I speaking with a friend over a drink after my birthday meal. He is telling me that certain vintage video games consoles have doubled in value in less than a year. Ideas I've been having for a while condense around his words. My generation are in the ascension. We are reaching that point where we can decide what happens to us, around us. We are starting to get powerful, starting to shine. We are coming into the focus of the twenty year cycle.
The twenty year cycle hasn't been around long, since the late seventies I suppose. In fact I think it might be shortening. It couldn't exist without the speed at which our media progresses, and it stands to reason that as the media gets faster (blogs, the internet, email) the cycle will shorten. The cycle is the product of people growing up and having the disposable income to purchase the weird and wonderful things they have wanted since they were children, or to replace something they had as a child for that nostalgia.
It's an interesting time. What will we do with our new found power? What sections of our childhood pop culture will be resurected?

Ok so I've added some nice fades to the background of text areas, which make everything a bit easier to read. Sadly IE does something silly as the transparancy is done using a png, so I have to use the (proprietry) gif format. I plan to do some browser sniffing serverside one day so the IE users get a (dirty) gif and the FF/Opera bods get a nice clean friendly png.

To be honest with you I don't know why I care, but for some reason I do!

Birthday Celebrations

Well it was my birthday on Sunday so the weekend became one long celebration of me :) Friday night a load of people rocked down to Mr Wolfs for a few beerios, which was nice. We stayed there until our numbers dwindled a little then wandered up to Giant Robot at the Cooler (didn't get in) then to The Woods. Stayed there till about 4am chatting with randoms then went to a friends house and carried on chatting drinking and eating pasta till the morning. Went home, sent a few texts to people basically saying do not disturb and fell asleep.
Saturday all the plans went awry. Had planned to be in The Woods most of the evening but there was a private party there and we wouldn't have all got in, so we went to Morphs for a few lagers (nice place, looked like it did good food, but not really an ideal bar...). Met up with the stragglers there then tried to get into Mr Wolfs, but that too was full, so we ended up in The River, which turned out to be pretty cool. There was a pretty decent blues band playing and I think most people had a good, or very good time. About 1:30am we decided to move onto somewhere else (the band had finished), tried Mr Wolfs again, and were again turned away, so wandered round to the Arc Bar, which was playing some fairly decent UK Hip Hop.
Left there about 2 I think, wandered home via a chip shop with Dee and Colin (carrying Dee a fair amount of the way), and was nicely tucked up in bed by half three.
Sunday went for brunch with Colin and his friends from Uni, mooched around the house and then went for a curry at the Redland Tandoori. Nice way to end the weekend :)
What made me really made me happy was how many people came out. I have a lot of very good friends, and I'm lucky.

::Photos::

Bored get boring

I realised the other day that I've become a bit boring. All I do is work on my thesis. Most days I don't leave the house. I used to be really interested in current affairs. I'd read the guardian (real news) and the register (g33k news) daily. I'd watch the channel 4 news every weekday evening. I took a great interest in music and art. Now I almost never read "the papers", have noticed myself not really listening to music to the point where I now often work in silence (I NEVER used to work in silence). I guess because I'm concentrating on the thesis I'm falling out of touch with things. When it's done I'll become the media savvy, politically charged, interesting person I once (thought I) was.

TODO list

• Finish Thesis
• Complete Grid Chapter
• Complete Analysis
• Start & Finish the rest
  
• Finish Academic CV
  
• Finish Metsonet.co.uk
• Update/redesign roadkilart.com
• Make more brushes
• Finish Thesis
• Sort out MPC hard drive (upgrade OS)
• Finish Thesis
• Pay electricity bill
• Finish Thesis

Which is a shame.

When I were a lad growing up in deepest darkest Essex I used to make mix tapes for girlfriends, before they were girlfriends, to woo them. I was thinking the other day that soon people won't be able to do that, it'll just be a playlist on a scratched iPod or something, which takes out the heart of it. Having to listen to the whole thing from start to finish, pressing pause between tracks, thats what made the thing special, and future generations won't have that. Even making a CD is different, unless you make a cover. Which is a shame.

