I have a major interview coming up, on Friday, which is quite exciting. It's for a job at Tesco trying to forecast demand. In short, Tesco pioneered (at least in the UK) the practise of using engineering and science based graduates to dip into their past data (which they've always been very good at collecting at the checkout) and then using that ( Read more... )

Since my mind is pre-occupied with so much, I decided that it would relax it if I went through the expanded definition for the neoliberalism article I have written and started to put references in ( Read more... )

I recently installed the Firefox Xmarks plugin. Xmarks allows you to keep your bookmarks synchronised across different browsers on different computers. I thought I'd give it a go as my dad was talking about it (well, he was talking about Foxmarks, which was its predecessor), and I've been finding myself wanting access to my bookmarks across ( Read more... )

My meeting with my supervisor went better than expected.

Tomorrow is the Rolling Grant visit. People come around, attend short talks, talk to us, look at some posters and then decide how much money to give us for the next two years. Such is how the decision making process for spending taxpayers money on research runs.

Bad foreverdirt, I have all of re: Your Brains memorised and I can't sleep because it keeps running through my brain and I start giggling.

Yesterday was a day in which I seemed bent on spending talking to people. After wychwood came and dropped some books off and I gave her back the ones I had, we ended up chatting for a while. This was then followed by an ( Read more... )

Ok, so you know I've been bitching about that analysis pipeline? About how it didn't work in the way I needed it too? Well, one of the (extremely major) sections that wasn't working has just worked. I figured out the problem without even trying when looking through a config file (which I had undoubtedly gone through at least ten times before) ( Read more... )

Yesterday I poked around in Chris's old directory and found the codes as he ran them. I did a quick test of something using his code. Previous running time: 50 minutes. His code: 4 minutes. Seeing it at least was enough to convince me that, no, it is not some nfs issue with cross cluster access, but it is some code optimisation procedure that ( Read more... )

I had a meeting with my supervisor earlier. The results of that are interesting ( Read more... )

I just had a lovely chat with Alex, the other grav wave PhD student who started in my year. It started with him asking me how life was going and me telling him about how crap the situation with the current data analysis pipeline is. He agreed with me that the situation was very shitty and probably the best thing to do would be to rewrite the code ( Read more... )

I've been in Pisa now for three days and it's been pretty excellent. In the mornings a bus comes and picks us up and takes us to the VIRGO site where we have excellent lectures and a nice lunch (plus various nice snacks). It drops us back off in town in the evenning for us to walk around and have dinner at some nice restaurant. I'm with Dee and ( Read more... )