And so peaceful until...

The blog has been quiet because my life has not been :)

No disasters, just constant piles of work. My work-in-progress is all about words and not stitches.

I've been away quite a bit this month (again, work):

But at least there's been travel knitting to keep me sane:

Growing Things - Part 2

Watering my plants today I saw my first tomatoes:

The flowers have been out on most of my chillis for a bit, but today was also the first time I spotted these little purple ones:

Office gardening seems to be working out considerably more successfully than garden gardening!

Growing Things

I recently switched desks in my office so that I could see out of the windows. One entire wall of our office is windows. With my new easy-reach windowsills, and a sudden interest in growing things (I think I've suddenly turned middle-aged), I've set about seeing what I can achieve.

First, my chilli's and a lone pepper (one of eight planted). These were first in and are the most recent plants to start looking like plants rather than just pots of soil. There's a slight chance that it's one chilli and a few peppers coming up, my labeling wasn't quite up to the job when I started planting.

One of a my Chillis?	A lone pepper?

Next, some sugar snap peas:

And finally, some very keen tomatoes:

There's a few more bits and bobs that haven't shown themselves yet, I look forward to introducing them when they do :)

An Interesting Array of Objects

As I sit here procrastinating, this struck me as quite an interesting arrangement of objects:

This is the base of my shiny Apple work monitor and is typically used as a store for small objects that I want to know where they are. It currently contains:

• Post-it bookmarks - I read hefty programming tomes rarely, but when I do these are an essential I *love* them. I was first introduced to them by my dad and quickly adopted them for myself. This particular set came from Amazon.
• A bottle top - I drink too much (water) to be constantly hopping up to top up my mug so have a 2 litre bottle within arms reach at all times. I'm not totally sure why I keep the top since I don't think I ever use them, just in case I guess.
• Nail file - I bite my nails, then I regret it and file them tidy again.
• A Swiss franc - I'm off to Switzerland for a conference later this month.
• A lady bug - I was given one of these in a German lesson last term because they're apparently significant and represent good luck. I lost mine immediately but then later found one by a bus stop - lucky me!
• Four paper clips - I thought I would use these as part of my thesis reading organisation... they're still there.
• Three sewing needles - this is perhaps overkill for work! There's normally only one but I brought one in on Wednesday for the Calorimetry and also took one out of my purse the same day; some tidying up required!
• iPod Nano - this is my running iPod. I really must go for a run this week! I was doing really well with the Couch25K for a while and then have basically stopped at week 7. Every week (or so) I squeeze in one more week 7 run but never progress. Whoops!

Now, back to some thesis?

In the Spinning Pool

Last week was Freshers Week (or Intro Week if you like to use its posh, non-exclusive name): during this Week annually it seems that, on a University campus, anything goes.

For this reason, I brought my spinning wheel onto campus.

Despite the fact that I do really enjoy spinning (and I really like how productive spinning on the wheel feels), I could probably use my fingers to count how many times I've really sat down and spun since I bought the wheel last year. This is in no way a positive admission - it's pretty depressingly terrible. The primary excuse is to do with the quantity of time I actually spend in my house awake and not cooking, cleaning or tidying - it's a small amount, but perhaps not as small as I think.

Solution: spin somewhere that isn't at home.

And here's the result:

Almost three bobbins of bluey-green merino. I love the way the colour has worked out - the yarn itself will be heavier than originally intended and its closer to overspun than underspun (this is highly unusual for me but I just couldn't get this merino to slip though my fingers the way I was expecting).

Not too shabby at all - fingers crossed I'll finish it off and ply it later in the week.

A Thief in the Night

It was a busy week last week. In the strange world of academia deadlines are prophesied as long-distant events that will one-day come to pass. And so they stay, forever in the future, until... like a thief in the night the long-foreseen deadline is suddenly upon you and people are finally prepared to dedicate some moments of their precious time to writing a few words for that paper you hope to submit later in the week. *sigh*

Still, I've survived and I think I must now have caught up on the majority of sleep lost during those stressful evenings of no knitting and a lot of typing. And, thanks to Saturday's KnitCafe, I almost feel like I might have caught up with some of the knitting too....

1) The September Socks are all done bar the sewn bind off. They need a bit of blocking really to smooth out the tension down the sides a bit and I'm somewhat less excited about them than I was when I started them. I'm not sure what's changed, but they just don't quite sing for me the way I thought they might.

2) I have my first bit of potentially actually usable handspun. Just 15m of the stuff, but it's much more even than the previous attempts and I think it's also pretty balanced. Very, very happy with this.

This had spent a long time sat on the spindle waiting to be plied but I just never got around to it until I found this post on What I've Learned Along the Way. Really impressed with the effort gone to here in order to produce a really nice summary of all sorts of spindle spinning bits and bobs. Anyway, I watched the Andean Plying video by theartofmegan and, right then and there, decided it was time to ply.

