Too busy to…

I can now enjoy my large number of cups per day guilt-free!
Wired News: Java Joy in Coffee Study

A lazy Sunday evening hiding in my air-conditioned apartment from the humidity and rain meant I finally got time to finish Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. (Potential spoilers below!)

My first week at work was fairly quiet — we had some fun breaking computers (and then fixing them again) but there was some dull admin to fill the evenings too. My fellow trainees and I have explored a couple of bars near work — they’re not bad, if a little expensive (and we haven’t [...]

A quick post to confirm my aliveness, and location as being currently New York, NY, USA. The appartment is lovely (it has a coffee machine and broadband Internet)[1] and the location is fantastic. Although my Australasian adventure is over, I hope I am just setting off on a whole new one so I shall endeavour [...]

Tomorrow morning I will be leaving Cambridge. I’ve done this before, but four years ago on the same day that I left I learnt that I had been granted funding for a PhD, and so the possibility of me coming back seemed quite likely. This time, after nearly seven years here, Cambridge feels much more [...]

It seems that people have now been using Powerpoint for sufficiently long that “Death by Powerpoint” is a rare event at conferences these days. Alas, this morning I felt the life being sucked from me by misuse of a laser pointer.
The two most obvious problems that inflict laser pointing users are that:

it causes the [...]

Personalised Google looks interesting. I’ve always liked the idea of MyYahoo! but the interface is quite cluttered so it never became my homepage. The interface of the Google portal is actually one of the coolest parts of this page — you can use “drag and drop” to re-order the information! Being a Beta-service, the available [...]

I actually finished binding the third copy of my thesis at 15:55 yesterday afternoon. Unfortunately, this being Cambridge, the Board of Graduate studies closes at 4pm so I had to wait until this morning to actually submit my thesis… but now it’s DONE! I shall have to prepare for the viva at some point, [...]

A few weeks ago my Inspiron 8100 died (again). Having already replaced the hard disk, I decided it was time to replace the whole machine and went shopping for a new laptop. A few days later I had decided that an iBook was the right choice.
Why? Well, on the desktop I am a [...]

Today’s Piled Higher and Deeper is particularly apt for me at the moment!
Progress on actual writing has stalled for the moment: this week I’ve spent a lot of time supervising, generating results graphs and producing the camera-ready version of a paper for iTrust. Hopefully my word count will start moving (upwards!) again [...]

A short spell of insomnia last week caused me to watch a late-night TV programme about the top British bands of 2004. Liking what I heard, iTunes’ excellent music sharing facility allowed me to preview the albums of Snow Patrol and Franz Ferdinand. I’m not convinced about the latter, but Snow Patrol’s Final Straw [...]

Online shopping is great. You can shop around for the cheapest prices from the comfort of your bedroom instead of having to tramp around town (or worse, drive from place from place), you can check out online reviews and product specs that are far more detailed and knowledgeable than any shop assistant and best of [...]

Something else to distract me from my thesis write-up, a new version of WordPress (the software that runs this site) was released today.
The official changelog is rather brief — here’s a more more comprehensive review of improvements, and upgrade instructions for the previous stable version (1.2).

A close end to the match — I’m glad I didn’t go to bed at 24-14, but in the end the Eagles just too sloppy in their execution.
Interesting to see the game shown on ITV this year — clearly more money to spend on presentation than Channel 5’s usual offering. Lots of ad-breaks in [...]

As hoped the Eagles came back almost straight away with a nice drive to level the score and open up the game. Ominously for the Eagles though, the Patriots are beginning to look very comfortable running the ball, giving them control of the line of scrimmage, the clock and I think, ultimately the game. We’ll [...]