One cool cat..

On a more positive note than my previous post, here's a picture of my friends' new kitten. I'd never seen a real life kitten before and was amazed at how small Oscar actually is. Oh and the crazy jumping around after everything!

He was intrigued by my shoes, and after trying to eat them, decided to sit on my feet instead and play with the spider. Shortly after this he tried to climb up the leg of my jeans, so note to self; bootleg jeans are not a great idea around small kittens...

See, I said I liked making my life more complicated than it ever needs to be..

Since I have an estimated year to go on my PhD I've been thinking about my career, or rather lack of one so far. Sometimes it feels like everyone I graduated with has moved on and grown up so much, whereas I'm still in the same place, in the same lab as I was 3 years ago. Not that I regret doing a PhD (I'm not quite *that* sick of it yet!), but I would be in a very different place if I'd decided to go into industry after finishing my undergrad degree.

I am sure that I want to stay in research when I finish. This is the part of my PhD I enjoy (and yes, that is just as well really). I've also liked teaching undergraduates in labs over the last couple of years. What I don't like about University research is there's never enough money to do exactly what I would like to do, I think it's possible that I'm deluding myself that industry would be any different. If I want to stay in academia I need papers. My grand total of papers at the moment is zero. I have results which I could publish but I lack the confidence to do this because I'm working on my own and I suffer from being a perfectionist.

So far, not so complicated. However added to this I want to go work in Australia for 18 months sometime within 2 years of graduating. So I ideally need work experience here to put me in better stead for when I turn up there looking for a job.

And and and! I'm doing something I never would have imagined even a year ago; I'm living with my boyfriend. Eek cohabiting, this makes things more complicated and ties me to the Nottingham area for the foreseeable future. So any job I apply for after finishing my PhD needs to be commutable from Nottingham, and industry research jobs around here are few and far between. This pushes me back in the academia direction. I just need to ensure that I'm doing that because it's what I want to do, rather than because it's convenient. And then back to what I'm struggling with at the moment; is it academia I'm fed up with, or is it the University of Nottingham? I've had a good time here, but I think I'm just getting a bit bored starting my 8th year here.

Plus my supervisor is transferring to Malaysia campus on Monday. I'm trying to view this in a non-disastrous way; after all my driving instructor emigrated to Cyprus the day after my driving test and I passed that no problems!

The European GP is pointless, especially when it's at Valencia..

The European grand prix has always been an oddity on the F1 calender, there are so few tracks which are good enough to warrant one country hosting two races, and so the "Grand prix of Europe" seems to have turned into the race which is auctioned off to the track prepared to pay Bernie's price.

Another year, another grand prix from Valencia and another bore.

10 laps to go until the finish and I don't think anything exciting has happened...

• We've had a McLaren pit stop where they didn't have the tyres ready, I can only assume the guys have been taking lessons from Ferrari .
• Barichello gets ahead of Hamilton in a very typically Ross Brawn strategic overtaking in the pits move. Yes, it's very clever but does not make for a great spectator sport.
• Luca Badoer utterly failed to impress, being out-driven by rookies Alguersuari and Grosjean. I would be surprised if Ferrari didn't try an alternative driver very very soon. I would love for Valentino Rossi to race, but I know that's just not going to happen.
  

In the interests of balance, I do like the trophy handed out at this grand prix. See photo for a happy picture of Lewis Hamilton with one last year when he later went on the win the championship. Note the lovely "Not for public use" watermark, always good when your image appears on the first page of a google image search (source).

I don't understand the full details of why some tracks provide good races and some dull ones. I don't know how long Valencia can be justified a place on the calender if next years race is a repeat of these last two. Oh wait, as long as you pay up to Bernie, the racing is irrelevant.. (Yes I am deeply cynical..)

I think I'll go look at the cricket score until the last lap, because nothing more is going to happen in this race.

The good news is that at least it's Spa next race.

..yes, it means you too...

I have a bit of a whinge now and again about people on my floor doing what I consider to be pretty stupid things. This notice put up by Rod the technician on my floor shows perfectly the steps that have to be taken for people to pay attention to things!

Now, on another work related note. Finally got a piece of equipment working, I shall kindly refer to it as 'legacy equipment'. The VNA (that's a vector network analyser for anyone who isn't so into their RF testing ) is a HP8510 and while it is old (it was the cutting edge of technology back in 1991!), it's still a very desirable piece of kit, with a frequency range of 45MHz up to 50GHz. It's not the VNA that's been giving me grief, it's the computer that it's attached to that I've been wanting to hit with sticks.

