Writing about: PhotoBox

Despite all the rush into digital imaging, I’m very much a fan of printing out images – the quality is always better in print than on screen, and you know that your paper copies will never crash, be accidentally deleted, become outdated or anything else.

Photobox is a website where you can upload your digital images, and they’ll print them on minilab printers (Fuji Frontier) – these are the same things that you’d get your photos printed on if you sent a film for processing. The quality is excellent, and the colour matching is perfect.*

Prints are 18p for a 6×4” print (the normal size), but you can get the price down to as little as 10p if you buy print credits. To put this in context, I recently printed 152 images at 6×4, at a cost of just over £18 (I bought 200 credits, which makes it 12p each) – this is slightly less than the cost per image for getting print film developed, and that doesn’t include the cost of film. When I shoot slide film, it costs 20p per slide all up, including film and processing.

The service from photobox is excellent. My order of 152 images was submitted on saturday night, printed on Monday, and arrived on Tuesday. If you order on a working day, they print on the same day.

The biggest problem with services such as photobox is that you really need to have broadband internet to upload any significant number of images to them. Each file from a modern digital camera will be in the region of 2Mb, and over a modem transferring that much data is painful.

All up, highly recommended.

* If you shoot in sRGB (i.e. most digital cameras, by default) it’ll be fine as is, if you use a wide gamut such as Adobe RGB (which I do) then you might want to get hold of the ICC profile from Dry Creek Photo which I’ve found to be very accurate). The files need to be sRGB before you upload them, though

I wasn’t blogging two years ago, otherwise I might have written an entry very much like this:

I spent a few weeks in 2003 travelling through Scandinavia with Andrea, which was really good fun. This was the first trip I’d been on where I was really taking a lot of photos – I averaged a roll a day, and I kept about 250 of the slides that I got back. My Gallery has more of the shots from this trip.

Monday 30th June

We flew Ryanair from Stansted to Stockholm Skavsta at some ungodly hour in the morning (hence taking the bus from Coventry at 1:45 or somesuch), followed by a bus into Stockholm itself, finally arriving around lunchtime, if my memory serves me correctly. We found the youth hostel where we were staying (half of which is actually in a ship!), and got our stuff moved in.

In the afternoon, we went up a TV tower in the park, and then walked around the town a bit, before heading back to the hostel. There were some hot air balloons over the city, which was cool. I took lots of photos of the bay, Andrea went straight to bed.

Tuesday 1st July

We went to see the Vasa – a warship from 1628 which sank on its maiden voyage, and was raised again in 1961. It’s got it’s own building, an impressive museum with the wreck at its centre.

In the afternoon, we walked around the city some more, and visited the Nobel museum, which contained an interesting series of installations, covering the recipients of the prize.

After dinner, we walked to the Tivoli amusement park, sadly to arrive just as it was closing (at 11!).

Wednesday 2nd July

We got checked out of the hostel, then took a boat to the island of Finnhamn, a tiny place on the outer edge of Stockholm’s archipelago. This was the first day we were going to be camping, so we headed to the campsite (primitive!) and got set up, before going to explore the island. Which didn’t take long :-) Andrea tried salt liquorice ice cream, didn’t like.
We ate dinner sitting on an outcrop of rock overlooking the sea.

Thursday 3rd July

Rain. Had no choice to pack the tent up still wet, and head back to the boat. Hurried across Stockholm, to catch a much bigger boat to Helsinki, via the Åland islands.

The Åland islands are a small group inbetween Sweden and Finland, and their only relevance to this case is that they have an arrangement with the EU such that they count as international travel. Hence, no VAT onboard ship. This in turn led to my introduction to some scary Austrian rum called Stroh which is 80% proof, and still tasty. Danger!

We had dinner in the buffet restaurant on board, which was nice. Beer on tap… Going on these boats again, I’d probably choose to eat in one of the a la carte restaurants, they’re not much more expensive, and looked to be of a good standard.

Friday 4th July

We stayed in a very nice campsite in Helsinki. Discovered that wet tents don’t like being packed away and left in a hot cabin overnight – traces of mildew everywhere! The weather was nice, so we headed out to Suomenlinna- a fortress on an island just offshore from Helsinki. We spent most of the day there. Andrea got sunburned :-(

Saturday 5th July

Still in Helsinki, we spent Saturday exploring the town. We visited the Helsinki museum, which had an interesting history of the city, had ice cream in the park, watched some guys playing vibraphone in the street, and finally found an internet cafe for a quick email check. Back at the campsite, we went for a walk around the estuary there. Found some keep-fit stations all along the path, and people actually using them!

