This weekend we went to the whisky show in London, and it was goooood. It was an all-in day ticket that gave us all the free samples we could drink from all the stands, as well as a few nice extras. As part of our tickets we got to have some ‘dream drams’, these are some very nice (read as rare/expensive) tipples to tickle our taste-buds. We wanted to go for the Bowmore 1964 White, but alas it was all gone when we got to the stand. Gutted. Still, the Auchentoshan 1957 went some way to counter my disappointment.

One of the things that got my gastronomic seal of approval was the food pairings with different whiskies. One of their tasters had gone to Borough market and bought some nice nibbles (cheese, sausage, chutney, chocolate etc) and matched them to various whiskies. It really highlighted some of the different aspects of whiskies that I know well, bringing out an almost new flavour to them.

I tried to scribble down the whiskies I tried on the train on the way home and I got a respectable list, there are at least two or three more that I can’t remember the name of.

• Caol Ila Moch
• Caol Ila 25yo
• Lagavulin Distillers edition 1995
• Port Askaig 30yo
• Amrut intermediate sherry matured
• Glengoyne 40yo
• Auchentoshan 1957 (50yo)
• Jameson Vintage
• Bunnahabhain 25yo
• Bunnahabhain 30yo
• Hakushu Bourbon barrel
• Springbank 18yo
• Bowmore 21yo
• TWE Port Ellen x2
• TWE Springbank
• Whisky society Bruichladdich
• Ardbeg 10yo
• Craggenmore 12yo
• Amrut
• Aberlour 10yo
• Caol Ila 12yo
• Mortlach 32yo Cask strength
• Balvenie 12yo
• Mackmyra first edition

I think I shall definitely be making an annual pilgrimage to this!

I don’t usually talk about emotional stuff on our blog but needed to vent somewhere.  Our friend, Echo, who had been fighting leukaemia sadly passed away on 19th May, she was just 29 years old. We found out whilst on holiday for my birthday which kind of put a damper on things 🙁

Olly and I only knew Echo for ~ 2 years, since we moved to Leicester and I started in the chemistry department. Echo was a PhD student in Chemistry but in a different research group to myself. A testament to her strength of character is that she left her home country (China) to come to the UK to pursue her PhD, and was writing up her thesis when she found out she was ill.

Echo was a positive, quirky person, always making everyone laugh and smile.   She would come out with some of the funniest things….. such as asking whether Olly’s pot-belly was real or whether it was a fake belly!!!!!!! Even the last time we spoke we were laughing about how she had taken up knitting as a hobby in the hospital.

Below are some of my favourite pictures of that I have of Echo that capture her cheeky fun loving ways.  Rest in peace. xxx

Gorgeous chemistry girls all dressed up for my 28th bday

Alan disrupts things and makes everyone laugh!

We eventually managed to convince Echo that apple bobbing was a great British tradition.... she had a go at it!

Echo as Chun-Li from streetfighter!

Echo's alcohol tolerance was never much!

Echo and Archie in the office

As you may or may not notice I have rewritten my entire website. Given that the old version was written when I was just learning HTML4 about six years ago I figured it was time for a bit of an update. It’s also given me a chance to have a play with some of the new HTML5 and CSS3 features as well as move a few things around. Notibly I moved the holidays pages to a blog category – there was starting to be too many.

In terms of the HTML5 stuff, I have employed the new structural tags <header>, <nav>, <footer> for now, with the likes of <section> to follow soon. One of the more noticable things is the use of the new <video> tag, in using this I am slowly converting all my video to Ogg Theora. This does mean that I am not supporting IE in the first instance, I may or may not get around to fixing it someone asks me nicely.

There’s a few other HTML5 bits and pieces around, my favourite may be the new <form> behaviour. They have rewritten it so you can upload many files at once and a lot of the validation of user input is done on-the-fly. I have a nice CMS that I use to manage my photos now with all these implemented 🙂

Obviously there is a nice sprinkling of CSS3 styles around which will work in modern browsers – even IE (if you are using IE9 and have compatibility mode turned off that is).

Let me know if you have any problems with the new style (things not displaying properly etc).

It just occurred to me that I have been in my new job for almost a month and not really told anyone what it is about, so here goes.

I am still at Leicester – I got ‘redeployed’ at the last minute as I am awesome and they couldn’t bear the thought of me leaving. I now work in the research computing support team in IT services. Like all my jobs it is split into a couple of different roles, although this time it is more of an equal split. First of all I am working in the HALOGEN project. This aims to bring together a collection of different spatial data-sets and allow correlations to be found between them, hopefully in the guise of a web front end that can do all sorts of pretty plotting etc. In that sense it is very similar to the work I have done in the past with the astronomy data sets.

The second aspect of the job is to help the RCS guys deploy their new LAMP stack to users. This means that I am going to have to deal with people, shudder.

