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We’ve got a whiteboard up in the office with a list on it of all the little jobs we have to do around the house. A day or so ago, one of the items was “Bodge shoe storage”. Now, I find that quite impressive: we’ve only been at this DIY game for a week, and already we’ve progressed to bodging.

Actually, it worked out quite well. We had some drawer units (from Ikea, naturally) that we used to use inside our wardrobes for clothes storage. They were a fairly simple construction, with a wooden frame and slots for plastic bins to use as drawers. We kept one of the drawers at the top for keys, wallets and other ephemera that you need close to the front door, then cut pieces of plywood as shelves to store our shoes. It looks pretty good, but has that crucial, slightly bodged, ‘we made this’, Blue Peter-ish vibe.

After months of hard work, I’ve finally emerged out of one of the tunnels I’ve been in, and have a few precious days to enjoy the sun and fresh air before plunging headlong into the next tunnel, which is marked with a nice Victorian enamel plate reading “Move House”.

It has been a very busy and somewhat stressful time. On Tuesday, I hit the button marked ‘Submit’ on my grant. To my disappointment, I didn’t get a lovely friendly message from the web interface saying “Congratulations! You’ve done it—-go and have a couple of beers and relax”, nor was there a sound effect like a rocket launch when I pressed the button. There really should be, because it was a bit of an anticlimax, though for reasons that I’ll explain, I wasn’t able to totally relax until Wednesday. As soon as I’d done the deed, I dashed off to catch a train to Lichfield to see The Sixteen and Harry Christophers performing Victoria’s Requiem. I had a bit of a nasty moment when the brakes failed (in the on position, rather than the off position, thankfully) on my train, and we had to get off and board the next one.

I’d like to say that the train breaking down was a portent for the way that the pressure on me didn’t quite let up, and that obstacles remained, but trains breaking down are a portent only of the terrible state of our rail system, and quite commonplace.

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This neorealist modern fairy tale from the director of ‘The Bicycle Thief’ is the sweet story of a boy called Totò. Found as a baby in a cabbage patch (the original Cabbage Patch Kid) and taken in by a loving but slightly dotty old woman, Totò ends up in an orphange when the old lady dies. When he leaves the orphanage as a young man, the sweet-natured boy finds himself staying in a shantytown with the homeless of Milan. A hurricane blows the shacks away, and Totò oversees the rebuilding of the area into a ramshackle but comfortable town, complete with street names, squares and even a statue, reclaimed from the rubbish.

All looks bright for the inhabitants, until the town proves to have lucrative hidden resources and rich developers try to evict the residents. When things look at their most hopeless, Totò receives a magic dove from the ghost of his dead adopted mother, and finds that he can work miracles.

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In the process of setting up The Emperor I installed GNU Midnight Commander, otherwise known as mc. It’s a two-pane file manager (with a built in previewer and editor) with a great, stripped-down interface which can be driven entirely from the keyboard. I’d seen it some time ago, but never managed to install it successfully on the Mac. However, it installed very easily with apt-get install on the Emperor, and I’ve been really enjoying it—-so much so that I’d love to have it on my Mac.

I tried this hint on MacOSXHints, but the compilation failed at the last hurdle. Despite the Smart Folder features and much improved searching in Tiger, Finder is still irritating to work with if you have a deeply nested folder structure. I’m a big fan of Path Finder, and am waiting impatiently for version 4 which will exploit Tiger features fully—-I just hope that it’s possible to view Smart Folders in the new Path Finder. Although it isn’t as keyboard-driven as mc, it has much of the same feeling of easy control over your files. One feature I love is that you can open a Terminal in a drawer which automatically has the working directory set to the path of the selected file or folder. That’s really convenient if you need to tinker with an invisible configuration file in a deeply-nested folder.

[The Great Escape, day three: written 13th August, 2005]

Coming around the rim of the former quarry in which the Eden Project is situated feels like entering the set of a Doctor Who episode. The two enormous Biodomes sit in the bottom of the quarry like giant alien eggs. At any moment, I expected to see Christopher Eccleston striding along in his leather coat. Well, a girl can dream…

I think that Tim Smit is one of my new heroes. As well as renovating the excellent Lost Gardens of Heligan, he was also the instigator of the Eden Project. Somehow, he managed to persuade investors that he could build two giant bubbles in a former quarry, one of which would house a tropical rainforest, complete with a waterfall. Oh, and it would be educational, informing people about conservation issues all over the world. Eden somehow manages to get these messages across—-along with a passion for plants—-without it ever sounding like you need to be someone who knits their own muesli to appreciate it.

