So I finally graduated from the PhD this week, some 4.5 years after finishing my MChem. It’s somewhat odd to have a pseudo-medieval ceremony in a university founded in the 60’s, but there you go. At least it wasn’t in Latin or Welsh…

It’s rather strange to visit Warwick again. I’ve been gradually becoming more distant from the place for the last year, but now it feels final. I’ve been working in Guildford since the summer, it really feels like a long time ago that I finished working at Warwick.

Graduating from the MChem feels like a lifetime ago. In some ways that was more of an event than this graduation. Firstly, it was new and exciting, and I was graduating with my class who I’d studied with for four years. This time, it was just the three of us, of who I only knew one of the others. Secondly, at the end of the MChem I was about to start something new, whereas this time I’m already well-established in a job. I think it was worth turning up for, just to draw this line under things and move along.

Might as well – 6Mb PDF. Enjoy…

Writing about: Memorandum to Self

I think I’ll write another memorandum for my postgraduate times tomorrow,

Well. Not quite the day after – more like a year later. What do I want to remember from the last few years?

• Stu: You’re not on the list, you’re not coming in
• F80
• Huddersfield
• The Tower
• The Mikeopath returns
• beard-stroking Tina
• bibenzyl
• Tal and Martin visit Warwick – alone?
• Hillwalking. Minibuses
• Wales. Andrea, Monica, Sas
• Gear Explosion
• Beers of the World
• Hot chocolate
• Long Distance
• Manchester
• Plans. Scanrail. Talking by the cone.
• “A historical legacy”
• Reflections and reassessments.
• Late taxi, early flight. The Mule.
• Perspectives one and two
• Once more with feeling. Go team
• Back to Sweden.

• James. Willes Road. Arranged from a field.

  ——

• A New Start (PhOX)
• Sheffield
• Breaking up
• Longer Distance
• Waldhaus
• Baltrum. SB New Year
• GRAD (A New Hope). Self-understanding.
• Lille. Airbed. La Citadelle. Notting Hill. Eurostar.
• Mobile. “Mostly red”
• Poly Rig, Poly Meister
• The birth of a blog. WB.
• Stalktastic discussions.
• Mobile. Specialized.
• The Gimp
• Go Outdoors
• Argos tour. Lost in London, “helpful” staff on the railways. Ferry from Harwich
• Cycletour

• Digital Revolution

  ——

• D70
• FSAC
• Inventor
• Bright Red Shoes
• Brussels. Endeavor
• Wien again

• Jobs jobs jobs

  ——

• Kenilworth. SA Merchant Navy. Dinosaur cat.
• Back to Earlsdon; Shalimar, Gabriel’s
• Snowdrifts on Baltrum
• Split sites
• Deep decisions: Security, Identity, Bureaucracy, Renunciation
• Waiting for data
• Submission
• Relocation

• Examination

  And that’s about it. Last year looks a little thin, it was all rather a haze of experiments and data.

So, it’s been just over a month since my viva and today I submitted my corrected thesis.

It’s almost exactly 10 years since I first went to Warwick, on an open day. Everything’s changed, but everything’s still the same. I remember the feeling when I went back there after my first summer break back in Watford – I really liked it. Still do.

This is why it’s strange; I just kind of faded away from the place gradually. I’ve been working in Guildford now for a couple of months, I’m not quite sure where the time’s going. I hardly noticed that I wasn’t at Warwick any more.

But now it’s over. I’ll be back to graduate, and that’ll probably be it, really. I’m not sad to be moving on – I was looking forward to it, and I’m glad it’s come finally, and I’m very happy where I am now. But I will miss the place.

Writing about: E–learning Research: blog styles for better academic writing, 30/05/06, transversality – a geophilosophical journal

Most of the time I write my blog entries for my own use, with a few other readers in mind who all use Firefox, so I’m not that bothered about Internet Exploder users. I’m also not interested in how my texts appear out of context in RSS aggregators, so it doesn’t matter that they lose their additional formatting in such systems.

I’m always interested to see the approach taken by the E-Learning Advisors (employed to advise the faculties about the use of e-learning technologies) at Warwick. This is a case in point; Rob O’Toole has formatted his blog to define semantic elements using CSS, so for example a definition is prefixed with *Definition:*.

The problem, of course, is that RSS readers and aggregators, and screen readers do not respect CSS styles. CSS is a description of layout, not of meaning. Just as the web is moving to a separation of content and presentation, Rob is explaining how to take a backward step and tie meaning to presentation, and simultaneously deny meaning to 90% of web users (using IE), anyone who wants to aggregate his work, and anyone who uses a screen reader.

I had left a comment explaining this, primarily as a caveat emptor, but evidently constructive feedback isn’t welcome.

So. There’s a proposal to put “traffic lights” on food so the buyer knows how bad things are for them. The supermarkets don’t want it, they’d rather give the numbers rather than any kind of relative rating. (do both?) So here’s a similar thing for my thesis.

Again, if you’re looking at this other than on my blog, it’s not going to make sense :-)

Estimated Submission Date: 31 March

This depends somewhat on getting some final data from an industrial collaborator, which is really the only thing causing Ch 5 to be orange rather than yellow.

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.