The computer was originally a Viglen III and it boasts a whole 600k of RAM and runs on MS DOS. The software that interacts with the VNA was written in the early '90s in HP Basic by someone in-house. So there's no documentation and half of the functions in the code either don't work, or cause the program to crash, wiping the data file it was working with as an added bonus.

So sadly it really isn't very Tron even if the text is a rather attractive green on a black background. On the bright side I have learnt how to work MS DOS to a very basic getting on level, and I haven't used MS DOS since when I was little on a Commodore 64 PC

Jury service

Since quite a lot of people have asked me what I did on my jury service I thought it would be a nice idea to write some of it down. Obviously I'm not going to go into detail about the cases or the other jurors (you're not allowed by law to do this and you are reminded of this several many times while you're there..). This is more about the proceedings of what happens, the information I would have liked to know before I turned up in court for my first day.

When you first get your Jury Summons through the door the first thought is 'eek what is this? It looks official, what have I done?!' When you open it up it's a very pink form! It has the basic information about the place and date you need to turn up and also a severely worded warning that you have to reply to this summons within seven days or you could be prosecuted. Nice. There's also some other forms about claiming for loss of earnings and a guide to jury service booklet to read. You have the options on the pink form to defer your service if you cannot attend the date given and to provide details of all dates you cannot attend for the next year. You can also give reasons why you think you should be excused entirely but I got the impression that it's really not that easy to get out of entirely. I don't mind doing my jury service, I do believe that it is important and to me it's the responsibility that goes with your right to vote.

The slight complication I had when I got my summons was I was moving house between the date I got the letter and the date of my jury service. I sent an email to the address on the form just asking for confirmation that it was okay to put my new address on the form and that it would be alright and got a very helpful and prompt reply, even offering me an alternative sooner date if that would be more convenient for me. I stuck with my original dates, but was impressed by how helpful the reply was. In-fact my overall feeling about the process was that all the staff realised that a lot of people really didn't want to be there, so they tried to make the process as easy and as painless as possible.

About three weeks before my jury service was due to start I was sent some more information, this time from Nottingham about the specifics for their court, like which door to go in, basic housekeeping like that. At this point if you need to contact anyone about it, you have to contact your local court and not the central jury processing bureau.

A week before sadly my godfather passed away and since I wanted to attend the funeral I had to ring Nottingham Crown Court and defer my jury service by a week at the last moment. After the lady I spoke to realised that I wasn't trying to wiggle my way out of doing it at the last minute, it was all sorted out and I received confirmation in the post the next day.

When I did turn up for my first day I registered when I arrived and sat with all the other new jurors (there were 73 of us!) in the jury waiting area. We watched a video about what happens in court and then sat and waited to be called.

The selection of people to serve on a jury is completely random, the names were picked by a computer. This means that during your average service of two weeks you could do several trials, or you could do none. I did three while I was there and some people did only one. A list of 14-16 names are called for a standard case and if you're one of them you go into a different room and the usher checks to see who wants to swear on the Christian Bible and if anyone wants a different text or to simply affirm, which is the non-religious version.

When you go into the court room the names of all the people involved in the trail and the area it took place in is read out. If you know any of the people, this includes witnesses, barristers and police officers you have to say and means you will probably not be selected for that jury because it would affect the impartiality of the trial. The defendant can also object to any of the jurors if they wish. 12 names are called, again at random, and these people are then sworn in as the jury.

The basic structure of the trail is that the prosecution will state their case, then the defence. Then both sides make their closing speeches and final the judge will sum up the evidence and provide guidance in the detail of the law that applies to the case.

Then the jury go and deliberate. This is top secret and you are not allowed to discuss what you talk about with anyone outside of the jury. The deliberation takes as long as it takes. They brought our lunch down to the room for us, I felt very sorry for people who were desperate for a cigarette and not allowed to leave.

When you've reached a unanimous verdict you go back into court and the foreman (I was the foreman once and I'm a woman, I'm not clear what the actual gender specific term is!) provides the verdict to the judge. If the defendant is found not guilty they are free to go. If they are found guilty then the judge can either pass a sentence then or can give a future date when sentencing can take place. You can phone the court after that date if you're interested in finding out what the sentence was.

