and store them on SD cards (you can fit a lot of books into 1 Gb). The device itself is about the same size as a paperback book and you navigate through books by "turning" pages. The technology has an ~1 second response time and the display resets to white before the new page appears. This has put a lot of people off, but it is reported that, just like physically turning a page, you stop noticing it. The device isn't currently available outside of the US, but the idea of this and a little box of SD cards is much more in line with my minimalist life idea. Amazon US recently released the Kindle - a similar kind of device which proved very popular in the US so the interest is there.

The next big thing to happen is flexible E-paper. This uses the same system, but whilst the TFTs that drive the current range of E-paper are based on silicon and therefore inflexible, several companies, including Cambridge's Plastic Logic, have created printable plastic TFTs that allow for flexible devices - a prototype of which is shown below.



I've a more advanced prototype in the flesh and it's very impressive. It is envisioned as being a business tool at first to allow the displaying of email attachments and to receive newspapers via a wireless subscription. The newspapers lost out in a major way to the onset of the internet which they didn't perceive as a threat, so they're not going to make the same mistake with E-paper. Plastic Logic have built an assembly plant in Dresden and the first products are expected to hit the shelves next Christmas so flexible readers could be a big hit in 2009!. The other big development is colour with several companies reporting successful laboratory tests.

Eventually these designs will be scaled up - imagine the giant advertising boards; instead of having a team of workmen to replace the posters one bit at a time, just upload a new image and they automatically update and once updated, they consume no power until they need to be changed again.

Personal GPS

It was a bit of a no-show last year - the technology was there but manufacturers chose to disable the feature. Logic dictates that this is simply so they can enable GPS in the next handsets that will launch in May/June and immediately create desire for the new models. The real driver though will be if the 2nd Apple iphone incorporates GPS (which it almost certainly will) - ever since the iPhone was announced, we've seen a slew of touch screen phones released, but none have matched the iPhone's specs (HVGA resolution and a multitouch screen) so companies are clearly influenced by Apple. At the moment GPS is a high end feature (such as the N95, Tytn II, Touch Cruise) but it will certainly filter down to the mainstream handsets this year and with it we'll see many more GPS-applications such as texting friends your location and navigating using Google maps or simply tagging photos with GPS coordinates. Now a GPS chip costs $1 so there really isn't any excuse.

Splashpower

I've been following this company on and off for several years now but it seems like 2008 could finally be the big year for them. They have developed a way of charging electronic devices by electromagnetic induction. How this works is that you plug a mousepad sized pad into the mains and then simply place items on it to charge - there is no need to plug in anything other than the pad. They claim a power efficiency of >90% and that charging speed is independent of the number of devices on the pad. It certainly sounds appealing as things like remote controls, MP3 players, phones and every other portable battery containing device could be sold without an AC adaptor. No doubt some people will say it's a return to the days when electrical items came without plugs, but it should drop the cost of the items in the first place and smaller, portable pads should be available for travelling - but if it really takes off, then hotels and the like will probably provide pads in-room. It should also help cut down the amount of wasted power attributed to phone chargers left plugged in 24/7. Eventually devices will come with compatible batteries already installed, but until then adaptors will be made available. It's taken the company a long time to get anything to the market and I think it's down to negotiating with companies to make their devices compatible. Splashpower are demonstrating their stuff at CES next week so hopefully we'll finally get a release date for the pads.

Smart cards

I touched on this last year with my prediction that contacless payment cards would take off. That didn't quite prove true unless you live or work in the city of London where the system was fully rolled out. This time around I'm predicting the rise of smart cards in general. Whilst the Oyster card has ensured that smart cards will always have a place in the UK, the rest of the country is so far missing out. This is set to change this year as Oyster-like cards are to be rolled out on the Birmingham transport system - this year for buses and next year for trains - it's a system that makes a massive amount of sense as it will cut fare-dodgers and speed upto the endless queues at New Street at peak times. The first to benefit will be the OAPs - including my parents - who will receive their free buses smart cards this Easter. It'll probably be the first time my parents have ever been at the front of a technology roll-out. In addition to this the wave and pay trials should reach out to the rest of the country by the end of the year. How popular it will be I don't know - it depends on retailer take-up. Of course, anyone applying for a passport will get a form of smart card in the form of the new RFID passports which is in itself a form of smart card. The plastic electronics industry is still trying to get the cost of a printed RFID tag under 1 cent before they start to challenge the old-skool barcode - don't expect that to happen this year.

Also keep an eye out for converging personal devices: The new iPod touch is simply and iPhone without the phone part (it still has the internet facilities) or another way of looking at it is that the iPhone is a slightly lower capacity iPod (16 Gb vs 8 Gb). Expect to see the 2nd gen iPhone sport HSDPA, built in GPS, and 16 Gb flash memory. And a high price. The iPhone hasn't taken off in the UK as we're not used to paying so much for phones - an iPhone costs £900 in all including the contract. The US are used to getting didged for phones so they lapped it up.

Results of my futurology predictions

Right so it's been a year since my first go at futurology so let's see how I did...

