Dr Laura James's writings

I'm having cake today for lunch (although not one of these). Perhaps this is unhealthy.

Went to Thetford forest today. It was very cold and frosty, but beautifully sunny too. Managed to find a very quiet path away from all the cyclists. I'm always amazed that my (now quite old) phone can actually take moderate pictures sometimes.

Spotted on GMSV : "As anticipated, when the young women in the current study were asked to select the agents who were most like them and who they most wanted to be like, they tended to pick young, female, attractive, and cool agents. However, they also selected the young, female, cool agents as being least like an engineer. When asked to select who they would most like to learn from about engineering, the women in the current study were far more likely to pick male agents who were uncool but attractive. Interestingly, it was also the male, uncool agents that they tended to rate as most like an engineer." So says Amy Baylor , a professor of instructional systems at Florida State University's Research of Innovative Technologies for Learning. This amused me greatly.

Cool - I'll be able to get the new Barenaked Ladies album on USB memory stick. (Assuming someone imports it, of course.) And it looks like Weird Al has recorded the first 6 tracks of his new album too. Can't wait.

Saw these guys in town this morning - solar-powered laptops, free for anyone to use. Cute waterproof hoods. Apparently it's Art, rather than Useful...

you need to turn the lights on. A lazy student lifestyle has wiped such details from my memory. Time for a change, perhaps.

2005 is the Year of the Volunteer, and Charlie and I got medals tonight for our work as Ambassadors over the years. Officially these are Awards for Commitment. Not had a medal before! Lots of mayors from Cambridgeshire, and the Lord Lieutenant, were there. 401 medals are being awarded nationwide, and Cambs got 36 of them. We're keen round here.

No idea when the season officially opens, of course. But I haven't baked anything for so long that this definitely counts as a new season for me.

Being currently "between jobs", I'm in an interesting situation when it comes to computing, as every day I use a range of different platforms in different locations, and none of them are really mine . At home I have a choice of Mac or PC and usually end up flitting between the two depending on what room I'd rather be in; elsewhere, I can often snatch a few minutes on a Windows machine or sometimes my own xterm and/or browser window on a Linux box. The experience is very different to that of having one's own main computer, set up with applications and preferences, and which automatically starts up widgets to keep one connected and informed. My USB key and webpages are pretty useful for documents (and at home all my files are on the network), but I do sometimes find that I'm stuck with a NeoOffice save file from the Mac which I can't edit on an alien Windows machine. Most of my document editing still happens at home, but it is good to see that I could now do...

For some time now, I've felt I ought to read a book entitled Behind the Scenes at the Museum , which had been very well received, but whenever I spotted it in a store, I'd always read the blurb and be put off. Perhaps it was because I like museums, but none seemed to occur in the book, or perhaps it sounded too much like a generic woman trapped in unhappy marriage tale. A month or two back, I needed a third book for a 3-for-2, and so bought Not the End of the World , which was a collection of wonderfully surreal short stories and which had an appealing blurb. A week or so later, I spotted another book by the same author (Kate Atkinson) which was set in Cambridge and looked like a mystery - it sounded terrific, and was. Having read that, I proceeded to devour the rest of her oeuvre, including some really splendid story telling. I finally finished Behind the Scenes at the weekend (one of her best, I think, no wonder everyone raved about it) and Emotionally Weird yesterday (a sur...

Stop Climate Chaos aims to be the next big campaign (following 2005's Make Poverty History). Sign up now on their petition, and pledge to be a bit greener in the future - and tell your friends to do the same. (Spreading the word, as promised, Anne!)

"Nothing right in my left brain; nothing left in my right brain" I assume it's an old one, but new to me. (Seen on a postcard in the house of a very helpful lady I visited yesterday.)