Dr Laura James's writings

Mary Dejevsky has a good column today, pointing out that bloggers are predominantly male, and that this might be more because they have more time to type away than women, rather than because women have less to say. So that's a good excuse for my never getting around to posting the interesting things I intend to then! (Alas, the article is probably behind the Indy's paywall.) This is something I've often felt about blogging, playing and tweaking new applications, hacking OSes, and open source development. Women can, and would like to, contribute to these things, but have other things to spend their time on. The iBunny is offline at present as we're moving office, and everything bar laptops, one desk, and the kettle is in boxes. Hopefully we'll be up and running somewhere new (we don't know where yet) soon.

If everything works, you can now check my status (or at least, what I've told my bunny by setting his ears) on my webpage ... Weird, huh?

It took a while, but iirobotics finally came up with the goods (I still have an order in with Firebox but nothing from them yet). iirobotics were great, regular email updates and a personal apology in the box. But: the Nabaztag is here! I'm now a paid up Full Friend bunny so you can message me (or rather my office) as much as you want. Bearing in mind that everyone in my office will hear whatever you send... We're thrilled, of course, although we have no idea what the bunny is up to most of the time. He flashes lights and talks at us, and waves his ears. But what does it all mean? (If you'd like to play with the API of our bunny, drop me a line and I'll give you all the authorisation codes etc)

If you can make her out amongst the planes of the American air museum at Duxford IWM , you can spot a woman on a cherry-picker, vacuuming the top of the B-52. This would clearly be a fun task - at least the first time you had to do it.

It's Techlinks at the IWM in Duxford again. Today, day one, I've been building rockets with primary children of various sizes. Unlike most years, we're only running activities for half-days this time, so I'm still quite functional afterwards; and for once it's not 30C out there. Usually a whole day of Techlinks leaves me a sweaty and voiceless heap...

Hunts Sailing Club in St Ives had an open day today, and Paul and I went along. The pic shows Paul returning to dry land from a turn out in the Fireball (in the middle). I had a longer go than him, helming the Fireball most of the time, which was fun as it's bigger than anything I used to sail, with far too many sails, and had a centre main which made for a few tiny yet confusing differences! The wind was fairly gentle but somewhat erratic, which put me off taking a Topper (the ones to the sides) out by myself - coming back to the boathouse against a very weak and changing wind wasn't pleasant, and I felt too out of practice to manage it reliably. Still, I had lots of fun :-)