fire alarm.  Cold.  useless security services people. 
Firemen.  Hoses - ooh exciting.  Watering the car park.  Bye-bye hoses.
Eventually let back in before we actually get hypothermia
Alarm still sounding.  Migraine (joy)
Firemen finish.  alarm broken.  won't turn off
that was 20 minutes ago
it's still going
ow

Edit: it finally shut up around 2300, at ( Read more... )

On Friday, I got back from my Canadian trip - 7 days in Vancouver (including a 4-day conference), then 3 days in Montreal.  It was great right up to the last afternoon, but more of that later ( Read more... )

This morning I turned on my digibox.  It popped up the "new or changed channels" screen, and I told it to do a rescan.  Which it did, happily reporting that 0 channels were found.  WTF?  It was working last night fine, and analogue signal was as good as it ever is (i.e. BBC2 is grainy but the others are ok).  So I spend maybe 10 or 15 minutes ( Read more... )

I spent the last few days in sunny Santa Margherita Ligure, in Italy, at the Medsip conference.  Actually, to be strictly accurate, I spent the days in the Auditorium Santa Margherita, and only saw the sun for a couple of hours in the morning, lunchtime and evening ( Read more... )

Why is public transport so hopeless ( Read more... )

It's been a busy week - partly because it's the last week of the academic year, so there were lots of end-of-year meetings and parties.  On top of that, I had a meeting with my supervisor that generated a significant amount of urgent work, so it's all been a bit chaotic.  On the upside, he has once again indicated that he thinks I will finish on ( Read more... )

Databases today.  Definitely the most tricky yet - although I was also starting from a base of almost no previous knowledge.  I certainly would have struggled if we'd taken the exam in the morning, but three practice papers later, I was well prepared.  There's one question that I might have got partly wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I got ( Read more... )

So I was submitting this paper to the EMBC conference in Vancouver.  Suffice it to say that the preparation of this paper has typically involved late nights, followed by long waits for my supervisor.  Then panicked rewrites of the introduction requiring removal of references to keep within the page limit.  And so on and so forth, nothing unusual ( Read more... )

I don't consider myself to be a particularly fussy computer user.  I own machines running both Windows and Linux, and love them both.  But I am becoming increasingly annoyed with my lab machine, which runs Solaris.  This is turning me into a vengeful anti-Sun person, who blames Sun for all of the idiosyncrasies of my particular machine/setup.  I'm ( Read more... )

Apparently I've been living in a death trap for the last year ( Read more... )