The Laptop is dead, long live the Laptop

Not so much dead as stolen. I arrived back from Aikido via the supermarket to find my front door only half-locked and at he same time noticed what looked like a note in the hallway with the word POLICE clearly visible. I began to have a suspicion that I was in for an unpleasant surprise.

I got in quickly, dropped to bags I was holding on the floor and began to investigate, it didn't take long, the laptop was gone. The nest thing I notice the shocking large amount of glass scattered on the floor next to the window (so much for window locks) and a large piece of wood across one half of the window.

I quickly checked the rest of the room, TV, check, DVD player, check, Ipod, check, Leather Jacket, check, GPS tracker, check, man-eating carnivorous attack plant... damn it, I keep forgetting to grow one of those.

My desire to push a red button, albeit a small one, preferable communicating to a collar around the thief's neck, was growing steadily.

So I contacted the police and reported my laptop stolen, and then my paranoia set it. If the theif had seen the other things in the house. TV, DVD player etc might they not be back later to get the rest.

I moved the filing cabinet in front of the window that had been broken into, and then placed the laser printer on top of it for good measure. I then decided that that was insufficient, and moved a sideboard and placed it in front of the window, blocking it entirely. Then I placed the laser printer back on top for good measure. At the very least anyone coming it should make enough noise the wake me up.

Emotionally and physically exhausted I knew that I was not going to get to sleep that night, so I made myself a cup of coffee and pulled out a good book and decided to maintain my vigil.

Fortunately there have been no further incident, though a burglar alarm is to be installed.

But this dos mean that Lucifer is now gone, lost to the world, though I hope that his BIOS password has caused the thief some inconvenience.

Fortunately Endsleigh have come though and provided me with a brand new laptop, Azazel.

Az has
Intel core duo processors @ 2.4 Ghz each
4 Gig Ram
ATI mobility Radeon 3400 series
and a 320 GB hard drive,

as well as a host of built in extras like a HDMI port, built in blue tooth and integrated webcam and microphone.

I hope now that I have a working PC I will return to blogging.

Keep reading,

Cheers

Salt bread and more!

So I have finally managed to make some salt-bread. I made a batch last Saturday following a new recipe.

2 lbs white bread flour
3 oz sugar
3/8 oz salt
1/4 oz shortening
2 7g packages of yeast
1 pint water (approx)

Kneed into a stiff dough, set to rise until doubled in size. Punch down and form in to about 12 rolls and allow to rise until doubled in size then bake in a 200 C oven for 15-20 min.

I also tried to make what I would call a health cob. There was a company called Zephrins in Barbados that used to make a health cob and this was an attempt to re-create that recipe.

2 cups whole wheat flour
2 cups white bread flour
2 tsp salt
2 7g packages yeast
3/4 cup scalded milk
1/4 cup warm water
1 tbs golden syrup
1 tbs black treacle
1 tbs malt extract
1 cup raisins

This recipe may have benefited from a bit more flour as the dough spread quite a lot during the second rise. Alternatively I may try to do the second rise in a bowl and turn it out for baking. But this recipe is defiantly a keeper, it turned out to be a wonderfully rich loaf, excellent with a little butter.

PS. I recommend mixing the molasses, syrup and malt into the milk, I think it makes mixing easier.

Cultural Activities

One of the things that I continual promise myself to do is to go into London and participate in some of the cultural offerings while it was on my door step. So when my friend V. invited me to see a play called Amazonia at the Young Vic I decided to attend.

Now a day trip in to London is always an expensive venture, £14 for a train ticket and subway pass, and probably another £15 on food, if you are eating cheap, before you have even done anything. Fortunately there are lots of free things too see and do in London as well. So, in order to make the most of the visit I decided to visit the Natural History Museum and the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.

We arrived at the Natural History Museum (NHM) and the place was mobbed, and if a group of people could be described as a 'sea' then this one had lots of ripples, that is, children. We made our way inside amide the chaos and confusion, looking for the photo exhibit. There is a long queue that looks like it is heading towards where the photo exhibit is, but as we get closer we realize this is the queue for the dinosaur exhibit. We arrive a the photo exhibit to find that there is a timed entrance, we are lucky and there are some tickets still available for the current entry period!

Once inside I am immediately disappointed. The photos are displayed on digital screens. This just doesn't seem right to me and with 90% of the photo available to be viewed online, I wonder if it was really worth it to go through the effort to see it in an over-crowded room. However, once I got over the disappointment of not have actual prints to look at I could appreciate that some of the photos were absolutely stunning.

Here are my favourites from those available online: Best bird , plants one, two (yes I know fungi aren't plants but the NHM doesn't seem to), three and four (look at the drop on the leaf), and seascapes one and two and a few others.

So after the photos we has some time to kill and wandered about the NHM until we came to the comparatively peacefully and quiet rock and gem collection, which did have some magnificent specimens as well as the vault, where I saw some of the most singularly valuable rocks I have ever seen.

We left the NHM about four and made our way to the Young Vic to pick up tickets and find a nearby place for dinner. We got our tickets and were recommended and excellent Turkish restaurant by one of V.'s friends.

