Dr Laura James's writings

Paul's new car arrived yesterday :) He is very happy about this! We're now a 2-Smart household, although his rather outshines mine...

In the background of the last post, you can see Ikea desks. We have a lot of Ikea furniture here; it's been something of a trial unloading, unpacking and building it in the current hot weather. At least we were sober , though! (Thanks to GMSV for the link!) It takes 2 PhDs in Engineering to assemble some items though.

It's been a busy couple of weeks as we moved office. Now we are nearly settled in the new place, although it's a tad hot at the moment... This shows only a tiny fraction of our cardboard mountain though. Deliveries keep coming, and so it's lucky we have clear carpet space to pile packaging on. We are slowly filling up the space with desks (and people) though.

My parents have bought me some super Leica binoculars , so I can see things more clearly :) It would have been good to have them this weekend, but alas this wasn't to be.

It was nice to get away and do some walking this weekend. The weather was excellent, making for a very clear view, although perhaps a little too hot for big hill climbs...

Today our office split in two - the back being full of desks and filing cabinets, for marketing, and the front becoming a proper lab with kettle, lab benches, scope, roomba, coffee table and pouffes, and barefooted engineers :)

We now have a Roomba in our office. Unhacked, as yet :) And a bit loud to operate during the day. Although it would drown out the grasshoppers which are evidently the source of the ongoing chirruping sound, not birds after all. We were wondering what birds would cheep all day... The morning was spent building a giant lab bench. We now need scopes to fill it - please, send us your unused network analysers too! Tomorrow, there is an Ikea delivery to build. How can we ever get work done amidst such excitement?

You can now design Lego models online . When you've finished, you can design the box - and then - they ship you the blocks you need to make it! Amazing stuff indeed. Priced by what blocks you use, just as you'd expect. Wow.

Well, after a good few months in our original offices, with amazing family connection for me, we've moved to Bridge Street. The main characteristic of this office is that it's big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is... Sorry, I was getting carried away there. As you can see, our 2 desks (being valiantly assembled by Amyas here) are rather dwarfed - and this is just a tiny fraction of the floorspace we are confronted with. Still, it's another nice central location, and as soon as we have more reliable broadband, we'll be very happy... Still unpacking in the meantime and wishing it wasn't quite so warm.

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 :-)

Marriage may end your career in scientific research, vice versa, or not. There's an interesting article discussing the issues in AAAS Science . The spookiest part is when one apparently successful marriage is described: the couple sitting together in bed, both doing work on laptops, and instant messaging each other. Ouch! Whatever happened to voice?

I don't believe in just recycling links, but if Cambridge-based people haven't seen MySociety's latest offering it's worth a look. Fascinating to see where you should live if you work at Microsoft Reearch.... now, with some data on real bus arrival times and delays, and some more destinations (city centre, science park), this could get very useful very quickly.

It's been good weather in Cambridge, mostly, this week. I've even quite enjoyed the rainy phases! Still, I haven't really appreciated it all, as I've been resting up after being ill last week. It's amazing how much I can sleep per day without feeling I'm overdoing my time in bed or napping. I'm hoping that I'll be properly recovered soon, and able to be awake for more than, say, 4 or 5 hours at a stretch without really wanting not to be. And perhaps I'll have woken up in time for the next beer festival, given that I totally missed this one. Today's link is to tips for making sure your startup is bulletproof . Doesn't mention making sure you are awake...

Inspired by the iDucks from BugBash, we're getting an Nabaztag for our office - we're going to see how long we last before it drives us mad . At least we won't feel guilty when we dismember it, unlike if we forget to water the office plants we don't have.

Not only am I Dr Laura now, I am also a Chartered Engineer, at last...