Sunday 6th July

Spent the morning relaxing in the camp, went for a walk along the waterfront again, and then caught a train to Vaasa, a small town further north in Finland. It was quite a walk from the train station to the campsite, but it was a good site, with a nice beach. We watched the sunset. At about 11pm.

Monday 7th July

We took a boat across back to Umeå in Sweden. This was a decrepit old passenger liner called Casino Express, that looked like it had been chugging around the baltic for decades. I particularly liked the picture of the boat in one of the stairwells, one of those classic images of the ship at night with all the rigging lit up. Except that it was a photo taken in the daytime, darkened, and with the lights painted on!

We arrived in Umeå, and planned to get across to Östersund and take the inland railway north within Sweden. The first step in this plan was to take a bus south to Sundsvall, where we could catch a train. However, on arrival in Sundsvall, it became clear that we’d mis-read a timetable, and would probably end up stranded in Sundsvall overnight. Which was a little boring.

So we changed plans, and took the last train out of Sundsvall that day – right up to the North of Norway, a town called Narvik. This was a 20hr train trip, passing back the way we’d just come by bus earlier in the day. Oh well.

Tuesday 8th July

We arrived into Narvik in the late afternoon and found the campsite, in a lovely location overlooking the fjord, but some way out of town. And in Narvik, the sun didn’t set. We were now far enough north that we had midnight sun.

Wednesday 9th July

We took a bus to Tromsø, the most northerly town in Europe. This place has a very solid feel to it, one can feel that living in this part of the world is a constant battle against the elements, for half the year at least. We found some space in the busy (but again, nice) campsite and relaxed there for the evening.

Thursday 10th July

We visited the Polar Museum – an interesting museum about the arctic, with displays about hunting and trapping, polar bears, Svalbard, Roald Amundsen, and Fridtjof Nansen.

Afterwards, we stopped for a Kebab, and then visited Polaria, a more touristy but still interesting visit, with more about the arctic in general, and an aquarium which has some seals.

Afterwards, we took a round-trip on a bus, to the other side of the island. It was rather accidental, but ended up being a good sightseeing tour.

Friday 11th July

We took the bus back to Narvik, then had to walk from the railway station to the bus station due to an incorrect timetable (and not, for a change, incorrect timetable reading!), but still got there in plenty of time. From Narvik, we took a bus down to the most northerly point in the norwegian railhead, at Fauske. We took the night train south to Trondheim.

Saturday 12th July

We nearly got derailled! Some rocks had fallen from the mountain, and so that stopped us dead in our tracks, so to speak. After sitting for a couple of hours, they managed to bring another train up behind us, to tow us back to the next station, from where we were bussed into Trondheim. In the end, it only added a few hours to the trip, we still arrived in Trondheim before lunch.
We wandered around the city for a while, taking photos and generally enjoying the ambience. We decided to stay in a makeshift backpackers, set up in the students’ union when it’s the summer holidays. Many beds in not much space, but not too bad.

Sunday 13th July

We decided to take the Hurtigrute boat south to Bergen. The Hurtigrute is a coastal service, which used to be the lifeblood of the area but now is mostly full of elderly German tourists. It provides a good view of the fjords, and shows off some impressive seamanship, manouvering very large ferries in very small harbours.

Monday 14th July

After arriving in Bergen, we went directly to the Rail station, heading for Flåm. Or more specifically, to Myrdal, which seems to mostly serve as one end of the Flåmsbana – an amazing mountain railway. We stayed in another decent campsite in Flåm, taking the opportunity to relax after the long trip down from the arctic.

Tuesday 15th July

We took the Flåmsbana back up to Myrdal, then continued on to Olso on a more conventional intercity train. We only stayed in Oslo for a couple of hours, before taking the train back to Sockholm. We camped (illegally) in a park, having arrived late in the evening. It was much nicer weather this time, hot and busy on the streets.

Wednesday 16th July

We visited the Medieval museum, with some interesting displays about medieval Stockholm, and cooked lunch on the grass in front of it there, before heading to the station, and back home.

