Dr Laura James's writings

Today, Michael and I built the Kre8 Mangonel which we'd acquired at the Duxford Children in Need event earlier this year.

The new iBunny, Violet 's Nabaztag/Tag , arrived whilst I was away for the holidays. I haven't dared connect it yet - partly, I'm waiting for Amyas to be here too, and partly I'm letting Violet's servers recover from a rather rough few weeks, by all accounts . More on the bunny when I've turned it on. My first impressions are that the high gloss finish is a mistake, it's awful; the "belly button" is somewhat weird; and the new, purple, tail seems to be a volume wheel. Now that could be useful.

Just back from the IOP East Anglia family Physics event at the Cavendish. Mark Lewney gave a talk on the physics of rock guitar, so at last I've seen the longer version, having previously only seen his abbreviated show at the Famelab launch. Dr Lewney is a great speaker, and is worth watching out for. He's on TV twice on Tuesday (Channel 4, around 2pm, and Newsnight on BBC2). Whilst at the Cav I did a survey to find out my carbon footprint; I suspect this will be worrying, and I await the result via email.

In other news of glowing pretty things, the i-Bar provides an illuminated active bar surface. Their video is very impressive, although the bar doesn't seem to have any practical purpose. I wonder how long they can keep that company name before Apple goes after them? (Thanks to Michael for the link!)

It's affordable (ish) and you can buy it now. The Heliodisplay uses water vapour, rather than holograms. Thanks to the FT for the link, some weeks ago now!

AlertMe.com is hiring! We actually have a webpage giving details of who we are and what we do, but we're trying to keep it slightly quiet, so I won't post the link here. We are looking for (a Senior Embedded Software Engineer, an Electronics Engineer (board-level), and on a contract basic, an Embedded Linux application programmer). If you're interested, drop me an email (laura at alertme.com) and I'll send you the full details (and even the link - to the first actual AlertMe webpage with more on it than just an image!).

I'm relocating this blog to a different URL. From now on, you can find the main page at http://lbj.dyndns.org/~laura/blog/blog.html . If you like feeds, click Atom .

Office furniture It's the next generation. 3D noughts and crosses, anyone?

River The Cam is being drained at the moment.

On Saturday I was in Duxford to judge technical robot design for the Eastern region First Lego League competition. Having read the briefing notes the night before, I felt the challenge was probably beyond me! In 8 weeks, outside of school, building a Mindstorms robot to autonomously accomplish 9 missions in two and a half minutes is an impressive accomplishment. Luckily, some of the NanoQuest missions turned out to be easier than I'd initially assumed, but it was still a very hard task. But a surprisingly large number of teams turned out excellent robots which performed, in some cases, stunningly well. Kudos to all the teams! Judging was great fun, and it was good to hear the kids talking through their designs and being so enthused about engineering. This is the baby brother competition to the First Robotics challenge, but seems to manage a more international presence. Hopefully some of the FLL teams will be able to have a go at the major challenge when they're a bit older; ...

In the run up to Christmas I'm becoming more aware of things I need to organise. If only there was enough time to try out all the nifty organisational tools online now! Ta-da lists from 37 signals would let me write a gift list, assuming all my gift-givers are online. I should probably use it for my todo lists instead, as suggested by lifehacker . Or I could try hiveminder . The one slightly annoying thing about all this wondrousness is that if your company is a tiny bit paranoid, you can't put work-related items up on these sites, as their privacy policies tend to make managers fret, perhaps with reason. Meanwhile, I regret not realising that I could have drawn sheep for the Sheep Thesis . That would have used up time too, though, alas...