My experience of jury service was on the whole good. While there is never going to be a good time for anyone to put their life on hold for a fortnight (or possibly longer), it is a very important service. Yes there is a lot of waiting around between cases to see if you're going to be picked but this is unavoidable. The staff do their best to try and make the experience as easy as possible and the judge in all of the cases I was involved in thanked the jury for what they were doing. Having had the experience of being on three juries I think that trial by jury is robust and invaluable. Any move to erode this right is deeply disturbing.

I found jury service a very interesting experience and I'm glad I've done it. I would be happy to do it again in the future, just not too soon!

I'm famous...

..well okay, not really. But I did get my comment published on a story on the BBC news website!

The story was about Kubrick's Clockwork Orange and how Thamesmead where most of it was filmed has become the fraud capital of the UK. However the picture at the top of the story is of an underpass, which I was always led to believe while growing up was actually in Aylesbury.
Link to story.

The underpass has since been demolished and rebuilt, so it does make it harder to confirm the story. The location I was told was that it was the subway between the bus station and rail station on the edge of the town.

I don't know if this is right, don't bite me too hard if it isn't!

Jackpot!

At 7.50am this morning I stopped briefly at Watford Gap services, I saw a man on the pokies there; if that isn't indicative of problem gambling I don't know what is!

Now you see him, now you don't....

So it emerges this morning that Schumacher will in-fact not be returning to formula 1 after all this season, since his neck isn't healed enough for the stresses (in the physics sense) of a race. Can't really say I'm too sad or surprised. The level of fitness required of a formula 1 driver is high and it realistically would take more than four weeks for someone to get back to that level, even someone without a previous neck injury.

Two questions remain:

1. Who will now drive the second Ferrari?
2. Will all those people who bought tickets for the remaining races because they wanted to see Schumi be entitled for a refund?

For the first, Ferrari must now turn to one of their two test drivers, Luca Badoer or Marc Gene. Now those are two names from the past! While they may not be immediately competitive, Ferrari are running out of time to find someone else who can get race ready in time. Speculation has linked Alonso and Kubica to the seat, but I really can't see the team letting a driver from another team into the cockpit with the potential to gain valuable information. This applies especially to Alonso since Renault will still be around next season.

And the second question? The answer clearly is going to be a resounding 'no'. I suspect some circuit managers will be rubbing their hands in glee at the extra revenue they've gained from the Schumacher circus.

EDIT: Speculation over, they've given the seat to Luca Badoer. I like the line in this article. "In agreement with Stefano Domenicali, we have therefore decided to give Luca Badoer the chance to race for the Scuderia after he has put in so many years of hard work as a test driver." Yeah, so many years of hard work that we'll only give you a chance because wunder-boy is unfit... Being not-Schumi at Ferrari has always been a tough gig.

Well the bookies seem to have rather a lot of faith in Schumacher's return...

Thought that I would pass comment on Michael Schumacher's return to F1 and rather than just rant, use some pseudo-statistics :)

The smug one's return to F1 seems to have been met with nothing but enthusiasm by the paddock but I'm sure I can't be the only one who isn't thrilled by his comeback. They should, in my opinion, have given the drive to their test driver who knows the car, instead of then being bitter about not then being allowed a mid-season test.

Clearly it has to be said that these were not the circumstances that anyone would have wanted to take up a drive, it's always sad when someone's been injured. Massa fortunately is making good progress, the latest being that he will "miss at least four grand prix" which is amazing given the man suffered a fractured skull! So hopefully Ferrari will be back to their main drivers well before the end of the season.

The selection of Schumi may well be a media and sponsor's dream. It's generated some good publicity for the sport. The return of anyone as successful in a sport as that will always be welcomed. It will be interesting to see how he places against the new generation of drivers (I'm trying to think off the top of my head how many drivers have driven in the same fields as Schumacher before, only the two Brawn, Kimi and Mark Webber spring to mind). Skybet has a whole range of different Schumi related flutters available, with the odds of a victory on his debut at 9/1 (favourite to win is Hamilton at 5/2). But those odds are pretty generous I would have said, it's only slightly worse than the odds for the current championship leader, Jenson Button at 8/1. Given the man hasn't yet driven this seasons car that's putting a lot of faith in him. Maybe this is the mysterious Schumacher effect at work again, which when he was still racing, seemed to make cars in-front (especially back-markers) leap out of the way.

I don't want him to do badly, because then people will make excuses for him, maybe a 5th or 6th would be good, just to take some of the shine off that halo...

