Cake

I'm having cake today for lunch (although not one of these). Perhaps this is unhealthy.

Forest

Went to Thetford forest today. It was very cold and frosty, but beautifully sunny too. Managed to find a very quiet path away from all the cyclists.



I'm always amazed that my (now quite old) phone can actually take moderate pictures sometimes.

Professor preferences

Spotted on GMSV: "As anticipated, when the young women in the current study were asked to select the agents who were most like them and who they most wanted to be like, they tended to pick young, female, attractive, and cool agents. However, they also selected the young, female, cool agents as being least like an engineer. When asked to select who they would most like to learn from about engineering, the women in the current study were far more likely to pick male agents who were uncool but attractive. Interestingly, it was also the male, uncool agents that they tended to rate as most like an engineer."

So says Amy Baylor, a professor of instructional systems at Florida State University's Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning. This amused me greatly.

Music on a stick

Cool - I'll be able to get the new Barenaked Ladies album on USB memory stick. (Assuming someone imports it, of course.) And it looks like Weird Al has recorded the first 6 tracks of his new album too. Can't wait.

Interactive Art Cambridge-style

Saw these guys in town this morning - solar-powered laptops, free for anyone to use. Cute waterproof hoods. Apparently it's Art, rather than Useful...

If you get up at 7:30 in November...

you need to turn the lights on. A lazy student lifestyle has wiped
such details from my memory. Time for a change, perhaps.

Recognition

2005 is the Year of the Volunteer, and Charlie and I got medals tonight for our work as Ambassadors over the years. Officially these are Awards for Commitment. Not had a medal before!

Lots of mayors from Cambridgeshire, and the Lord Lieutenant, were there. 401 medals are being awarded nationwide, and Cambs got 36 of them. We're keen round here.

First baking of the season

No idea when the season officially opens, of course. But I haven't baked anything for so long that this definitely counts as a new season for me.

A digital and peripatetic existence

Being currently "between jobs", I'm in an interesting situation when it comes to computing, as every day I use a range of different platforms in different locations, and none of them are really mine. At home I have a choice of Mac or PC and usually end up flitting between the two depending on what room I'd rather be in; elsewhere, I can often snatch a few minutes on a Windows machine or sometimes my own xterm and/or browser window on a Linux box.

The experience is very different to that of having one's own main computer, set up with applications and preferences, and which automatically starts up widgets to keep one connected and informed. My USB key and webpages are pretty useful for documents (and at home all my files are on the network), but I do sometimes find that I'm stuck with a NeoOffice save file from the Mac which I can't edit on an alien Windows machine. Most of my document editing still happens at home, but it is good to see that I could now do some of these tasks online if I wanted to. For almost everything else, I am now very dependent on Google, which is convenient (single login) but which disturbs my engineering brain (single point of failure). I can get email, newsgroups and even RSS feeds - the only thing I still need is my bookmarks file, which admittedly can be accessed in other ways, but for which a nice web interface would be handy. Also, if I'm not on a home machine, I'm not connected to others via IM and so for those of my friends who have almost entirely abandoned email, I might as well be on the moon when I am away from home for a while.

I do in fact have a smallish laptop, which I could tote around for use in networked spaces; however, I've found that I simply don't bother. If my outings were more defined (home-cafe-home, for example) perhaps I would, but I usually end up having several meetings or errands to run on a single trip, and can't face carrying the darn thing around. A PDA would probably fit into this new lifestyle more easily, but for me it would need to be a Psion-style thing with keyboard, proper browser and wifi, and which seemlessly coped with GPRS otherwise - which means I'd also need a proper contract cellphone to afford the data charges... It would automatically back itself up, too. Although 5 years ago we were sure that by now this type of thing would be available, it isn't really, which is sad. Five years ago I would at least have been kitted out with the range of latest gadgets required to approximate to this ideal, and would have spent the time to get them all working the way I like. I must be getting old though, as even if I could justify blowing the cash on the devices and services, I wouldn't want to spend the time setting them up these days. If I was in work, I wouldn't have the time (and in any case most of my requirements would be handled by a corporate IT system); as it is, I have the time but don't quite see this state as a lasting one worth investing the effort in.

I'm quite enjoying my freelance lifestyle at the moment though. If only I could find a way of getting paid to do something similar, I would!

Literally Weird

For some time now, I've felt I ought to read a book entitled Behind the Scenes at the Museum, which had been very well received, but whenever I spotted it in a store, I'd always read the blurb and be put off. Perhaps it was because I like museums, but none seemed to occur in the book, or perhaps it sounded too much like a generic woman trapped in unhappy marriage tale.

A month or two back, I needed a third book for a 3-for-2, and so bought Not the End of the World, which was a collection of wonderfully surreal short stories and which had an appealing blurb. A week or so later, I spotted another book by the same author (Kate Atkinson) which was set in Cambridge and looked like a mystery - it sounded terrific, and was. Having read that, I proceeded to devour the rest of her oeuvre, including some really splendid story telling. I finally finished Behind the Scenes at the weekend (one of her best, I think, no wonder everyone raved about it) and Emotionally Weird yesterday (a surreal comic novel, and a nice complement to the other campus novels I've been working my way through lately). How on earth did I miss out on Kate Atkinson for so long?

She's now on my elite "I'll even buy in hardback" authors list, joining Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, John Le Carre, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling. A rather SF/cyberpunk weighted list, hmm. With my recent foray through campus novels I've also found I like David Lodge, so perhaps he is moving onto my hardback list too. This is in spite of the fact that my time as a PhD student involved rather less sex and excitement than most of the characters in Lodge's academic departments manage. Sigh.

Take action - stop climate chaos

Stop Climate Chaos aims to be the next big campaign (following 2005's Make Poverty History). Sign up now on their petition, and pledge to be a bit greener in the future - and tell your friends to do the same.

(Spreading the word, as promised, Anne!)

Great quote

"Nothing right in my left brain; nothing left in my right brain"

I assume it's an old one, but new to me. (Seen on a postcard in the
house of a very helpful lady I visited yesterday.)