Dr Laura James's writings

A very nicely done example of viral marketing: Smart Enlightenment . Are you vacuuming the carpet of pain? If so, Dr Tridion can help. (Thanks to Mum for the link!)

then I'd strongly recommend going to see "I am Shakespeare" at the Arts Theatre. This was, sadly, somewhat poorly attended tonight, but was a great show, starring Sean Foley (of The Right Size, a duo I admire hugely) and Mark Rylance of the Globe. If you are interested in Shakespeare, or the internet, or just enjoy a lively show, go see it.

Michael has a new passport. It contains a wide selection of images of British birds. However, the note that came with it, full of puff about the high tech security features, fails to describe the birds! A great deal of effort with Google reveals one leaflet about the birds ( here , on a very unofficial site), but the bird on the "chip" page is unnamed. Does anyone know what it is? It's pictured in the leaflet I've linked- twice, in fact.

Yesterday, the podcast. Today, I was interviewed by Rory Cellan-Jones for BBC News 24! The video is linked from the image of a tasteful toy Post Office in that article, half way down. As well as showing some of the first bits of AlertMe kit we've revealed to the public, it was nice to be asked about the reasons I moved from academia to industry, too.

I'm featured in the latest SET Women podcast , produced by Cobi Smith. It's very strange to hear your voice and words, processed and tidied up by someone else! Cobi has done a good job on the podcast series though, even if I don't feature until number 6 :)

Our website is now live. Enjoy!

A pleasant consequence of living near a jam factory is that sometimes the village smells of strawberries. If you listen to the Archers , and have read all the Harry Potter books, you are likely to enjoy Lantana2's fantasy . Last year, Michael and I attended an excellent Wine Appreciation course at Impington Village College. It is on again during the autumn term and I would strongly recommend it to anyone who would like to learn more about wine in an informal setting. If they don't get the numbers, the course will be cancelled, so do consider registering and joining us! It was so good, we're taking the course again.

We've had the Wattson at home for a while. Using the Holmes software (subtle naming there!) I can view our household electricity usage over the last few months. Holmes may be in beta, but it makes lovely graphs. We've been glad to find that our "resting" power consumption is quite low, even with the server running. You can see the kettle boiling and so on in the morning, and the washing machine (ouch!) in the evening. Our consumption goes up when Michael stays at home with a cold, boiling the kettle and running extra computers... We can also spot the weekends when we are at home more, and more likely to be running washing machines and so on: It's very interesting to see how our power usage varies over the hours, days and months. I look forward to the winter to see how that changes things! (Aside: I recently read Arthur and George by Julian Barnes - a fascinating book. I'd recommend it to all those who like the naming of Wattson!)

I've put up the photos from last week's Smart Festival . Everyone should watch the fascinating video (" shift happens ") about what the 21st century is probably going to be like - I spotted it here on John's blog .

I was unaware until yesterday that Cambridge had a Fringe festival, which starts this week. This year, the Fringe included a science comedy cabaret last night at Footlights, and all the hip scientists from the region were there. The evening started with Mark Stevenson , who did some traditional standup with a vaguely scientific spin. Lots of sex and a small amount of monkeys. (Photos are the traditionally bad mobile phone camera in bar style, I'm afraid!) Harry Witchel was up next, "you can see me on Big Brother, but you're better off not". He eschewed straight standup in favour of a lecturing style, well-suited to his audience, and presented some scientific analysis of dating and body language. It was a great act, only slightly let down by his audio-visual aids (movies are not best shown on a laptop screen, picked up by a CCTV camera, and relayed to an LCD panel!). Finally, we heard from Ron Laskey , the creator of Songs for Cynical Scientists, and the man who wrote...

AlertMe employees apparently do not wash up their mugs. We have therefore been given our own mugs to force us to wash up. They are lovely mugs; although not the easiest to wash.

A Smart Festival at Mercedes World in Brooklands, Sam and Zoe's wedding, and another Impington sunset.

BarCamp is coming to Cambridge! BarCamb will happen on 24th August. It should be interesting to see how the web2.0ish BarCamp types blend with the science people local to Hinxton. Hopefully there will be some interesting sessions anyway. There's a MiniBar in London tomorrow too, which sounds like a hoot, although I won't be there.

A beautiful picture of "the graceful concentric arcs traced by the stars" as the earth rotates. (Thanks to Amyas for the link!) It's part of the wonderful Astronomy Picture of the Day series.

The plants turned out to be from Michael's grandmother - many thanks! Michael did a good job of planting them out before we went away for the weekend. Whilst away we visited the red squirrels at Formby Point. Much of the weekend we had brilliant sunshine; hard to imagine the floods elsewhere. When we got back to Cambridge, it seemed as if it could have been dry all weekend, and there was a terrific sunset.

This morning, before 8am, the doorbell rang. It was a delivery man with 27 baby plants for Michael. "Must be planted within 24 hours." We have clematis and honeysuckle and pinks, and no idea who sent them. There should be an emergency gardener we could call out to identify homes for them in the garden, bring some pots, and do some urgent planting out.

I'm a fan of Neil Gaiman 's writing, both novels and shorter format work, although I've never managed to get into his comic books. Stardust has now been made into a film, and comes out in the US next month, and the UK sometime in the autumn. There's always a slight worry when magical and beautifully described books appear in film, but the TV spot for Stardust looks promising, and Gaiman seems happy with it too. I'm looking forward to the release.

Today a few dozen bikes rode in formation into Cambridge to mark Bike to Work Day. I was on the back of one of them. The police were there too to tell everyone what to do. The riders got free high visibility jackets with various slogans to encourage people to bike, "Fed up of traffic?", "I'll get there before you" and so on, along with a URL: http://takeyourbiketestnow.com . The bike test is changing, and so if you are thinking of learning, now is the time.

On Sunday we saw the current Harry Potter film, which was quite enjoyable, although perhaps less strong than the storyline of the book; the necessary trimming to fit within a feature length removed some of the subtleties of the plot. There was less showing the strength and potential of Neville than I would have liked, for example; and although the London flight scenes were lovely, whatever happened to stealth? Moody would surely have disapproved of buzzing tourist boats... I'm looking forward to the final book, although I fear my pre-order (from what a friend splendidly calls WarlikeSingleBosomedLadyDotCom) may arrive in a place where I am not, delaying my reading by a day or so. I don't expect stunning writing, but at least a rollicking storyline. Last weekend we went camping on the bike ; we managed to take all the usual stuff, and there was still plenty of space for me on the back. On Thursday we visited the former Millennium Dome, the interior of which is a pedestrian boule...

I spent most of yesterday at a secondary school in central Cambridge, explaining the world of engineering and work to a large group of 14 year olds. We spent most of the day examining bridges - what factors have to be considered, what kinds of structure are strong and why, how you can model a bridge using computer aided design (CAD) tools on a PC, and how you can build a bridge from spaghetti if you try hard enough. I was impressed by the computer suite, which had enough PCs that each teenager had their own. Quite a few of them got the hang of the software quickly and were designing and testing their bridge ideas without help. Others struggled, particularly with starting afresh with a new bridge design. As I explained the process (click to open the File menu, then either Save your current design or click New Design to start again) I realised that in some cases the problem was not unfamiliarity with the Windows paradigm, but that some of the teenagers couldn't read . This startled m...