Blah blah blah

Its been awhile again...
Writing thesis. Have RSI in my right arm, and possible left too. Submitting jobs to the grid and CERN batch farms (watching the output arrive in your inbox is a bit like how I imagine watching racing pigeons come home feels like). Trying this interweb dating malarky. Writing thesis. Trying to sort out a job.

And thats that for now.

It's been a while

Well it's been a while since I last posted to this blog, my work blog has been a bit more active, but I didn't realise I hadn't posted here since the middle of February until I started the redesign of my website. I've been pretty busy with work since getting back from India, including trips to Lake Louise Canada (amazing!!) the day after I got back from India, and Fermi Lab just outside Chicago via New York.
The India trip was pretty great. Hard work punctuated by a great trip to Goa - I still miss those beaches!! I think it really got my thesis on track, certainly all the work that I've done since built up on the work done on that trip.
The trip to Canada was for the Lake Louise Winter Institute, a nice relax after the bustle of Mumbai, a week in a Five Star hotel (the Lake Louise Fairmont Chateaux) discussing physics in a nice laid back manner, snowboarding, snow shoeing, swimming and steam room. It really was tough. Probably the most beautiful scenery that I've walked in. It was also really nice to be around people I knew - India had got a bit lonely. After the week in Lake Louise I went to Toronto to spend a week with my friend Lindz, which was pretty cool. I really needed the week to just hang out and Toronto is a great place to do that.
After the two trips away it was great to get back to Bristol and normality. It lasted a while, but then the CMS physics week at Fermi Lab came up.
Myself and Rob Frazier travelled over together and spent a long weekend in New York, before heading to Chicago on the Monday for the Physics week. The weekend in New York was pretty amazing, it's such a cool city, so big. It's how you imagine a city should be. I want to live there! Rob had a friend living there who showed us the sights and sounds of the place. I think without having a guide we would probablyhve got overwhelmed.
Fermi Lab was a pretty interesting place to visit, and I enjoyed working there for the week. We went out into the city one night for some Persian food, which was very tasty and spent a couple of days in Chicago at Hotel 71 after the conference which was pretty nice. It was a shame that it was just me and Rob against the City of Chicago, but we made friends with some Americans and ended up in a "Keg Party". Very cool. Living in Chicago wouldn't be that bad either.
I'm now back in Bristol after possibly my last trip to CERN. Works pretty hectic lots of analysis to do, which is mainly working out how to submit jobs running over the whole 5,000,000 event sample. Great fun! Right best get back it....

Back in Bombay/Mumbai

Well the trip to Goa was ace (took lots and lots of photos which I'll post soon). It was great to see CJ and Taz again as well as sit on a beach and sun myself :)
The train journey back was pretty horrible, vomiting and diarrhea, but I got back in one piece (leaving the contents of my stomache along the way) and slept it off. Have since been a bit more careful about food and am feeling much much better. Also now have my laptop working so have some music to listen to at night. Been thinking about deleting my linux partitions but think I'll wait till I'm back in Bristol and have the XP cd's to hand - I've got a nasty feeling I'd screw up the MBR if I did it here.
Since getting back I've been a bit more active with work. I now have a pretty good idea what I need to do wrt the Invisible Higgs code, a lot of the physics is still above me but I'll get there. I've also started to write my talk for the Dublin IOP. My last talk (at CMSUK) was a bit crap so I'm hoping to get this properly prepared in advance.
Trying to get the last of the MadGraph samples done today, then I can concentrate on getting my ORCA/ROOT analysis code up and running. I still have a few questions and ideas I need to thrash out (which I'll note down in my ORCA blog) but I think I'm pretty much on the right track at least.
Not heard from Greg since I got out here so assuming he's not read thesis (after making a fuss about it at CMSUK). Need to think of a polite way to give him a kick up the arse when I get back...

Evening

Last night I went to bed having completed a little achievement. There really is no feeling greater than doing something to improve your surroundings just before going to bed. I swapped lightbulbs between two lamps so the one over my bed works. Very satisfying.

