Author name: Ian Robinson

Bachelor of Science Open

| | Science

I accepted a BSc Open from the Open University yesterday. I’m working towards a BSc (Hons) Molecular Science and will complete that next year by doing:

S343 Inorganic Chemistry
SXR343 Transition Metal Chemistry
SXM390 Frontiers of Chemistry

But the points I have, including some courses I’m not using for the Molecular Science degree, means i can take the BSc Open this year. I can now stick BSc Open after my name if I like. Not that I will. Here is the transcript of the courses I did for the Open Degree:
Bsc Click picture for larger view

Somebody to Love – Queen

| | General

Queen made a lot of videos. I still like the one for Somebody to Love the most I think. It’s simply the 4 of them in a studio, inter-cut with concert footage. So the most important thing, i.e. the music itself, doesn’t have to compete with over ambitious visuals or story. You can watch a 30 second clip at the iTMS or buy the video in its 5 minute splendour there as well.

Stlstill Click picture for larger view

December! That means it’s…

| | Science

Open University course results time! I got mine yesterday. Passed the 2 courses I submitted work for. Didn’t pass the one I didn’t submit for. Funny that šŸ™‚ I had to ignore one of the courses due to work stuff taking my time.

I got a pass (91%) in the 10 point course S197: How the Universe Works and a Grade 3 for S250 Science in Context (average 64% for course work). I was happy with the Grade 3 for S250 given that I missed one of the 4 compulsory assignments and only did about half of another one. I did that half whilst in San Francisco at this years Apple WWDC.

Hoping to do the following next year:

S343 Inorganic Chemistry
SXR343 Transition Metal Chemistry
SXM390 Frontiers of Chemistry

Although I have chopped and changed a bit between the courses I was signed up for next year so the OU might tell me to sod off šŸ™‚

Dodgy Holiday – Mika

| | General

Yeah!. New artist. New Music. Mika is going to be huge. Dodgy Holiday is very good. The performance of the song Grace Kelly on Later with Jools Holland is very good as well. Available as a QuickTime file at the Mika MySpace Music site.

He has a very broad vocal range. The control is better than most and he uses it really well. Inevitably there is comparison to Freddie Mercury and Marc Bolan et al. Sounds a bit like Scissor Sisters and The Darkness from a vocal perspective (but better). He doesn’t need the comparisons to other vocalists. He can stand alone as a very good singer and musician. Looking forward to the album.

Dodgy Holiday

[Thanks to Brian May’s Soapbox for the pointer]

ecto and SOHO Notes it is then

| | General

I wrote previously that I was testing MacJounal as a replacement for ecto as a blog tool and SOHO Notes as a personal journal app. Whilst MacJounal has some nice touches, and does have a nice Mac interface, I’ve reverted to ecto and SOHO Notes for the two tasks respectively. I really missed being able to drag a picture into a blog entry window in ecto and have a thumbnail automatically created that linked to a full size version when uploaded to my Soapbox. I also like the ability to specify a target when creating links. On the SOHO Notes front I like the way it automatically enters the current date as the title of a note when you create one in the in built Journal folder. Hardly Earth shattering I know but the small touches are nice.

The Commonwealth Saga – Peter F. Hamilton (reprise)

| | Uncategorized

Iā€™ve posted here about Peter F. Hamiltonā€™s excellent Commonwealth Saga before. Just finished it again. Still very good. Some of the story lines (like the time spent by Ozzie, Orion and Tochee on the Silfen paths) can drag a bit. There is a new trilogy set in the same Universe but 1500 years after the Commonwealth Saga due to appear over the next few years. Itā€™s going to be called The Void Trilogy. Happy days. Looking forward to that. Have ordered a copy of Misspent Youth to complete the Commonwealth Universe canon.

Chess Blunder

| | General

Good grief. What a blunder. I was playing a 12 minute game of chess against a human opponent on playchess.com and got to the following position –

Chess051220062.png

I was playing white and it was my move. I had about 3 minutes on my clock and my opponent had about 1.5 minutes. So no time pressure. So what did I play?

49. b7??