I’ve just come back from more jetsetting – this time a really good week away in Vienna, being all cultural. I’ve been to Wien before, back in 2001 when I was visiting a friend doing an ERASMUS placement there. I enjoyed myself then, and had been meaning to go back there ever since.

My Vienna photo gallery has many more photos.

I really like the whole cafehouse culture there – there are so many nice places to sit and enjoy a coffee and cake, or whatever. There are also many good, reasonably priced restaurants around. As Andrea said, the whole city is very baroque. It’s quite overpowering until you get used to it, the centre is all 5 or 6 story buildings with masses of ornate details, interspersed with some impressive imperial palaces. Topped off with an affordable and top-quality public transport system, it’s a nice place to be.

So. A brief summary of what we did:

Thursday

Andrea arrived in the morning by bus, and walked around the entire city. I turned up in the afternoon, and we went for a walk around the town, just orienting myself really. Took tram #1 around the ring a couple of times to see the sights. Took some photos of the Hofburg at sunset.

Friday

Went to Schönbrunn, wandered ardound the gardens. Many cheesy tourist photos. Went to the Naschmarkt for a kebab for lunch, then back to Schönbrunn afterwards! Lots of gardens and forest to explore, including some extremely tame red squirrels which are rather a novelty for us islanders.

Saturday

Visited Stephansdom, the enormous gothic hulk of a cathedral right in the centre of the city. Climbed up the North tower (the taller of the two) – it’s undergoing some restoration work at the moment, so the views are a little restricted, but it was good exercise.

Next, on for the traditional tourist excursion of eating Sachertorte, in Hotel Sacher – nice cake, nice coffee, only tourists there.
In the afternoon, we visited the Albertina – a couple of interesting exhibitions there, “from Goya to Picasso” was the main attraction, we also saw the exhibition of work by Piet Mondrian, but gave Anton Kolig a miss.
In the afternoon, we went to have a look at Karlskirche – a very impressive Baroque church in the Resselpark. Didn’t go in, but admired from the outside. From there, we went on the the Prater, which is a large park just to the edge of town, with a year-round funfair including the famous Riesenrad – not quite the London Eye…

Sunday

In the morning, we visited the Haus der Musik which I enjoyed a lot. There’s a straightforward history of the Vienna Philharmonic (which we skipped), then an impressive floor about the nature of sound with lots of interactive things to do. Next up was a floor with good displays about Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, Mahler, and the Second School. There’s an interactive thingy where you can conduct the orchestra (on a TV screen) and they do what you want! If you’re too bad, they start complaining though..
In the afternoon, I went to take some photos of Gasometer and Hundertwasser’s incinerator plant.

Monday

Monday was a bank holiday in Austria, so not much was open. We spent most of the day walking in the Wienerwald, the forest surrounding Vienna. We took the U-bahn to Heiligenstadt, then Tram N to Nussdorf, and walked from there up to Kahlenberg. We had fried things (Schnitzel for me, chips for Andrea) and then more Sachertorte and strudel in a cafe with a magnificent terrace overlooking the town. By the time we were ready to move on it threatened to rain, so we took the bus down again.
In the afternoon, we went back to the Resselpark to take some more photos (after the SD card on my Coolpix camera went on the blink), and then to the Donauinsel afterwards.

Tuesday

We went shopping for gifts in the morning, and wandered around town some more. We went from there to “Vienna DC” – a large block of grey on the north side of the Danube, home to the UN buildings, and some other corporate goodness. We were just passing through, on the way to the Donauturm. This is a 252m tall TV transmitter tower which one can take go up inside. More disturbingly, they do bungee jumping from it if that’s your thing. Excellent views over the city. After strolling through the donaupark for a while, we went back into the city, for a coffee in Cafe Central (probably Vienna’s most famous Kaffeehaus). After some more ambling through the city, we set off to find the Hundertwasserhaus, a block of flats in the same style as the incinerator. I don’t like Hundertwasser’s architecture – it looks like a child has randomly coloured bits of the building. We took a tram from there back to the Prater, and walked through the park for a while.
We went for dinner at the “Goulash Museum” (Schulerstrasse 20) which has, perhaps unsurprisingly, mostly goulash-based dishes for around €5-10. Back to Cafe Central for a nightcap, and then to bed.