It’s a fairly short term position, but at least it will keep me off the streets for a while.

So my WASP public archive paper has been accepted and is the highlight of this weeks issue of A&A 🙂 You can see it on the A&A website.

So Becca and I have finally finished our Ph.D.s. We have the certificates, the photos and the scars. All that is left to do now is bask in our own smugness and get some leather bound copies of our thesis made up. If you are really bored you can read my thesis. One day I will upload Becca’s thesis too 🙂

And so another N.A.M. has ended – I am writing this on the long train journey home. Luckily I booked my seat long before Eyjafjallajokull started to stir, and ground all the planes (unlike many that could not make it, or get back). The N.A.M. was at Glasgow University, close to the centre of the city, the university is an ancient one with many pretty old buildings that look like they belong in a work of fiction.

My main reason for coming to the N.A.M. was the launch of the SuperWASP public archive. I have been working on this for around a year now, and on Monday it was officially let loose on the public. This first data release has 14 billion data points and over 3.5 million images now available to be queried and downloaded. The general consensus among the people I spoke to about it was that it will be a very useful resource. The trouble I am having is that it is rather difficult to get people excited about an astronomical data base, and then getting them to tell their friends!

As ever with N.A.M.s there was a wide range of sessions to go to, one that I particularly enjoyed was the software astronomy session. In it the chair introduced the term astroinformaticsto me as a way of describing what it is that I do – a much sexier title than archive scientist me thinks 🙂

As you would expect there were a few people rather irate at the open forum which had representatives from the funding councils. One poor guy told us how he had his three year post-doc ended one year in, with one months notice, due to the current funding issues. Needless to say, this is precisely why more and more of my friends are moving abroad.

Besides the conference I did get to do some other stuff – mainly revolving around drinking of some description. The conference dinner was in the Kelvingrive museum, which was pretty cool. And so it is that I am heading back to Leicester with a bottle of double matured lagavulin in my case, and a head full of new ideas…

So last week I handed in my thesis. Four years of toil and torment finished. In all it was 82,217 words, 303 pages, 151 figures and 27 tables. Although a fair whack of that was in the appendix, so it doesn’t really count.

I’ve been working as a post-doc for the last year, so I have been writing up in my spare time, that has not been a great deal of fun I have to admit. The odd thing now is that I don’t know what to do with my spare time, well actually it’s more that I am struggling to sit and do nothing! Ho hum, I am sure the apathy will kick in again when it can be bothered.

Just that pesky viva to think about now.

So we are enjoying our holiday out here in sunny Sri Lanka. And what makes it all the more nicer is to gloat about how nice it is here when you are all (by all I suspect I am just talking about my sister) busy working away 🙂

We stopped in a rather nice hotel when we arrived in Colombo, the kind of place where diplomats go to do diplomacy. Well I assume that is what they were doing. I should probably qualify diplomats – they were Canadian.

From Colombo we were picked up in our private tour car, which is to take us all around the island for a week, at stupid-o-clock in the morning. I can only assume that that translated into ridiculous-o-clock time in UK time that I was still living my life by.

First on our mammoth trip was the elephant sanctuary. It’s a nice place where orphaned elephants can go and be protected. So we sat in a restaurant and ate while the elephants were washed just below us, then off to the feeding place to see them munch.

From there we went up to Sigiriya which is an old palace complex that is in ruins now that they found a while back – proper Indiana Jones stylee. Much of it is on top of a very tall rock formation. As it happens there are lots of hornets nesting on the rocks, and the day before they had been getting angry and stinging people. So just as we were about to make it to the top one decided he didn’t like my leg and dug his stinger in. Now I just looked this up and hornets belong to the vindictiveus bastardus class of bugs – i.e. the ones that sting you that don’t die – so I hope he caught hay fever from me and sneezes his way into the path of a bus.

Today we went to a spice garden and saw lots of the local stuff they grow here – including cocaine. They also insisted on giving me a massage, and since I am always up for random men to rub my semi-naked body I thought I would give it a go – t’was nice. We also went to a batik factory and spent far too much money on cloth type things. From there we went to the temple that Buddha’s tooth is in.

Now we are in Kandy and tomorrow we will head out to see a tea plantation – hopefully I will get to try lots of different types…

I will upload some of the many photos when I get a chance – although something tells me that would take an age from this internet connection.

One of the nice things about being here is that people seem to think I am great! Several kids have said that I am beautiful – in fact at one of the religious monuments a bunch of school kids stopped looking at the statues and started staring at me. I could get used to this.

So our first paper from the Schome Park Pilot has been published! This one was based upon the initial data that we collected in our early days in Second Life. The basic jist of it is that Second Life works well for distance learning 🙂 If you are interested in what we did have a read of the paper. I image that this will be my only publication in an educational journal!