Christmas Balls Past

In a fit of nostalgia, I searched out and archived my humble website for Churchill’s Springball 2001.

My website for Wolfson’s Christmas Ball 2003 is also available.

Will I ever do another? Let’s just see…

Combined Journal Search

As a keen DPhil student, I obviously spend hours each day looking up journal articles.

As something of a disenter, I refuse to waste even more time using the Bodley’s much-championed OxLIP(link), and shamefully rely on Google far too much, even given its recent failings (El Reg link).

So I’ve finally gotton around to produce a simple combined search page for the few journals I regularly pull up citations. You can find it here.

I am sure it can be vastly improved, and who knows, if I have to wait much more for samples, it may receive a lot of attention over the next few days…
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Used Book Update…

Having just brought by first book from eBay (Lifemanship by Stephen Potter, if you’re interested), I thought it would be useful to note other interesting auctions:

eBay

Gamesmanship, Stephen Potter (Penguin PB) (link)

Stephen Potter Box Set (Penguin) (link)

Upmanship, Stephen Potter (Penguin PB) (link)

The latter strikes me as quite expensive for a late Penguin reprint.

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Veeco Conference

Yesterday I attended Veeco’s (link) Scanning Probe Microscopy Applications Conference and Users Meeting at the Oxford Centre, Summertown.

Among the presentations, some amazing research was exhibited, most notably the Ultra High-Speed Scanning Probe Microscopy from Andy Humphris (Uni of Bristol), which allows video-speed imaging at near typical AFM resolutions, and Scanning Hall Probe Microscopy from Dorothee Petit (Uni of Durham). The latter involves fabrication of 50nm Hall probes actually on the end of AFM tips by Ga+ FIB milling.

I still hope, however, that clever ideas will rein over those that rely on access to technologies.
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End of the Week

The glorious feeling of the end of a Friday afternoon!

Today capped a rather strange week: I’ve not done anything of the things I had hoped, but it’s been pretty successful and I’ve enjoyed the ride nevertheless.

Problems with access to the cleanroom prevented me getting on with any actual work in there, although LL kindly helped me out with advice about necessary oxide and metal thicknesses, which I shall hopefully get sorted out next week with the Thin Film Facility.

I have, however, had increased success with my deposition and imaging of nanotubes. After a bit of lucky inspiration, I appear to have formulated a nice way to produce a decent distribution of long (mainly) individual nanotubes. Handily, we have got plenty of the required dispersion sitting around unwanted, so I shall be able to happily produce hundreds of pretty samples in the years to come. Time to work out what to do with them all!
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My First Hilary

Back to work today! The AFM and the DWB Cleanroom are desperately calling.

In the meantime, I’ve finally found a way of producing decent thumbnail print-outs of all my AFM scans. They are in a tricky HDF format, of which MatLab refuses to extract the important x-y scale information [DataSet_Info.Dims.Scale(1) = none, strangely].

Fortunately the strangely-named WSxM from Scanning Probe Microscopy Software (link) has proved its worth with a satisfactory file browser. The actual program isn’t as feature-packed as SPIP from Image Metrology (link) but then it’s not leaden down by the money-grabbing ‘trial-version’ limitations. Not that I really blame ImageMet — I’d bloody well want money (as well as some damn recognition) if I’d put so much effort into something. Talking of which, off to work…
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Used Book Update…

Another update of those interesting (in my humble opinion) used books gathering dust in charity shops:

Oxfam (Summertown)

• No interesting books at all! (But maybe I didn’t really look as I wasn’t in the mood.)

Nevertheless, my confidence in Oxford is not completely lost. It was good to overhear yesterday in St. Giles Oxfam that Jilly Cooper and Jeffery Archer books are simply thrown away: ‘Jilly Cooper books just don’t sell very well in Oxford’, the gentleman of obvious distinction said.

Huttons take note.

p.s. Reservoir Books (link) on St. Aldates are closed again until term-time, if I remember correctly.

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[Slutz] Revival

Out of sheer curiosity (honest) I had a sneaky play of Counter-Strike — the famous Half-Life modification — after not touching it for nearly three years. Not daunted by the 700MB+ download required under Valve’s ludicrous Steam set-up, which is obviously being rigged so that they can finally get around to charging people to play CS online, I found the game all so familiar. If anything, the age of the CS community seems to have weened out all the hackers and t/killers that spoilt the game so badly in the past. An unsettling amount of killing fun was had. Anyway, as I’m sure you can guess, I was rubbish, although — as K would have undoubtedly agreed — I was still miles better than B ever was: [Slutz] will live on forever!

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In case there was ever any doubt…

My journal says I’m 76% masculine.

What does your LJ writing style say about your gender? UsernameCommunity

LJ Gender Tool by

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Summer Jobs in Britain

Hobbs’s book is still rated five stars — catch it before any real reviewers come along! (link)

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