Wednesday

Proper leaving weather on Wednesday – raining hard. We got up early with the intention of going to get breakfast in town somewhere, but in the end ate too much chocolate before leaving and so just wandered aimlessly around for a while, slightly hindered by the fact that most museums etc only open at 10. We walked along Mariahilferstrasse, aiming for an aquarium there, but by the time we arrived it was getting late, so we just went to sit in a nice Kaffeehaus called Servus. I took the S7 from Wien Mitte back to the airport, and that was that.

(My Other Blog)

Writing about: Group IV » Blog Archive » Tocil Wood

Tocil wood is lovely at the moment: all the bluebells are out and it’s an impressive sight. It’s very hard to capture the feel of these things – each flower is so small, it’s just a sea of blue…

The purpose of my trip to Brussels was actually to evaluate the performance of some of my compounds under a range of conditions, using a high-throughput reactor that our collaborator at BP/Solvay (now Innovene) have, called an Argonaut Endeavour

The endeavour is a nice piece of engineering, designed for high pressure, high temperature work, specifically “hydrogenations, carbonylations and polymerizations”. It allows you to run 8 reactions in parallel, under differing conditions. We ran 2 catalysts in each run, with the same set of 4 conditions for each, testing temperature dependence and hexene incorporation. The protocol we used involved pre-activating the catalyst with MAO before injection into the reactor, so it’s important whatever reacting the catalyst with MAO forms is stable for as long as it takes you to inject it into the reactor.

It is probably not realistic to test more than 2 catalysts in any given run, given this activation procedure, it’ll become difficult to keep things moving.

The biggest problem with this reactor is the design of the injector ports. BP have developed a way of injecting under an inert atmosphere, which is nice, but the reactor is clearly not designed for this type of operation. The injector ports are fiddly, delicate parts, and whatever you inject must pass through an extremely fine (0.5mm?) tube into the reactor [I believe that the fine diameter tubing is necessary to make it possible to inject against the pressure of the reactor].

The problem here is that if you inject aluminum alkyls such as MAO, once the inert atmosphere is removed, alumina forms on all the surfaces of the injector ports, requiring a complete strip-down of the injection system after each run. Further, it is easy for the narrow tubing to become blocked, either with alumina, or with polymer formed during the run. To unblock these tubes is a serious hassle, without guaranteed success. More to the point, occasionally an injector will block after the reactor is assembled; the first one knows about it is one is trying to inject the catalyst or solvent to start the run – in this situation it is impossible to unblock, and the result is that that vessel cannot be run.

During the run, the conditions within each reactor are monitored, and usually controlled well. On one occasion, the system failed to control the pressure of ethylene in a vessel to the required 10 bar, and allowed it to rise to the supply pressure of 15 bar; it is possible that the inlet valve had become blocked. In some further cases, the measured uptake of ethylene became negative. This must be an instrumentation issue. Basically, the uptake charts generated are probably more use as qualitative measures rather than quantitative. The really interesting data from the week’s work will be the final productivity numbers under these conditions, and the analyses of hexene incorporation and branching characteristics.

In one week, we conducted 56 separate polymerisation reactions, testing 12 catalysts under varying conditions. To do this work using Schlenk tests would probably have taken in the order of 2 months of solid work. There was some time overhead involved in shipping the chemicals to Brussels, and of course in the travel and time spend arranging incidentals to the trip, but nonetheless we collected a significant amount of information regarding our catalysts.

I just came back from a week in Brussels, working at the BP/Innovene/Solvay site – I’ll write about my work separately.

Due to some Seafood Expo, we were staying in a youth hostel in Anderlecht, called G̩n̩ration Europe Рnice hostel, decent breakfasts, fairly rough area of town. A particular highlight was rolling up there in a BMW executive car! Last night spent in the Hilton Brussels Рwhich was pretty much as expected for a 5 star business hotel. Excellent breakfasts.

Brussels is a great city if you want to eat out – there are so many nice restaurants, and many fit in the “decent, reasonably priced” category which is so hard to find in the UK. I especially enjoyed Le Paon Royal – an excellent bistro on the square by Église Sainte Cathérine. I had Chateaubriand with frites, which was excellent.