My plan for this wee bit of yarn is to craft myself a wee lavender bag as stolen from Eskimimi who in turn stole it from Mooncalf (both very lovely blogs). I've got a big bag of lavender in my sewing pile so it sounds like the perfect combination.

3) My 'Summer Scarf', the Lace Ribbon Scarf from knitty is blocked. It's way too long I think, so I need to try it on and see if I want to rip some of it out or not. Also, it's wider at one end than the other (about 1.5" wider) - I guess it was worked over that period where my gauge was changing quite dramatically. Still, noone will know, and perhaps the flaws mean I shall have to keep it after all...

Perhaps I will finish some projects soon, it seems I have not yet learned the lesson about how increasing the number of things started has an impact on the size of the finishing pile :)

Disco Biva

This Saffy is traveling to Germany tomorrow for a week's worky-seminary-type stuff and fancied a companion. So, as she sorted through her geocaching goodies she put together an unused Travel Bug dog tag, and a disco ball keyring thereby creating...

The Disco Biva!
The Disco Biva can be spied on through his own special page at geocaching.com and perhaps soon may be spotted in a cache near you :)

University Challenge: Lancaster

Spent some time last week writing this:

University Challenge: Lancaster

This is (hopefully) the first in a series of geocaches about and near universities. I'm thinking the next one will be the nearby University of Cumbria but then maybe Warwick (although there are a number of caches there already) and/or Staffordshire (in Stoke) and/or Liverpool.

This cache gives you a collection of little facts about Lancaster University, each one accompanied by a simple question. The answer to each question can easily be found with a quick web search (there's nothing cryptic or difficult to find about the answers to these questions, if you're looking for that try slateman's cache Duchy of Lancaster - again it's all online, but not quite so easy!)

WIP: Infolab Baby Sweater

I always wondered who in their right mind thought that green and orange were two good colours to go together - and, in particular, why they felt the need to demonstrate their point in the design of our building:

(image from the InfoLab21 homepage)

It's green and orange, and slightly odd looking, and you can see it from the motorway.

And yet, when I came to think of things I wanted to do with my nice ball of green Araucania Ulmo, and when I'd finally settled on the seamless kimono baby sweater, and when I'd realised that my yardage was probably just on the short side, and I was shopping for a colour just to make up the yards and cover those edgings... what did I pick? Yes, that's right, I chose orange (Patons Linen Touch in Mandarin, should you be wondering).

(this lousy picture does the jumper no favours, I didn't think to take one until all the natural light had gone)

It's not there yet and the orange still looks awfully bright to me, but I'm sort of hoping that once the sleeve edgings and i-cord are in too then it'll just look crisp. Crisp, not too bright, but nice defining edges. Fingers crossed.

:s

Can you tell I'm still not sure about this one? They did go better before I knit them up I'm sure.

JISC Study - PhD Blogging

Another JISC post, they've not asked for anything specific from us since last time but I felt like I really should be posting something (and also, I've not got much else going yet):

---

One method I find useful for keeping up with things happening in my research area is to watch the blogs of researchers I know are working on similar projects. For example, this week I've had a bit of free time just to read some papers - looking through recent posts on the blog of someone I've encountered at conferences, I found some papers he was recommending for a summer school and read those.

---

Sounds a bit trite really. Oh well.

JISC Study - PhD blogging

As a PhD student beginning in 2008 or 2009 and born somewhere between 1982 and 1994 I'm able to participate in a "groundbreaking 3-year study of the information-seeking and research behaviours of 'Generation Y' doctoral students". The Researchers of Tomorrow study is being commissioned by The British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee and is being conducted by Education for Change.

The study's only just got going and one of the things they've asked us to do is keep a blog on their site tracking out PhD and how we go through it. This week they've posted a specific blog request and I figured I'd copy my responses in here too. The post is possibly a bit grumpier than it needed to be, I hate not knowing what I'm doing (the lack of real things to do has been quite useful for progressing on Brownies and wedding stuff though).

This week’s blog request…

We are keen to hear more from you on where you are right now in your doctoral journey."

So where am I? I'm coming to the end of the first year of my PhD and at this precise moment it all seems a bit up in the air. During the year I've worked on two or three projects all, in some way, vaguely related to what my PhD topic might be or, at least, what we thought it was when I applied.

On the plus side, I've had one paper published, I've attended a conference, participated in a Summer Spring school for my area of research, and I've worked on a project at an internationally renowned university other than my own. On the not so good side, I don't quite know where I'm going...

"What stage in your research are you at currently? Can you select one of the following to describe your present activities?"

