HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAUD MARIE!

One year young today! Thank you Maud Marie for bringing us all so much fun over the past 365 days. Many happy returns! Lots of love, Uncle Tim x x x

Ubuntu is the future...

For a bit of fun, when I moved down to Southampton I took the old PC that was sitting in Mum's garage. I needed a bit of a pet project to see if it still worked and if it could function as a useful object in my new place. Basically I thought it might work as a glorified Hi-fi if I could plug in my external harddrive that contains all my music. Anything else would be a bonus. It had a CD reading drive (that sounded someone blending a handful of nuts and bolts), no USB2.0, and no ethernet, so fairly useless. I managed to install Windows XP (which was a struggle) to find out that it would not recognise the disk format (Mac) anyway. Add to this that it would not work with my ADSL modem via USB and you end up with a huge waste of time.

This was all around the time that the new and "fantastic" Windows Vista was being released. I begin to devour the trouncing in the media that it received with glee. People have been waiting months (if not years) for its official release so that they can get their sticky little hands on all the new features. Well, as far as I can see it has a moderately fancy new look, a heap load more security features to block out all those nasty viruses and an indexed search facility similar to Spotlight in Mac or Google Desktop. Wow! And all this will probably require 2 or 3 times more RAM and Ghz than you had before and it ONLY costs between £200 or £350 depending on how much of this new fantastic stuff you can possibly live without. Well I hereby declare that unless forced by my employer, or through some catastrophic chain of cosmic events, I will NEVER purchase a Windows operating system again in my life. Ever!

So I was reading some Vista-hating blog and the guy was saying "Anyone with half a brain is going to be using Linux. Its free and functional." Not being a total geek, I always assumed that Linux was reserved for the IT professionals only. How wrong I was. A little research and a 30 minute download later and I had the latest Linux operating system Ubuntu burned onto a CD. Slip it in the drive of this old PC. Reboot and off it goes.

Ubuntu is all the free and functional philosophy of Linux, packaged in a beautiful and easy to use geek-free way. The tagline for this software is "Linux for Human Beings" which I think is a good way to put it. To my delight, after the short installation, the graphics and navigation through the system are smooth and intuitive, and everything JUST WORKS! USB modem: no problem, on the net within seconds. Cant it read my Mac formatted harddrive? Of course.. im surprised you even needed to ask (I imagine it saying??)!

Just like Windows or Mac, everything is completely customisable, so I might lose the pooh brown themed that it loads with for something a bit cheerier, but ultimately this system has endless possibilities, and they are all FREE!

Keeping up with the bloggers...

Well everyone is posting these pictures... so I'd better try and keep up!

Unfortunately, Southampton does not have a spectacular array of webcams... in fact, they are very poorly located. It says that its supposed to look like this...


But currently, we have this to look at...


Thankfully, round the corner in Portsmouth they have built the lovely Spinnaker Tower, which is worth pointing a camera at. This is the view today... quite clear and blue but still only +7 degrees.

Window on the world...

Im a couple of weeks into work now and I suppose you might be wondering what I actually get up to. Below are a taster of what I get to look at... bacterial scunge.


This picture 100 times magnified and shows the edge of the flow cell at the bottom of the picture and above the line half way up the picture are the bacteria growing on the surface of the glass.




I have zoomed in (400x) on some of those bacteria, who in this flow cell, like to grow in clusters. These are big groups of bacteria all growing quite quickly in this ball like structure... we dont really know why they do this yet.




This picture is looking at one individual colony of cells, 1000x normal size. You can see the individual cells. This is a seething mass of bacteria all jostling about and slithering around... its very cool to watch!

Hopefully soon... VIDEO of these little guys....
(look I know it's not as exciting as Maud on a sledge but I have limited "cute" subject matter)