Finally it was time for the show and we all filled in the Young Vic, the first interesting this was that the audience completely surrounded the stage, and it was a quite small space, lending itself to a more intimate air. The play itself was very much a mixed bag, the writing was poor and the story development left a lot to be desired, but some of the individual performance were quite good, given the material and the music was well performed. I particularly like the use that was made of a "pond" on stage from which, with an audience sprinkling splash, some of the actors would exit or enter the stage.

I think next I got into London I will have to do a little more research before hand, but there definitely will be a next time.

A New Year

Well it a New Year and I have started it well. I have received official notification that I will be acknowledged as a philosophiæ doctor, which is the Latin for Doctor of Philosophy or, loosely translated, a teacher of knowledge. So I now have to decide if I will use my new appellation of Dr. in my everyday life or do I reserve it for professional use only.

The next big thing is to get my graduate work visa so I can work in the UK and don't get kick out of the country at the end of the month!

The other accomplishment is I managed to run the three miles to the YMCA (albeit only at an average speed of 5.5 mph) with an extra 15 lb of weight on my back and then managed a regular aikido session. The next goal is to run three miles, do 2 to 3 hours of aikido and then run back home. I'll let you know when I manage that.

Viva - Done!

So its over... four years of work completed, and in the formal language of the university, I have been recommended for a PhD pending some minor alterations of my thesis.

Which translates to a pass! So I will soon officially by Dr.! I have a few minor changes to make to a few paragraphs and some typos to fix then it will be official!

HIV Cure! and Elixer of Youth found - Big Week in Science

With predictable exaggeration the press has hailed the curing of a man with HIV (or at least it suppression to undetectable levels for 22 months). Quite an achievement to be sure, but this is not going to save the world from HIV, so if you only read headlines you are going to be disappointed. For the cure they transplanted bone marrow from a man with a genetic resistance to HIV (about 1% of European descendants are effectively immune to HIV) into a man suffering from leukaemia and HIV, and two years later there is no sign of either disease.

This will not cure the masses of HIV. You need to find a compatibly bone marrow donor (a difficult task in itself) and that bone marrow donor needs to be from the 1% of the European descendent with natural immunity. So if you lucky and rich enough you might have a cure, otherwise tough. Interestingly there are sites (1) (2) offering to take you money and tell if you have these resistance genes, though how reliable these test might be is anybody's guess.

Well they have finally found it, a pill to restore youth! Well, not really, but it does appear to help our telomeres (telomeres are bits of our chromosome that are lost every time a cell divides, when you run out of telomeres bad things happen). The found this magic pill in a plant used in Chinese medicine, I suspect traditional Chinese doctor will be seeing more business (go Renata).

Other stories that caught my attention, mouth bactria make food tastier, and progress toward genetically engineered pigs that may produce organ that are accepted by our immune systems, reducing the chance of organ rejection.

New favorite song

I generally thing Coldplay has been a little too depressive, but I love this song.

Getting Techy

Victory! Not just in the US election but also in my attempt to setup a wireless network in my house.

Setting up a basic wireless network is not a hard task; SSIDs, encryption protocols and MAC address filtering are all fairly straight forward. But I was trying to do something exotic.

I had wireless network setup in the house, and I wanted to share a network printer wirelessly across the network. The simple solution would have been to buy a printer with a wireless card built-in. However all of the machines that came with wireless card were much higher spec, and therefore more expensive, than what was needed.

So I had a bright idea. I figured I could get a wireless access point, connect it the printer, and then bridge the two wireless networks, simple!

First I tried used the Netgear router (WRG 614 v5) and a Belkin Wireless G access point (AP). No joy, I could configure the wireless AP to join the router, but the router wasn't having any of it.
So then I tried a Netgear router and the Linksys WGR54 v 6 wireless router. No joy either. The I discovered that I simply could not do it. At least not with what I had, but then I discovered 3rd party firmware.

This was a revelation to me. Firmware is a computer program that is stored on your hardware device that tells it how to operate, and it had never occurred to me that I would be able to use someone else’s firmware a piece of hardware, but that is what these people have done. So I checked my Linksys router for compatibility, and after much apprehension about turning my router into a door-stop, I managed to install DD-WTR on my Linksys router. And it was a whole new world of functionality.

It had never occurred to me that router providers were deliberate neutering their products to reduce functionality to create an artificial features gradient for pricing purposes. I mean it obvious why they would do it, but I had naively assumed that the differences in functionality between routers was a product of more expensive components rather than simply being about the firmware loaded on to them.

After that it was fairly straight-forward to bridge the wireless networks and now I have finally been able to move the printer from in front of the television (where it need to be in order to be plugged into the router).

Yes they did!

After two disastrous election choices the citizens of the United States of America finally made a good choice. It is a historic moment, a black man elected to the presidency of the US of A, and certainly on that I had not expected to see for another twenty years.

It has not been easy for him to get his far, and I suspect it will only get harder from here on. The expectations of Obama are so high that he be hard-pressed not to disappoint. I wish him luck and await the announcements of who he will have in his cabinet.

Panic stations

I have a viva date! It is approximately one month from now. Just reading the email elevates my heart rate. Now I have to re-read my viva, again, mark all the typos I have noted, re-read critical papers, and prepare for a few hours of excruciating questioning on the last 4 years of my life.