Digital photo frames

They certainly have increased massively in popularity (if not quality). The main sticking points seem to be non standard aspect ratios (some are 16:9, some are 4:3 some are 3:2) so the pictures require formatting or people will look odd, high power requirements so most will only work from the mains. The prices have come down and it's been possible to get a 7" screen for around £35. They are popping up in more and more places and are appealing to a much broader market than before. Their popularity will only increase and slowly but surely larger versions (upto 12") are making their way onto the market. The next evolution will come with the development of e-ink. With this technology displaying a picture uses no energy - energy is only used to change the picture. There'll be more about this later. Black and white e-ink products are already on the market and colour-displays have been prototyped. I'll have more about e-ink in my predictions for 2008.
Result: partly successful

Contactless payments

The wave and pay system has been rolled out in London, but in a much smaller area than predicted: it is really only useful within the city, but it will be rolled out further over 2008. Travel anywhere on the tube and you will see ads for the Barclay One-pulse credit card that combines wave and pay with an oyster card so this may well become very popular in London this year. For the rest of the country however I'm not sure how long it will take as the banks are only planning to issue 5m cards this year and HSBC in Durham didn't even have any details of any north east trials.
result: predicted too early

HSDPA

A bit hard to tell what to think of this one. Most 3G phones released this year have been HSDPA-enabled. Pretty much all the phones released since May are capable of connecting to the net at 3.6Mbps which is almost as fast as the average UK broadband speeds. The speeds are set to double to 7.2Mbps (and maybe even 14.4Mbps) in 2008 and indeed over the summer most of the UK phone networks began to take mobile data access a lot more seriously. Certainly 3, Vodafone and T-mobile offer USB HSDPA modems for accessing the internet from a laptop anywhere with a mobile phone signal and all the networks have launched "unlimited" data packages to connect to the internet from your phones. The term unlimited varies wildly with 3 being the most generous offering 1Gb of data for £5/month, followed T-mobile offering 1Gb for £12.50/month (The cheaper £7.50 option apparently is fixed at a much slower speed than HSDPA is capable of), O2 allow 200Mb for £7.50/month and Vodafone offer 120Mb for £7.50 whilst Orange bring up the rear demanding £8/month for a paltry 30Mb. So once again, we have the facilities to make a massive jump forward in information access, but only if we're prepared to pay for it. Expect HSDPA routers to become a lot cheaper in 2008 and perhaps higher data allowances.
result: success - but who will pay for it?

Personal GPS

Now I will admit defeat on this one. Sales of in car, stand-alone GPS units must have gone through the roof this year with the big brand, Tomtom, finally breaking under the £100 barrier putting it in the realm of impulse purchase. However, my prediction was about personal GPS ie built into mobile phones. At the moment you get the best from sat-nav if a mobile phone is involved cos the phone can download traffic updates and send them to the main unit via bluetooth which will then seamlessly direct you around traffic jams. I can see the bigger companies like Tomtom integrating a sim card into new in car units and do this without the need for a phone or data charges (much like the Amazon Kindle reader does with books). But back to my prediction that most mobile phones would have GPS in them by the end of the year. It was looking good, the N95 launched with GPS and even a lower end Nokia 6110 had GPS. All the new HTC phones were run my the Qualcomm 7200 chip that includes, among other things, built in GPS and wifi. Sure enough all the new phones (Tytn II, Touch Dual and S730) were shown with fully functioning GPS and wifi, but for some reason the final devices lacked GPS (Touch Dual and S730) and wifi (Touch Dual). The phones good switch these functions on, but HTC had removed the antennae making the features useless. This seems a bit odd as it would increase the appeal of the phones. Furthermore the follow up to the very successful K800i, the K850i - widely rumoured to have GPS - was released GPS-less. The cynical would say that the GPS features were only disabled to provide the ability to release "upgraded" models in 6 months. The years big release, the iPhone was also GPS-less so this perhaps took the pressure off other manufacturers. I'll extend this prediction to next year.
result: failed due to lazy companies

Wii

Here's the unmitigated success of my predictions. It wasn't easy to find a Wii after Christmas. I kept missing stock refreshes online and most batches sold out within minutes. I finally got my Wii in late January and it was fantastic. The demand kept up and Wiis were hard to come by until the summer and suer enough once Christmas rolled around again they were once again nowhere to be found. It's not just the UK, in the week before Christmas 1.5 million Wiis were sold around the world - that's 1.5 million in a week. The only thing more popular was the DS lite which sold over 2 million in a week. By comparison the PS3 sold around 600K and the PSP sold 725K. Take that Sony. It seems the combination of a low (well-ish) price and broad appeal have hit a nerve. I heard stories of people's parents buying Wiis and having Wii parties with their friends. While there was a dearth of party games, Paper Mario, Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime 3 and the sublime Super Mario Galaxy ensured it catered to the gamers too. As the bloggers favoured animated Gif below says - these Nintendo consoles are printing money (just as the PS3 eats it). Even though they're slightly creepy, they crack me up every time I see them.



The next year starts off with the release of Wii fit, complete with balance board, that Nintendo can use to cash in on the whole after Christmas exercise fad so expect the console sales to keep on accelerating away from the competition.



result: definitely a success.

I'll post my predictions for 2008 in the next couple of days.

Updates are coming

I know it's been over four months since my last update here, but I've been being sociable and haven't had the internet at home so updates have been dificult. They are coming in the next few days. In the mean time I wish everyone a happy New Year and all the best for 2008. I've also updated 4 months worth of photos to my Flickr account so click the link on the right to see them.

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.)

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).

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.