We also liked a noodle bar called Suki, on rue des Poissonners (near the Bourse). It’s a tiny place, but serves up really good noodles, rice, and pad thai – nice and cheap and very tasty.

The public transport system in Brussels is pretty good – a comprehensive network of trams and busses, which seemed to mostly run on time. The route to the site at which we were working was a mass of roadworks, which caused some delays (and shaken fists from the locals), but that was the exception rather than the rule. It is considered bad luck to have to wait more than 5 minutes for a bus during the daytime.

All up, a very enjoyable trip. More photos, as ever in my gallery

Writing about: Blogs in the guardian, 05/05/05, every nightmare begins as a dream

Well, I’m in the Guardian today – hello to anyone who’s come here from reading the article there.

Here’s the full detail of the questions I answered for Jim. I stand by what I say here, although in reflection my tone is more negative than I’d intended. You can see my posts discussing these ideas in more detail here and here

As you’ll probably discover, I’ve sent the same basic questions to Dan Lawrence and Helen Ryan.
You know they’re a couple, right?

By the way, are you part of the staff at Warwick? Or part of the student body? Or a bit of both?
PhD student. We’re in a kind of limbo. We’re full students, NUS cards and all, but we’re paid to be here, rather than the other way round. Most do a bit of teaching, although in Chemistry, we generally only do lab demonstrating. Anyway, here they are…

1. When did you start your blog? Had you been blogging before?
I started about a year ago, and no, I’d never had a blog before.

2. What did you expect from blogging when you started your Warwick blog? Have your expectations met? What’s surprised you most?
I was interested to see if any productive work was done with them. I thought it was a strange thing for the university to invest so much resource into. I came to it feeling rather cynical, but decided to throw myself into it anyway. I saw the potential for group interaction very strongly – I’d never seen anything quite like that before.
I’m not really surprised by the way that the project has gone – more on that later.

3. Has the blog helped with your academic work? Or is it more of a social thing?
I try to use it for my academic work where possible, when there’s a need for reflection or record. I’ve taken to writing to-do-lists on it, although that’s just for convenience. It’s definitely a social space, and although cliques do form, they’re not exclusive – it’s very easy for newcomers to get involved.

4. Have Warwick Blogs affected the wider real world culture of the university?
No, I don’t think so. The number of people who have interacted in the real world due to some event on blogs would qualify blogs as one of the smaller student societies here.

5.Whose Warwick blogs do you read – is it people who were already friends? Or have you become friends with people after getting to know them via their blogs?
I’ve met a small percentage of the people whose blogs I read. There are occasional “blog socials” arranged, although I haven’t made it to any yet. I also read the blogs of my co-workers.

6. What’s the general feeling about the blogging project? Browsing around, I ‘ve noticed some unease about how useful they are, or rather some irritation/upset over abuses of the system (e.g. anonymous comments etc) – is this just a phase that will pass, or does it indicate some larger problems with the project?
It is early days for WB, but there seems to be little interest on the part of the university in assessing how the thing is going. They’ve started this thing, but seem to have lost focus on what the original idea behind it was. That’s the impression that I get anyway. The freedom of speech of the bloggers is being compromised by the university’s Acceptable Usage Policy for WB, which is (compared to most blog sites) draconian. The blogs admin appears to suspend student’s blogs on some very shaky reasons, and they are essentially untouchable. There is no information regarding the admin is, how they reach their decision, and who to appeal to if you disagree.

7. Does you blog help at all with PDP? I know you’ve raised some concerns that early hopes that the blogs would allow for ‘guerilla PDP’ haven’t really been met yet… do you think blogs are just very different from the whole PDP idea or might they be able to work with it in some way?
A vanishingly small proportion of the people who blog write anything reflective at all. If the idea was “that if we get students to start blogging, they will gradually start to do PDP” (http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/elearning/workshops/presentations/blogs/) then it has so far not happened, a year in.
I have never seen an answer to the question “Why on earth should I publish my private reflections?”. I don’t think that a public forum is really the place to be as honest with yourself as you need to be to gain from the kind of reflection required for useful PDP. There are “private” entries on blogs (restricted to just the author), but I’ve never written one. If I wanted to do that, I’d use a diary.

8. Will you continue blogging once you leave Warwick?
Probably. I’m undecided at this stage. I’m extremely unlikely to carry on using Warwick Blogs, anyway.