No.6 Trip

I was up north this weekend, as Mum and I had decided to do a trip down to No. 6. I flew up from Southampton on the Saturday morning and met Mum at the airport, then we headed straight for Great Grandma Williams (or Nanna if you prefer) in Rhos. Had a lovely lunch out in the bistro round the corner and then headed off in the afternoon on to our final destination. The pictures are from Sunday morning at Penmon Point. The Black Point Lighthouse has a constantly chiming bell, probably to warn of the dangerous passage between Anglesea and Puffin Island, as I don't think it is just for effect.

Grandma's Pictures

Hello everyone, just downloading a few shots of our trip to No.6 and found Grandma's happy snaps from Maud's birthday weekend. As always ultra cute poses and tiaras on show. Looks like one of the first attempts at eating cake was a bit wobbly... but I'm sure with a bit more practice that will be ironed out. Mmmm... cake!

New trip planned!

Woohoo... no pictures in this post but just to announce my new ticker above that is counting down the days until our next Oslo trip. I will be testing the transport connections from Southampton to OSL via Heathrow for the first time, and meeting up with Mum at the airport at the other side all being well. We are taking full advantage of the May bank holiday weekend which occurs in both the UK and Norway which is handy. It will be May before you know it!

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)

How a flow cell works...

Over the next few years I am going to be studying how my bacterium Pseudomonas grows whilst it is attached to surfaces (a biofilm) and the underlying genetics of it all. Flow cells allow us to watch biofilms grow in real time and observe how changes in the bacterium affect it. This may help us devise better treatments for people with infections or prevent bacteria causing problems in the world of industry.

I thought I would introduce you to the flow cell and how it works. This is probably as close as you are going to get to bubbling coloured flasks and test tubes like in the movies. The Flow Cell model we are using is going to be the basis of a lot of my future work and is a very nice system.


These bottles hold a dilute nutrient solution that my bacteria are going to live in and feed off. The tubes are all sterile and lead to....
.... the pump, which slowly draws out the fluid at about 5 millilitres per hour. This leads to....
The flow cell itself. Fluid is being pumped in on the left and out on the right. Lots of acrylic, silicone and PTFE tape ensure there are no leaks through the three channels that are covered by a thin glass coverslip. We can then inject a few bacteria into the flowcell and watch them grow on the glass by putting the whole thing under the microscope. To end the journey, the fluid then flows out of the flow cell and into...

... the waste container. And finally....

This is where the bacteria go to die. Our very own fancy autoclave that heats up under pressure to kill all the bacteria so we can throw them away.

More pictures of my little bacteria under the microscope to follow soon...

Tour of the lab...

For all those interested I will do a few photos of my new workplace so you can imagine me in my labcoat (no photos of that yet) at work. No bubbling flasks of coloured liquid like in the films but that can be arranged and you can be assured I will take pictures and video.


Front Door to our lab. Got to have the appropriate signs to warn people of the dangers inside!


Its only a small lab with one main bench. This is the side with our biofilm flow cell setup.


Close up of the flow cell system.
Our lovely new compound microscope and imaging system.
The other side of the bench. This will be "my space" as there is really no one else working here apart from a couple of undergraduate students.

My empty flat...

Hello all, well its been nearly a week in my new place and I have only just got to doing the blog. Not internet at home until my 24Mbs broadband is activated on the 23rd. As you can see it is clean, neat and EMPTY! Not quite the "Hello" magazine spread of photos that I had originally hoped to publish of my house, but hey, we all got to start somewhere. I will begin the slow process of acquiring a sofa and a table in the near future, and some shelves for the bathroom. I will update my photos in the near future and show you the difference. My TV was my best purchase yet from Ebay. £41 for a 28" widescreen TV with a stand and free freeview box! Perfect! The guy was so keen to get rid of it he even brought it round to my place which was a 60 mile roundtrip for him! What a very nice man. This all meant that within 2 hours of getting the keys I was at least setup with a telly and would only have to contend with sitting on the floor to watch it.

Southampton Water (from the sky)!

Well my adventure down in Southampton has begun. A quick flight from Manchester (only 35 minutes in the air) and you are there for a measly £25 if you book ahead. Only slight hiccup was when I though they lost my suitcase, but thankfully they had just left it on the tarmac on its lonesome. The airport is a bit small compared to what I'm used to so it was a bit unnerving to watch the baggage guys unload their truck one by one until all were collected and mine still wasnt there. Despite their dubious baggage handling skills, it's much nicer not to have to battle through miles of corridors and millions of people to get anywhere.

This is the view from my £15 a night Travelodge window. Very grey today and very wet. I spent Friday afternoon and Saturday morning trudging the streets to find an apartment ASAP. Not knowing anyone down here, or the areas very well this is a fairly daunting task requiring a certain amount of perseverance and a lot of luck.

So initially I checked out all the apartments I could that were in my preferred price range and budget, and soon realised that I needed to reassess the aforementioned budget rather rapidly. As with most things in life you really do get what you pay for. I have no idea why I thought this would be any different in the Southampton property market. I have discovered that the crafty student of Soton come find their accommodation in January that they want to move into in September! Rather more advanced planning and forethought than any student I ever met. Anyway the upshot of that is that estate agents are crammed with scruffy students trying to get a 10 bedroom 1 bathroom house for £20 a week.

To cut a long and boring story short, the only property (out of ten that I saw) that was worth considering living in was the one I put a deposit down on this afternoon. The two big hopefuls I had reserved to see last were snapped up before I even got to see them. The property I liked was close to town, not far from university, and lots of nice little shops, bars and restaurants. It seems too good to be true which makes me nervous, but screwing my courage to its sticking place I marched to the estate agents with my deposit before anyone beat me to it. I will find out on Monday, but all being well I should have the keys next Saturday. The flat is in the picture below and I will be on the top floor on the right hand side. Its 1 bed, furnished with sofas and a bed and wardrobe, washing machine and fridge, so pretty much all I need to start with.




This is the street round the corner with one of my nearest pubs. There are lots of places that look nice to eat, so I will have plenty of options and will not starve or go thirsty.

Apart from the very wet start to my Southampton adventure (my jeans and shoes are currently drying on the radiator) it seems like everything will start out OK and carry on the same. I can now look forward to my first day at work and all the new challenges and exciting opportunities that will present. More updates on that soon... TTFN.

Latest snaps of movie star Maud

After the hustle and bustle of a hectic filming schedule on the run up to Christmas, the movie star Maud (from her recent debut feature movie: Lunch with Maud) has escaped Oslo to her secret UK retreat away from the papps and tabloids. In a strange quirk of life imitating art we managed to get these snaps of Maud gobbling down more bread with pate... we think she must have got a real taste for it after doing so many takes of that scene for the movie.

The food available to Maud's entourage at this UK hideaway is second to none! New Years Day breakfast of a proper bacon and egg breakfast with bucks fizz! (This beverage accompaniment to brunch ties in nicely with Uncle Tim's NY resolution to have more fun).


Bread and pate preparation just as Maud likes it.

Grandma with Maud in one of her many beautiful pink ensembles...






And Maud pulling funny faces at the kitchen door....