My present activities probably best fit under ideas generation, with a sprinkling of background work and some preparing and organising.¹

This particular week falls a bit into no man's land. I've just finished some work out in the US and we haven't yet worked out what's next now I'm back home (plus everyone's on holiday or going on holiday so there's not much chance of an immediate decision). Having spend the first half of the week frustrated, I think I'm going to spend the rest of today reading whatever papers I can find that might relate and that interest me - at least that should turn out to be sort of useful.¹

---

¹The full list of options was: ideas generation, background work, preparing and organising, analysing, writing or creating, dissemination of your research, none of these – please describe.

²Some of the papers I plan to read have been pulled from recent posts on Albrecht's blog, particularly this post about his Summer school reading.

Roboceptionist

So, today's CMU special is... Tank the Roboceptionist! Went to lunch today with Jan, Ben and Adam and we left the building by a different route to the one I've been using. Dropping below the ground level (which is at floor 5) to the fourth floor we went out through Newell-Simon Hall which contains, amongst other things, the Robotics Institute. As we left the Newell-Simon we passed Tank - a robotic receptionist. Too cool to stop as we walked by to get lunch I wandered back out that way later on when I went to the Office of International Education's Open House afternoon. Here are a couple of photos of Tank at work:



Interestingly, as I explored a bit more closely I spotted a computer screen inside Tank's booth that was displaying user interface content I wouldn't have expected to see. I didn't get a photo of that but I did take this one of what I saw next...


OK, so the girl probably doesn't hide there all the time but it did make me laugh. A robotic receptionist connected to a Windows PC connected to a human student :) Sadly the photo of the hiding girl really isn't that good - my flash went off unexpectedly which made it difficult to catch her unawares a second time.

First Day at CMU

So, today was my first full day in Pittsburgh and my first day at Carnegie Mellon. The weather is a bit like Lancaster only more changeable. A colleague Jan described it as binary weather - everywhere else has two bits (four possible values) to describe the weather through the year whilst Pittsburgh has only one (two possible values). Though Spring and Fall the weather apparently just switches really quickly between Summer and Winter. Today certainly it's been partly warm (but grey) and muggy, and partly torrential rain. It's not been especially cold though so I think tomorrow I may leave the coat behind.

Here's a generic campus picture taken as I ate my lunch on the grass outside. I was surprised how busy campus got at roughly lunchtime, it had been much quieter as I passed through at 9am. By 1pm there was a BBQ, some volleyball and some lacrosse going on in addition to those folks just enjoying lunch or study outside.


I had a bit of a wander round in my lunchtime, mostly in the University Center. Managed to find the bookstore (which doesn't sell as many books as you might think), art store, post office, food court (no, really), FedEx, the games room, prayer room and probably some other stuff.

The campus seems to have a few cool little structures and other quirks, here's the first one I spotted today:


This is the Mobot Slalom Course used for an annual mobot (mobile robot) race. The record robot for this year finished in just over 30 seconds:


I left CMU at around 4pm feeling pretty sleepy but woke up a little outside. Having got back to my suite at the Shadyside Inn I figured I ought to go and buy some food somewhere so I was in a position to do some sort of tea. Went to Giant Eagle on Centre Ave and bought myself some bread, veggies, rice, butter, sandwich meat (bologna), crisps, granola, toothpaste, razors and shaving cream. That will do for now, but I did forget cooking oil so had to cook my stir-fried veggies in butter - oops. I also totally under-estimated how many veggies I wanted for tea, I think I was trying to compensate for the fact that I normally go way over :) Perhaps I can blame it on the strangeness of cooking for myself when I'm now fairly used to cooking for two (including one with a 'man' appetite).

And now it's 21:10 here in the US and gone 2am in the UK so I am definately close to my staying awake limit. Time to wash-up and then sleep.

That Christmas Feeling

I'm not really feeling Christmassy as such yet, but what I am feeling is this strange reluctance to do any work at all. It's like the week has become one big Friday. It's a good job I've accepted that I'm not going to get anything really useful done next week!

So, what am I not interested in doing today? Today's work is to read some stuff from Protecting Study Volunteers in Research... I'd rather be reading Twilight (and I am occasionally!)

Vampires or US Legislation, which is more exciting?

Timing is Everything

Today we've been into town to do some Christmas shopping. Well we went and I shopped. We get home and I'm wrapping presents when Hobnob announces that we should have crackers for the LuBBs curry tomorrow - why did this not occur to him earlier? Also he's forgotten to buy a present for his godson.

So now we must go shopping tomorrow.

No Plastic? Fantastic!