Really stupid move or what? Can you see why? Black can checkmate in a single move with 49 … Ng2#. Here is the position at the end:

Chess02122006_22.png

I couldnā€™t believe it šŸ™ I should have played 49. Rxf4 Kxf4 50. Kxe2 and then advanced the pawn on the b-file to Queen it. More study required I think to spot obvious mating positions. Here is the full game if anyone is interested:

[Event “Rated game, 12m + 0s”]
[Site “Beginners”]
[Date “2006.12.05”]
[White “Canicula”]
[Black “Coriolis”]
[Result “0-1”]
[WhiteElo “1251”]
[BlackElo “1283”]
[ECO “C42”]
[Annotator “Robinson,Ian”]

1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 d6 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. d3 Be7 5. Be2 O-O 6. Be3 Nc6 7. O-O Be6 8. Ng5
d5 9. f3 d4 10. Nxe6 fxe6 11. Bg5 dxc3 12. bxc3 b5 13. d4 b4 14. c4 exd4 15. e5
Nd7 16. Bxe7 Qxe7 17. f4 Rf7 18. Bh5 g6 19. Bf3 Rxf4 20. Qd2 Raf8 21. Bxc6 Nxe5
22. Rxf4 Nxc4 23. Rxf8+ Qxf8 24. Qf2 Ne5 25. Qxf8+ Kxf8 26. Be4 c5 27. Re1 Kf7
28. h4 c4 29. h5 b3 30. axb3 cxb3 31. cxb3 d3 32. Kf2 Ng4+ 33. Kf3 gxh5 34.
Bxh7 Kf6 35. Ra1 Ke5 36. Bxd3 Kd4 37. Bc4 e5 38. Rxa7 e4+ 39. Ke2 Ne3 40. Bf7
Nxg2 41. Bxh5 Nf4+ 42. Kd2 e3+ 43. Ke1 Nxh5 44. Rd7+ Ke4 45. b4 Nf4 46. b5 e2
47. b6 Kf3 48. Rf7 Ke3 49. b7 Ng2# 0-1

BTW the chess boards above are taken from the excellent Sigma Chess.

UPDATE: Itā€™s not all doom and gloom. I won my most recent game –

[Event “Rated game, 8m + 0s”]
[Site “Beginners”]
[Date “2006.12.05”]
[White “Canicula”]
[Black “GĀønni”]
[Result “1-0”]
[WhiteElo “1169”]
[BlackElo “1378”]
[ECO “B06”]
[Annotator “Robinson,Ian”]

1. e4 g6 2. Nf3 Bg7 3. Nc3 Nc6 4. Bd3 d6 5. O-O Bxc3 6. bxc3 e5 7. Bb2 Bg4 8.
Bc4 Qd7 9. d4 exd4 10. cxd4 Bxf3 11. Qxf3 Nxd4 12. Bxd4 O-O-O 13. Bxh8 Ne7 14.
Qxf7 Rxh8 15. Qe6 b6 16. Qxd7+ Kxd7 17. Rae1 Rf8 18. f3 Rf4 19. g3 Rf6 20. f4
c6 21. g4 b5 22. Bd3 a6 23. g5 Rf7 24. f5 gxf5 25. exf5 Nd5 26. g6 hxg6 27.
fxg6 Rg7 28. Rf7+ Rxf7 29. gxf7 1-0

Batten down the hatches

| | Science

Yikes. Looks like it might be a bit windy over the British Isles this weekend. The picture below is the Atlantic pressure chart for Sunday 3rd at noon. I love sitting in a nice warm house listening to the wind howling. Itā€™s certainly better than being out in it. I remember being out out fishing in a boat in the Irish Sea off Ardglass Harbour one day in a gale. It was a reasonably big boat. Well made. Sturdy. The waves were bigger than it was. It was weird. When in a trough between waves there was a wall of water for 360o around the boat. All you could see was water, sky and extremely harassed gulls! I think going out that day was probably a mistake.

AtPressure03122006.png

A new pleasure

| | General

With apologies to Douglas Adams for nicking the line uttered when Arthur Dent uses his bottle of Retsina to gain access to the flying perpetual party in HHGTTG. But I discovered a new pleasure tonight. Thatchers Coxs Single Varietal cider. Itā€™s really tangy and crisp. Delicious chilled and over heaps of ice. Even better, they sell it in a Tesco store I pass on the way home from work. I bought one a few days ago to taste it. Iā€™ll be getting more šŸ™‚

ThatchersCoxCider.jpg

Yearly check-up done

| | Uncategorized

I had my yearly TC check-up today. Is it really a year since the last one? Had the usual physical exam and a chest x-ray. Assuming the x-ray is clear, and it should be, Iā€™ll have another exam same time next year.

