Having worked most of the weekend, I finished the first draft of the write up on Monday.  I'd have finished it about an hour earlier if I hadn't stupidly deleted one of the tex files first thing (along with it's 2 backups).   Thank God for touch-typing and the previous night's pdf...  I met my theoretical supervisor this afternoon, who said it was ( Read more... )

I've persuaded my housemates to switch away from NTL!  As of 19th Sept, we will no longer be beholden to the spawn of the Devil.  Unfortunately, we will also be offline for a week or so, as our broadband can't be set up until the BT line is enabled, but meh.  I'm sure we'll survive ( Read more... )

I think I have about half of my dataset now.  This is a good thing, as my deadline for handing in the report is the 15th, and this morning I had no decent data.  I have discovered a lot about experimental work, mainly that you will have to do something 10 times before you find the right way to do it, and that working out how to get the data is much ( Read more... )

At the BBC, I got used to the concept that an "urgent" workshop job would take 2-3 weeks, or less if you pestered them continously.  A "non-urgent" job would get done just before the deadline, or not at all if you'd sent it to CAD (who failed to even start one job I sent them by the time I resigned, over a year later ( Read more... )

The legal, NHS-employed vampires, anyway.

And I didn't faint!

This despite my blood failing to sink in the haemoglobin test, so I now have matching holes in each arm - one for a bigger venous sample for the haemoglobin test, and one for the "real thing".  This has happened before in hot weather, apparently it's a known problem in the heat that some ( Read more... )

I finally did some experimental work today, thanks to my supervisor returning from the US and spending about 4 hours helping me get set up.  We've now got a working closed flow loop, and we've managed to inject bubbles and see them using ultrasound.  Not bad for an afternoon's work!  I might post some piccys later if there's interest ( Read more... )

One of the questions I keep getting asked, both in Oxford and outside, is "What exactly do you do?". It's not an easy question to answer - "a DPhil at the Life Sciences Interface" usually leaves people more confused than before. Most times I've ended up telling people that I'm working on a cross-over between engineering and medicine, which is all ( Read more... )

As part of my course, I do 2 short (8 weeks) projects: one in summer and one in autumn. The idea is that one of these forms the basis for our substansive DPhil research. So at the moment I'm stressing about what to do for my second project.

I've decided on the first one (summer). I'll be looking at bubbles using ultrasound.
( technical details )