The exhibits and labels show wit, creativity and scholarship, and include folklore and myths about plants, as well as scientific facts. The whole place is playful (as you can see from some of my photos here), and you explore each area with a genuine curiosity to see what’s around the corner—-just like Heligan.

The giant tropical biodome is a marvel, that rivals some cathedrals for its ability to inspire awe. However, I managed to come away with a more tangible reminder of the day; I got badly bitten by mosquitoes (goodness only knows how). That doesn’t seem to bode well for my trip to the real tropics in September.

Thanks to a link on 2lmc spool, I installed the truly wonderful Electric Sheep screensaver. In fact, it’s a rather superior species of screen saver, in which your own computer becomes part of a huge network of interconnected machines collaboratively creating and rendering lovely fractal-like, abstract, moving images, which constantly shift and morph into one another. These images are called sheep. What’s more, if you like one of the images you see you can vote for it by pressing the up arrow. The votes are then used as part of a weighting process in a genetic algorithm to breed more sheep. Popular sheep live longer (and presumably reproduce more), and so the sheep evolve into ever more beautiful forms.

The still images on the site really don’t do it justice, so it’s worth trying it out for yourself. However, you do need a pretty decent network connection, and you have to be patient while waiting for the first one to appear. Then you’ll be sitting in front of the screen for hours, wide-eyed and saying, “Oh, man—-look at all the pretty patterns and colours. Those electric sheep are really hoopy froods.”

I’m definitely trying to think about too many things at once at the moment. Yesterday, I loaded up my pod coffee machine with water and coffee pods, and then switched it on while I raced to finish an urgent email I was dealing with. A tiny part of my brain commented that the machine seemed to be making an unusual sound, but the rest of my brain told it to shut up and concentrate on the email.

A few minutes later, I reached over to grab my coffee cup, only to realise that it wasn’t there. The tiny drip tray, however, was copiously overflowing with lovely, steaming hot java, and the surface of the filing cabinet on which the machine sits had developed a very fine crema.

Curses.

I was faced with a tricky problem. In a little over a week, I’m going to Brazil (mostly staying in a place a very long way from the nearest city or town) for three weeks. I think that it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll have any way of connecting my own computer to the internet for most of that time (though I may find the odd cybercafe somewhere), but I still wanted to have a computer with me. I need to take notes, analyse results, read papers and so on, all of which would be much easier with a laptop than without.

But here’s where the problem comes in; I really didn’t want to risk taking my PowerBook. I’m likely to be working in fairly rough conditions, and I’m spending a few days at either end of the trip in Sao Paulo, where there is—-let’s face it—-at least some possibility of the computer being stolen. It’s insured, but I can’t face the disruption of hassle of having to get a new one, recreate my system from backups and so on. And I have to admit that I feel terribly attached to my Mac—-I just didn’t feel that I could put my baby my computer in the line of fire like that.

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[The Great Escape, day two: written 12th August, 2005]

There’s something romantic about the ‘Lost’ part isn’t there? Even though The Lost Gardens of Heligan have the usual complement of car parks, gift shops and tea rooms, it still has the air of somewhere that might require a machete and a pith helmet to get into.

Heligan covers an enormous area (about 200 hectares in total), and there’s a surprise around every corner. The Jungle and Lost Valley are a delight, with palms, bananas and giant gunnera crowding the jungle part of the valley, which has a sub-tropical micro-climate. It’s warm, green and humid, and if it weren’t for the hordes of other visitors and the carefully maintained boardwalks, you might believe yourself to be somewhere much more exotic than Cornwall.

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I’ve posted the first batch of photographs from my holiday on flickr, if you’re interested.

“So, you’re a lecturer—-you must get nice long holidays!”

If you’re a lecturer or school teacher, you’re probably wearily familiar with that kind of comment. While it’s true that the students have very long holidays over the summer, so we’re not doing any teaching, the departure of the students is the cue for most of us to roll our sleeves up and actually get our own research done. We do have quite generous leave allocations, but the truth is that most academics never manage to take off all the time that they are entitled to.

