I’ve just realised that I never wrote about Ben’s latest tricks! He’s into animal noises at the moment, and is really good at matching animals names and pictures to the noises they make. Ok, he doesn’t always get them right, and you do sometimes need a little bit of imagination to distinguish between them, but […]

I’m starting to feel like an old hand at this travelling game; or is that just old? 🙂 Anywhere, here we in Oxford for our annual project workshop, sort of a bit like a mini-version of the jolly in Nottingham last week. My talk is a bit more involved here, as I’ve got a 30 […]

Found an excellent but under-advertised tool called Synergy, which lets you control multiple machines from a single keyboard and mouse… Ah, you say – isn’t that just a KVM (keyboard video monitor) switch. Mais non, because with this handy bit of software you have a monitor per computer, and seemlessly change which one you’re controlling […]

My new passport arrived this afternoon, and I have to say it looks much the same as the old one. One thing that’s quite amusing is that I spent ages agonising over whether to put “Dr” as my title. On the one hand it would be cool, but on the other hand it might attract […]

Here I am at the University of Nottingham, in Cavendish Hall (one of the students’ halls of residence), and I must say that the connectivity has been fantastic – good wireless coverage everywhere in the conference centre, and wired network in all the rooms. A major part of the All Hands meeting is the ‘booths’ […]

Off to Nottingham for most of this week, for all the “All Hands” conference. This is an annual get together of all the EPSRC e-Science projects, where we demonstrate our work and have various talks about e-Science and Grid Computing stuff. I’ve not been to one before, but I’m not a huge conference fan at […]

So the wife and I have been watching Lost on Channel 4, leading to much speculation as to what exactly is going on. One possible urban-legend doing the rounds is that every characters back story incidently features one of the other characters from the crash – so in the background, or on the TV, or […]

There’s been a “piece of research” recently that says that we all lots of gadget appliances lying around our kitchens that either never have come out of the box, or have only been used once or twice. Things like toasted-sandwich makers, food processors, coffee makers, bread machines, ice-cream makers, etc. In one sense I’m not […]

Going out to a Barn Dance this evening!! A couple at church are both celebrating their 40th birthdays this year, and so decided to have a big party – should be fun. Feel like we’ve earned an evening off as well, after another bout of painting today (ceiling finished, tester colours up and under consideration) […]

So the Sony PSP was released today. I had to come home a bit early for reasons that I won’t go in to – but ended up wandering through town; past Dixons, Woolies, Game and the like. It must be said that all of these retailers appeared to have stock (they certainly had the empty […]