Dr Laura James's writings

All being well, our online shop will be open on Monday. Exciting times!

Yesterday, I spotted the wonderful Cambridge Joy parkour video: It turns out that one of the stars is from the Wirral, like me! Indeed, the Wirral is evidently a hotbed of urban sports; there's also a nice YouTube video of some young skateboarders in Morrisons car park in West Kirby. These kids are just amazing.

Yesterday, Amyas let his tea get cold on his desk. I mentioned that a USB cup warmer would stop this happening; Amyas, being a sensible chap, seemed surprised that such a thing existed. Well, I knew I'd seen them somewhere, and I thought I might purchase one for fun. I looked on the internet... and there were USB cup warmers . Great. But it isn't that simple. You can pay anything from £2 to £20, it seems, for a single warmer. You can choose between silver, white, black, gold, all in different shapes and sizes. You can get a USB cup warmer with integrated 4-port USB hub. Some cup warmers come with cups. Or stainless steel cups with lids. Some are flat-topped, some have round indents, some have on-off switches and LEDs. Some - very rare, this kind - have LCD clocks and temperature readouts! Some offer 50-60C warming; some 40C to 80C, from outer edge to centre. I'm overwhelmed by the variety! I am awed that so many people should have designed these gizmos and had them manufa

I haven't drawn anything for a very, very long time. Yesterday I sketched a bluetit, and today a robin, which I then watercoloured. I think the bluetit is better.

We talked about backup solutions for our data. Michael said that by now, 5 years ago he would have expected to give his credit card and some words to a software agent, and it would go off and find the right thing online, and a box would just show up at the house with a backup solution in it. I said that the agent would actually be off looking at kitten pictures; Joy of Tech said so in their Web N.0 predictions . Michael said he didn't know about kittens, but that some of his friends are into cat pictures with captions of the form "I am in your blah, blahhing your blah" and that these were deemed extremely funny. We had to look it up. Apparently, the concept is called Lolcatz. We found a nice, clear definition , which says: an LOLCAT is any photo of a cute cat along with an irony-free caption... An LOLCATZ is a photo similar in content, but one that captures the aggressive stupidity found in some parts of the Internet, such as 12-year-old boys who grew with the Internet t