Part of the problem is that—-like many other working people—-we don’t have anyone to cover our work when we go on holiday. You know that when you come back, you’ll be facing exactly what was on your desk (real or virtual) when you left, plus whatever has accumulated in your absence. After a while you feel that it might be less work in the long run to simply stay at your desk.

If you take time off, but don’t stray from an internet connection, the temptation to check that nothing urgent has cropped up can corrode your sense of relaxation—-another feature that’s common to many modern jobs.

For these reasons (and many more!) Mr. Bsag and I hadn’t had a proper holiday for more than two years, so last week, we made our escape to Cornwall. It wasn’t a long holiday, but it was a complete break: no car, no email, no internet, and best of all—-no work.

[The Great Escape, day one: written 11th August, 2005]

I love the sea. Some of my happiest moments have been spent beside it, on it, or in it. For me, there’s a special quality of relaxation that comes from sitting or walking by a shore, looking at the waves and breathing in that lovely seaweed smell. So today, as the train rounded a corner at Dawlish to hug the narrow strip of land between the ox blood red cliffs and the petrol blue sea, it was all I could do not to yell out “I can see the sea!” like an excited six year old.

It’s a pity, then, that I live in one of the points of Britain that’s furthest from the sea. I have to get my fix in short, intense bursts of exposure.

We’ve just eaten our entire season’s crop of lettuce in two very small side salads. I think that we need to rethink our horticultural practices. Lots of stones and soil that looks like dust does not make for happy, abundant lettuces.

Furthermore, we’re suffering from lettuce-envy, because friends of ours produced a bed full of hedge-sized lettuces in a couple of weeks. Our scrawny little saplings have struggled for months to reach a size that makes it worthwhile washing them and putting them on a plate.

Peter Cooper alerted me to the fact that he’d made some huge changes to RSS Digest (the service I used to display my del.icio.us link on this page) and it had emerged—-like a butterfly from a chrysalis—-to become FeedDigest.

I found some time to sign up for the new service today, and I’m really blown away by it. For a start, it’s much quicker than it used to be (not that the speed ever bothered me much), and there are loads of new features like combining feeds, slick templating features, and a host of different output formats.

The free account gives you up to 5 digests from up to 3 sources, so you can try it out and see if you like it. I think you’ll be hooked. Apart from anything else, it’s worth signing up just to see Peter’s wonderful way with Ajax alert boxes. Needless to say, I’m jealous.

I’m finally back home again after a very intense week at the conference. It was a fantastic and academically inspiring time in many ways, but now I’m completely exhausted. I’ve just finished sorting through a load of emails that needed responses and a few other outstanding work matters, and I think that’s probably about it for me this weekend as far as intelligent activity goes.

It’s pretty interesting going to a conference that’s outside your area of expertise, as much for the fun of experiencing a different scientific culture as anything else. The differences are very subtle, but interesting, and two things in particular surprised me a little.

First, there were more people using Apple hardware than I had expected—-I’d estimate that a little over 25% of the laptops at the conference were Powerbooks or iBooks. Given my unofficial position as Apple Fangirl, I obviously think that’s an encouraging thing. I suppose that I shouldn’t have been so surprised given the increasing credibility of Macs as a serious development platform since the move to a BSD foundation with Mac OS X, but it was still nice to see.

Second, I was agog at the number of people using laptops during talks, and particularly people surfing or checking email. Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m just a bit out of touch (not having gone to a really big Biology conference in a couple of years), but at most conferences I’ve attended, very few people have even used laptops to take notes. A wireless connection in the lecture room does allow people to do cool things like downloading a paper mentioned in the talk, or surfing the speaker’s home page. However, some people were either parallel processing with great efficiency, or just using the time to catch up on email or other tasks.

The terrible temptation for me was to look over their shoulder and see just what they were finding so fascinating. If they were Mac users, I felt even more compelled to see what they had in their Dock. I didn’t quite feel that I had the chutzpah to open up my Powerbook, so I sat there like Dr. Luddite with my Moleskine and fountain pen. I’m planning to sort and transcribe my notes on to my computer next week, and hoping that the transcription process might prompt a bit more processing and synthesis of the ideas I was exposed to.

I took pathetically few photographs in Edinburgh—-my excuse is that I had very little free time—-but I’ve put a few up on flickr.