Today has been pretty busy. Woke up at 8 had breakfast and a shower then came onto TIFR to check email to see if I'd got anything from CJ and Tara. I hadn't. Then went into town to sort out their accomodation. Had a bit of a wander around, nothing major. Some cool buildings in that part of town, aswell as slums. Only got accosted 4 times, which I thought was good going. Missed the bus so took a cab back here. Unfortuneatly the driver didn't know where here was. I was lost so couldn't direct him, and thought perhaps it was a language thing (I know how much I mumble) so wrote down TIFR and its address on some paper (I luckily had). He gets out the cab and asks this bloke for directions! And then charges me full fare! Good to see cabbies are the same the world over.

This evening, after some serious code hacking, my eyes were squares so I went for a walk along the Sea wall. The sun was setting and the sky looked like rust. Bats were flying about catching things. There are these cool garden lights along the wall which I really like - going to take a photo later. It was nice. The view across the bay is pretty cool too, especially at night. In the day you can see that some of the buildings are falling down, but at night the sky line is as impressive as any I've seen. You can also see the pollution, I realised that it was actually bloking out the sunset a little.

Right and now back to work! Ha ha!

Late night

Well I'm waiting for a file to upload and its taking ages, which has meant I've been sat in front of this computer for about an hour and a half longer than I intended.
Meeting CJ and Tara on Wednesday, I think the plan is to tour Elephanta Island on Thursday and then head off to Goa early on Friday morning. Should be good.
Work is going well, though prehaps in a slightly orthogonal direction. It's annoying me that I don't really understand what it is I'm doing yet, so I can solve a problem thats put in front of me but not work out if thats the problem I need to be solving. I'm starting to get a bit more into it though, which is deffinitely a good thing, so hopefully the understanding isn't far away!
Right I'm off to bed - sod the file :)

India

Well since I'm in India I thought I'd make a post :) I've come to Mumbai to work
at TIFR for three and a half weeks. I'm
working with Kajari Mazumdar on an analysis of Invisible Higgs Boson decays, which will form the backbone of my PhD thesis.
I arrived here on Monday (24th) after 19 hours travel, and I'm just about over the jet lag. Monday and Tuesday merged into Muesday and I've had to scribble down a makeshift calendar to help me keep track of the days.
Although the journey was long I actually enjoyed it. I was sat next to a builder from London - a real salt of the Earth - who was going to Kathmandu to walk for a few months. We parted ways at Doha. I arrived in Mumbai a bit sleepy but buzzing from that weird adrenaline you get when you go to a new place. Got through customs and passport control pretty quickly and was met by a driver from TIFR.
The drive through Mumbai was a real eye opener, like any city every inch of tarmac was being replaced, but here it was done by hand, the workers along with other families living by the roadside. It reminded me of a Roy Bailey song "... why choose to live where the petrol fumes go....its not our choice but a choice they made for us" (well something like that). And above this poverty there were huge adverts for ADSL and mobile phone companies. A really weird mix. At traffic lights people stop and try and sell you fruit and magazines ("What Car?"), and the driving is mania! Three cars where in england you'd maybe have one.
TIFR is a really nice place to work. It's on the Arabian sea (the site is on loan for 100 years from the Navy), you can see across the bay to the posh part of Mumbai (looks extra nice at night) and there a nice gardens around the buildings. Everything looks like it was designed and built in the 70's, and in a lot of cases hasn't be painted or repaired since. Still, I prefer it to CERN, perhaps because its new.
I'm staying on site at the guesthouse. My room is a bit run down, though not really any worse than my room in halls, but it's really homely. The walls are painted the colour of black birds eggs and there are two pigeons nesting above my window. When I shut the curtains they get scared and fly off, making me jump, so the curtains are staying open :) Sleeping has been hard because of crows and fighting ferral dogs.
Last night it rained quite hard, the smell was amazing and it's really freshened the air today - hurrah! Even Kajari was saying it was hot.
Well I'd best head back to the guesthouse as my friends CJ and Tara should be ringing in a bit to organise our trip to Goa next week. I'm really looking forward to it so will work all weekend so I can have as much time with them as possible.