Writing about: Elsevier.com – Journal of Controlled Release

Todays Journal of the Day, for sure. Can’t decide whether it sounds kinky, painful or meditative.

A while back I did one of those blogmemes – filling in a map with red in all the countries that I’ve been to. Here’s a more interesting version, for anyone with Google Earth – the same kind of thing as a KMZ File. Obviously, it’s not really everywhere that I’ve been, just the places that I feel some connection with.

Quite an illuminating exercise. I really need to get out of Europe more :-)

Apparantly, a power cut at Warwick University has led to “multiple electrical failures” in the IT gear there, and users should expect “major disruption for the next week.”

This really isn’t acceptable. The supply of clean, reliable power for a machine room has been a fundamental priority for decades, and Warwick still can’t get it right. I’m sure that ITS will pass the blame for this catastrophe along to Estates, but that is really avoiding the problem. It is up to the customer ( i.e. ITS) to make sure that they get the services that they need, and that these services are trustworthy.

This post is not a dig at the ITS staff who I’m sure are at this very moment doing their best to restore a room full of smouldering piles of hardware into a shiny network. Rather, I feel that this event is yet another indication of management failure, either within ITS or within the university more generally.

Perhaps the decision was taken not to invest in adequate UPS/generator capacity. But if you add up the total lost productivity from a university having no network for a period of days, I think that the cost of a more substantial power supply becomes good value.

This is a “Circle of Fifths”, which shows the interrelationships between major and minor scales, and their key signatures. I’ve recently been playing quite a lot, and it struck me just how much I’ve forgotten. So, I made this to help out. There’s also a printable PDF version too.

Unless you count Tintin, I’ve never read a graphic novel before, but seeing as how the film’s been making some noise I thought it would be a good place to start.

This is a very dark piece, probably because the issues that it raises are so totally believable, and utterly current. Considering this book was written in the early 80’s, it could genuinely be described as prophetic. Reading this kind of work is a real reminder of the importance of personal liberty, but also puts the “opressive” restrictions on civil liberties which are being proposed at the moment into perspective somewhat.

Well worth a read.

Deconvolute that. (Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggghhhhhhhhh)

My best photos at Max Hammond Photos.
More of my photography on Flickr.

More from the eye.

My best photos at Max Hammond Photos.
More of my photography on Flickr.

I’m going to miss this.

So, a while back I signed up for Audioscrobbler, now Last.fm – it’s a music network site and some more. But I mostly found it interesting because it can keep track of the music you’re listening to. In fact (good grief) it seems to be a year to the day since I joined up. And here are my all-time (for the last year) top artists, of the 6137 tracks that I’ve listened to…

My best photos at Max Hammond Photos.
More of my photography on Flickr.

The Cutty Sark. I have some very distant memories of visiting Greenwich when I was a child; I remember the maritime muesum, and I think we went aboard the Cutty Sark. I must have been 8 or 10 then, I guess, and I hadn’t been back to that part of london since.

It’s easy to forget that, not that long ago, ships like this were the main vessels of trade around the world. This one worked as a tea clipper, and then as a wool clipper. Modern container transports seem so much less personal than this ship.