Happy days šŸ™‚

Site update

| | General

You may have noticed that Iā€™ve changed the theme in use by WordPress for the Soapbox. The new one is based on Man~ja. I want to change the colours of the entry headers to blue and the colours of the links in posts to a different colour as well. Iā€™d also like to change the Posted by… text to a different colour as well. However no matter what changes I make to the style.css file the colours wonā€™t change. Iā€™ll sort it out later! I like the new theme. I think it is cleaner than the previous one. A few more tweaks and Iā€™ll be happy.

UPDATE: Looks like the colour changes I made to the CSS file are working today. I think the blue is a bit bright so Iā€™ve changed it to be Dark Blue (#00008B). I think the style sheet must be getting cached somewhere between me and the Gradwell servers. So Iā€™ll see tomorrow, after the cache has expired, how the new colours look.

Campaigning for dark skies…

| | Science, Technology

Saw this on Brian Mayā€™s Soapbox. New initiative to try and preserve dark skies at night so that people can see and appreciate the stars, nebulae and other celestial objects. At present the amount of light that goes up into the sky from lights is ridiculous. Just take a look at the pictures of cities, or indeed the Earth from space, at night. Or look out the window from a plane when landing in a city at night. Lots of light from street lamps, building lights, etc. goes up into the sky. Surely if nothing else this is a waste of electricity? If street lights had mirrored reflective hoods to project all the light downwards would this not allow a reduction in the amount of energy required to light a location and also reduce the amount of light that was wasted and allowed to escape upwards? Surely in these times of awareness of climate change and the impact of power generation on the CO2 emissions this is the perfect time to address the light pollution issue as well?

Testing MacJournal again

| | General

Iā€™m having another look at MacJournal to see if itā€™ll work as my personal diary tool and also as a blog editing tool. Iā€™m writing this entry using v4.1d4, which is the latest available development build from Dan Schimpf. The editor is nice. Probably a bit better than ecto form a Macintosh GUI perspective.

I was able to download all 190 entries from my Soapbox okay after pointing it at the base URL. When I tried this in a previous version it only downloaded a subset of them. Not sure if that was as result of something I did wrong or the program itself.

In theory I should be able to use this one program to compose and store both personal entries and public entries for the Soapbox. Anyone want to take bets on how long itā€™ll be before a private entry gets posted here šŸ™‚

Here is a screen grab of this entry being composed in MacJournal. If picture uploading is working then youā€™ll be able to see it. If not Iā€™ll need to do some more tweaking!

MacJournalSmall.jpg
Click on picture for larger view

Update: Obviously pictures are being scaled to fit the column width. Have to fix that. Three options:

        ā€¢ Find out if MacJournal can mimic the behaviour of ecto. The latter will include a thumbnail of the image in the post and will display the image in a new window when itā€™s double clicked. This would be my preference for a fix.
        ā€¢ Amend the CSS templates for the WordPress theme to stop images being scaled. If anyone knows how to do this post in the comments.
        ā€¢ Change the WordPress scheme to not use a single centred column. Might be time to go to a normal full window width theme anyway.

Update 2: The images are okay in the RSS feed from the site. Which is how everyone reads blogs anyway! Right?

Update 3: Iā€™ve edited the picture to make it a thumbnail with a link to the larger version.

New Job!!

| | General, Science, Technology

I’m moving to a new job!! If you look at the side bar it says that I’m employed as an IT Consultant by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, and work mainly in Northern Ireland. Well that’ll soon have to change to something like I’m employed as a Senior Solutions Architect by a UK based IT services company. I live in Belfast, UK, am based there but my work is focused on the education sector in England.

I’m moving sideways in the company I work for into the Managed Services Education section that delivers solutions for the Building Schools for the Future project. The new job will be helping to deliver environments and solutions to the education sector. It involves using technologies to create flexible learning environments, both physical and virtual, so that students can learn at their own pace, access lesson materials when not able to attend lessons (for whatever reason), adopt new technology to enhance learning (podcasts, digital media etc.).

I’m really looking forward to it. It’ll involve finding out how people learn. How the environment they are learning in influences this. How technology can help keep students interested and make them want to learn. Obviously the job will involve more than that, but I’ll learn that as I go along. I’ll transfer to the new role in January. Can’t wait.

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