Follow-up to A Mild Rubber Obsession from Group IV

And this stuff has now turned up! Including my very own gimp bag :-)

Not that I’m hoping for rain, but I thought that all waterproof stuff was probably a sensible plan. All we need to do now is work out a route…

Writing about web page http://www.maxhammondphotos.org.uk/gallery/

I have a lot of images online, and currently the albums feature of blogbuilder isn’t sufficient for the way I want to display them.

If you’d like to see my photos, they’re all on http://www.maxhammondphotos.org.uk

(Originally written 2004–06-23 19:11)

Well, plastic, but close enough :-)

Since I’ve now booked the boat to Cuxhaven, to go cycling through Denmark with Andrea in the summer, I decided to order the rest of the set of Ortlieb bike gear. Already have the excellent Back-Roller Plus rear panniers, and have now ordered a pair of Front Roller Plus’, a Rack-Pack, and an Ultimate 3 handlebar bag, all from the very friendly Unterwegs outdoor shops in Germany. Expecting my package within the next few days :-)

Saved quite a bit ordering in Germany, but paid by credit card (rather than debit) who charge a 2.25% comission which I’d forgotten about. Booo. Still saved a bit compared to buying in the UK, and free postage too. Yay!

(Originally written 2004–06-23 18:40:05)

Poster finished, which is nice. Finally got it printed, but Powerpoint had helpfully decided that I didn’t really want to have any atom labels on one diagram, so I filled them in by hand..
Presentation was today too – mostly very dull. A few academics wandering around, spoke to Stefan at some length, who had some interesting ideas and some impracticable ones too.

I like:

• The idea of injecting hexene in the middle of an ethylene run, and seeing if the ethylene rate is modified.


• Adding an amount of a known tight-PDi PE to a run, to see if it’s modified, which would suggest a radical mechanism

An important point is that I really need to separate k_p from everything else that’s going on in the system. This will get into some hairy kinetics, probably, but may well end up being important. Must discuss with Pete.
Now just have to write my report for next weds, and all will be happy.

(Originally written 2004–06-21 16:34)
Just in case I should forget again, this is how BAr^F works.

(Originally written 2004–06-20 18:18)

This is my rig. It is wonderful. It works. And it will be my friend for the next x months while I characterise the activity of everything that I’ve made over the last two years…

Those cylinders have 20 bar of ethylene in them, the supply cylinder is around 80-90 bar depending on what the temperature is. eeeek. If that thing blows up, you’d have to be in the next county to get away. Oh well :-)

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/click/rss/0.91/public/-/1/hi/world/europe/3820607.stm

(Originally written 2004–06-18 21:47)
Well hoo-ra. Now we just have to wait for an ill-informed electorate to reject it in a referendum.

I did read a good suggestion somewhere a while back, that the referendum should include a multiple choice questionaire about the constitution, and your vote would only count if you scored more than 70%. Very reasonable, I thought.
And I just saw on http://www.britainineurope.org/ the results of an opinion poll:

Q.1 In March Tony Blair announced the government would call a referendum on an aspect of Britain’s relationship with Europe. Do you know if this is about:

Whether Britain should:

• Join the euro? 29%


• Sign up to the European Constitution? 32%


• Leave the EU? 12%


• If the EU should enlarge to take in new countries from Eastern Europe? 6%
  
• Don’t know 20%

This is frightening.

(Originally written 2004–06-18 13:10)

So I’m currently writing my second year poster. Suprisingly, I find that I have lots to say, and not really enough space to say it.

But anyway, the weapon of choice is powerpoint, of all things, since we don’t have anything more suitable. I am bored of powerpoint thinking that I want to make a presentation, rather than an A0 poster. It’s unstable, doesn’t like doing all the DDE stuff, and thinks that it knows better than me what size my text should be.

I wonder if publisher has improved while I haven’t been looking? Or if it’s worth trying to persuede Pete to buy Quark XPress and do the job right…

(Originally written 2004–06-16 23:01)

I went on something called a GRAD course a couple of weeks ago, and so I feel the need to share.

These things are basically an attempt by the research councils to do a few things:

• Teach PhD students some transferrable skills


• Increase the PhD completion rates amongst attendees


• Make us more employable


• Get us thinking a bit about jobs

It was one of the most useful exercises that I have ever undertaken.

I have to admit, I was slightly cynical, travelling up to Newcastle for a week of team-building goodness, but I got really stuck in nonetheless. I think that the thing that really got me (and everyone else) involved is that things really felt relevent. They called the tasks “simulations,” and I feel that that is probably the best description of them. They were all challenging, they made us focus on our teamwork, time management, negotiation, creative, and many other skills, and left us exhausted but feeling good about things really.

It was noticable how the team dynamic progressed through the week; I feel that we learned a lot because of the good mix of characters in the team – there wasn’t just one loud one, one quiet one etc, we had a few more assertive types (I’d include myself here) who took a while to get used to the team environment, but once things had settled down a bit, we were like a well-oiled machine :)

Perhaps one of the more directly useful sessions was titled “achieving progress in your PhD”, aka “getting a PhD”. It was somewhat reassuring to see that lots of people there had doubts about their ability to finish the thing. I’d been feeling uncertain about it all for some time; about my dedication to it, about my work ethic, about the whole thing really. To know that I’m not alone was the first step to getting on with it.

I came back from the course buzzing, feeling better about my work than I had done in literally years, and that feeling has persisted much longer than I was afraid it might. I’ve been back “in the real world” for a month now, and I’m still motivated. I’m certainly working much harder than before. The first two weeks back were phenomenal, now it’s merely superb :) I’m much better at noticing when I’m slacking at something, and then getting back on and comitting myself to it properly. And I really feel like I’m taking ownership of my work, finally. Accepting that in the end nobody else cares as much as I do about whether I get this PhD.

It was very interesting to meet a lot of PhD students, from a wide variety of institutions around the country, and studying all variety of subjects. To hear about people’s experiences of their supervisers showed me that:

• I’ve got one of the best


• I need to bring him onboard my work far more than I have been

So I had what I considered to be a very constructive meeting on my return, and we planned in some detail the route that my work will take in the near future. And so far, I’m sticking to the plan, and progressing nicely.

So my advice for anyone doing a PhD – go to a GRAD course. I think ideally you should go at the end of your first year, or the beginning of your second year. If you’re funded by a research council you can go for free. I reckon that it’s worth doing one of the 5-day courses, and we all enjoyed the outdoor activities that were a part of our course. That was what really brought our team together in the end.

Take your pick on the GRAD website.

Writing about web page http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/medialog/

(Originally written 2004–06-16 13:01)
Just when warwick blogs were starting to look interesting, they start posting all their press releases as a blog too, and cluttering up the aggregate feed. How dull. All this stuff is already on the newsandevents site, so what’s the point? Other than that the news site is painfully slow, I guess.