Dr Laura James's writings

Or rather, ears...

Weird Al has just released a preview track from his forthcoming album, Straight Outta Lynwood . It's on his MySpace site, along with another track which I believe won't make the album - You're Pitiful - which I now hear in my head whenever James Blunt is played at me.

Today, a hawk took down a starling in the garden. I was glad it wasn't one of the more interesting / rarer birds!

Playing with Lego NXT. Writing programmes with little icons on the iMac; downloading them via Bluetooth; driving motors, playing with sensors, trying to figure out these complicated new Lego parts... It's rather fun.

The trendy wine of the moment! For once I am up to date with the in-crowd :) Not the cheapest - you need to go to Waitrose, or other posh shops apparently. But it's unusual and good. Waitrose now has a wine chiller thingy near the dessert wines, so I was able to chill this bottle rapidly (4 minutes) before taking it home.

is one heck of a lot of wires. Nonetheless, I'm chuffed - new dev kit to play with (from Ember ), and plenty of different shades of red to admire.

Lots of roadsters, too :)

Lots of cars this month!

Gray turned 50 today. I met Taco for the first time: Gray looked splendid as usual Paul wore his new glasses There was cake

I was in London yesterday for Claire's hen night - a super time was had by all, between the fondant fancies, garlic bread, Mamma Mia, and lovely cocktails... We didn't half feel underdressed compared to the hens on stage at the show, though!

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.