With the title ripped shamelessly from one of the described blogs :)

I picked up a couple of blogs from a university mailout today. Subtext is an independent university email which I occasionally stretch to reading all of. Somewhere at the bottom of this last one (that link currently sends you to 34 but I assume 43 will be uploaded shortly) were links to the blogs of two students, Rose and Ele, who had been pursuing life without any plastic. I've come across this idea before somewhere and I do think it's a great one, just a shame it's so hard to do at the moment. Whilst I'm not quite sure I'm adventurous enough to take this challenge on myself it does prompt some thought as to how much more effort I *could* be putting in to these things. I know that as time passes we all get better at reducing, reusing and recycling and yet I also know that there's far too much stuff that gets taken and binned just because not doing so is a little bit more thought or work. (That said, I'm still not sure on the whole Mooncup thing - maybe I'll ask Becky one day :))

Also, I think I know Rose (which is what drove me to look at the blog in the first place).

Maths Puzzle

The following puzzle was posted on one of the departmental forums...

ABCDEF x G=BCDEFA

We know that:

ABCDEF is even
G is odd
All are different digits

Being as it's the computing department a few people have brute forced this but, given that I'm ill today, I thought I'd have a go at solving it properly - and succeeded!

Here goes....

1) For ABCDEF to be even, F must be even.

2) Even x odd = even so BCDEFA must be even, so A is even.

3) All are different digits so ABCDEF can't be equal to BCDEFA, so G does not equal 1.

4) ABCDEF has the same number of digits as BCDEFA so, A x G must be less than 10.

5) Possible options for A and G are: A ∈ {0, 2, 4, 6, 8}, G ∈ {3, 5, 7, 9}. Given that found in 4), A must be in {0, 2} as 3x4=12. Including a leading zero is rather unlikely, so A = 2.

6) Given 5) and 4), G = 3. So now we have:
2BCDEF
x 3
-----------
BCDEF2
------------

7) 3 x F ends in 2, given that F is even, 3 x F ∈ {0, 12, 18, 24}. F must be 4. So now we have:
2BCDE4
x 3
-----------
BCDE42
------------

8) (3 x E)+1 ends in 4, so 3 x E ends in 3. E can be either odd or even so 3 x E ∈ {0, 3, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27}, therefore E = 1.
2BCD14
x 3
-----------
BCD142
------------

9) 3xD ends in 1. D can be odd or even so 3 x D ∈ {0, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27}, therefore D = 7.
2BC714
x 3
-----------
BC7142
------------

10) (3 x C)+2 ends in 7, so 3 x C ends in 5. C can be either odd or even so 3 x C ∈ {0, 15, 18, 24, 27}, therefore C = 5.
2B5714
x 3
-----------
B57142
------------

11) (3xB)+1 ends in 5, so 3 x B ends in 4. B can be odd or even so 3 x B ∈ {0, 18, 24, 27}, therefore B = 8.
285714
x 3
-----------
857142
------------

Note, once I'd got A and G I did initially start by trying to solve this from the other side as follows (I quickly realised that I'd got the wrong end!):

7) The value of B must be at least 6 (AxG plus any carry over values). Therefore, B ∈ {6, 7, 8, 9}.

8) Given that 3 x B ∈ {18, 21, 24, 27}, some carry over value will be applied so the value of B must be greater than 6. Therefore, B ∈ {7, 8, 9} and 3 x B ∈ {21, 24, 27}.

9) Given 8), the carry over must be 2. So B is greater than or equal to 8, B ∈ {8, 9}. (Note, the obvious thing to do here is say that B ∈ 8, but it's possible for B to equal 9... take for example the value 298145 x 3 = 917435).

Wizard of Oz

I've just been doing a very quick bit of research into the Wizard of Oz approach to usability studies (by which I mean checking it meant what I thought it did) and somehow ended up at Wikipedia's page on Political Interpretions of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I have a feeling I've seen some of this before and promptly forgotten it all, but it's amazing that:

1) People can draw so much out of all these things. Whether it's on religious grounds or political it seems that something like this exists for almost any kids story, classical novel or well-known film (and probably some lesser known ones too). Maybe I'll have to go looking for some more but there's always the classic Lord of the Rings religious arguments :) Even on the poetry front I sometimes have to wonder how much of the subtleties and double meanings were *really* intended and how many just worked out that way - did people really write all those GCSE anthology poems with so many meanings?

2) That people can contribute so many details to Wikipedia :) It's strangely addictive.

Six down...

Finally finished chapter six of my dissertation leaving me just the conculsion to go!

Actually, that's not quite true. My evaluation is all good until I get to results where there is a single sentence saying that there isn't any. I'd like to try and get in at least one really.

And I never did look at Tiny OS.

*sigh*

Standard Deviation in a Single Pass - Hurrah!

Amazingly I got from a Google search for "standard deviation on the fly", round a few twists and turns, to...

Calculate standard deviation in one pass

Exactly what I was looking for!