If I was the gambling type, I'd place £1 on Lewis Hamilton to win the 2009 Driver's championship at 25/1. It's unlikely but it's a nice dream and McLaren have had worse seasons than this! If Hamilton can't win it, my support goes to "Aylesbury's own Mark Webber" (yes, my local paper did get a bit too keen!), ironic that the only F1 driver living in the UK isn't one of the two Brits on the grid.

I'm sorry, I didn't like The Dark Knight...

When I first saw The Dark Knight in the cinema all those months ago I had mixed feelings about it. I enjoyed the story and the twists, but it felt very long and rather disjointed. Add this to the sense of complete and utter hopelessness I got it, I was very happy that I was leaving the cinema to a beautiful sunny afternoon to lift my mood back up.

I rented the DVD and watched it again. I wanted to rewatch it because I felt it was complicated enough and that I might feel differently and enjoy it more when I knew what was going to happen so wasn't worried about following the plot so much.

I can't say I enjoyed it anymore then I did the first time. Sorry! On my first sitting I got two hours in to the point where Harvey is in the hospital and they do the he's become Two-face reveal. When I said above the film felt disjointed to me, this was the point that I was expecting it to end in the cinema, but no there's still another half an hour to go! I had to stop watching because I knew I'd be in too much of a black mood to go to bed and sleep well otherwise.

A lot of my thoughts from the first viewing still hold true for me. Batman's voice just sounds silly to me. And I want to know if he's got a really high-tech way of applying all that black make-up around his eyes! Rachel's relationship with Harvey doesn't convince me, I assumed I was meant to feel this so we knew that actually she's still holding a candle for Bruce, fair enough. But no, she then writes a letter to Bruce saying that she actually does love Harvey and is going to marry him. At this point Bruce comes close to actually showing some emotion, a rare thing in this film. The whole cast feel like they're simply going through the motions, I don't think any of them believe they'll get another film in the series so they didn't see any point in making the effort. For me the most emotionally charged part of the film should be where Harvey and Rachel are in the two warehouses rigged up to bombs and Batman is rushing to save them. Given that this apparently madly in love couple are saying their goodbyes to eachother, its a mystery how it ended up sounding like Rachel was actually looking forward to dying. Maybe no one thought to tell her that the film was going to carry on for another 45 minutes? I can only speculate....

Other small annoyances I have with this film; the computers all make whirring processing noises like in CSI; the sonar on the phone system is just a step too far for me to believe it would ever work in the way it's portrayed and there's no attempt to throw a Heisenberg compensator to make me any happier! Batman's cape would so have caught in the back wheel on his motorbike and injured him. The speech is unnecessarily quiet and then cuts to very loud action scenes meaning that I jump out of my skin and my neighbours probably now hate me. I know I'm being pedantic, but these things matter! One final thing, could someone tell Bruce that he doesn't need to be quite such a jerk to throw people off the scent that he's Batman. Thank you ;)

On the good side. Heath Ledger's performance as the joker is good. So good in-fact he's terrifying. The role could so easily have come off so badly but he plays the anarchist lunatic brilliantly. The film would never have been as popular as it was if it wasn't for the untimely death of Ledger and his part is good, it's a shame it was let down by a lot of other factors. The joker is a good character, he is unpredictable and as he points out in the film, chaos makes people scared. He also manages to make Batman look a bit of a tool by playing him so well, that amused me.

When I go to the cinema I want my escapism, I do realise that films would be very dull if they all had happy endings but this was just so bleak I wanted it to end so I could go back to my own life. I think that the Watchmen film found a better balance in this by showing a bleak future and a pretty sad ending but managing to give hope for the future. I know this is what Batman is meant to do at the end where he rides off into the night but after the previous 150 minutes of death and destruction with no hope I couldn't find that hope in the end. On reflection, my overwhelming feeling when I left the cinema was my appreciation of the sunny afternoon after all that darkness. I bet if I did a straw poll on what the weather was normally like in Gotham, the majority would say dark or raining. Even though we see several sunny days in the course of the film, it's clear that the darkness permeates the whole tone of the film and not in a good way.

Since it's fun to put things in nice little numbered boxes, I'll give The Dark Knight 4 out of 11. I can see why people like it, but it's too bleak for my tastes and it's certainly no where near as good as a lot of people hyped it up to be at the time.

So this is blogger then...

Livejournal has annoyed me with it's American English spelling for maybe the last time! We'll see how blogger manages and if I stay...