Last Friday I went to a meeting with two mentors from the Prince's Trust to talk to them about my business plans. I have been making websites and setting up blogs for people for a while now and I thought I should move forward with this and turn it into a proper business.
So I spent Thursday last week writing out my business plan which was a good thing to do anyway and made me realise how far ahead with things I actually am. The Prince's Trust was something that Flo initially told me about back before the pregnancy and I had been toying with the idea of starting a craft business but I got cuaght up a) being ill and b) blogging about the craft on Salaric Crafts but the blogging led to writing and that led to websites for people I met through writing and wham - here I am.
I think I have a niche and am excited though in some ways I wish it had all started to kick off last year (which it couldn't due to the flood) or that they had waited just a bit longer to get around to contacting me so that I wasn't in the middle of having to write essays on the formation of the moon and the such like.
I don't know if I can't get the financial help from them but even if I can't I want to have the business tutoring as I feel that will be most helpful.
The Prince's Trust help poeple under 30 set up their business's which is cool and hopefully will help me sort our lives out. Unfortunatly I am asking for just over the amount that you get without having to 'Go to Panel' . I need servers and I need to have them in a data centre so I am asking £2000 which is basically the servers etc.... my hardware costs :'( The panel is apparently something that looks like Dragons Den but they say they are friendlier - well they couldn't be less friendly could they!
They got excited about my 'mind map' that I had drawn in Jean's feltips for added colour in a typically me way - I thought it was a flow diagram and thought mind maps where what Carinia was calling the things she was drawing for her PhD stuff. So now I am wondering if mind maps is a sort of catch all for things I term: Brain storming, flow diagrams and spider diagrams.
I probably should investigate this at some point.
One of the things that I am having to do at the moment is heavily prioritize what I spend my time on and sadly this means that for the last two months I have done no art or craft but then this is my ultra busy term.
I have a list of homework from the Prince's Trust as well as from college but I am afraid playing with Jean still comes highest on my agender. She is being quiet mischevious at the moment as well - unfortunalty she has developed sciencetific method for finding out exactly what she can and can't get away with.
The funniest thing she does though is wait for me to get up from the laptop then she climbs into my seat and says, 'Can I do your work now Mummy?' and she sits just like Alaric poised to start a heavey programming session.
Well here I go again....
To join the world of the Blue Monster a new Gurgitation monster is on the loose, courtesy of me and my madness!
Presenting Red Monster's Blog!
http://red.monsters.wigglypets.co.uk/
Mum is being released from the hospital today - she still has one drain in but apparently the district nurse will come and see her to remove it.
Yesturday mum had her lymph nodes removed and as it is the second lot of surgery in a very short space of time so she was wiped. I tried to go and see her but stupidly I only had her mobile number which wasn't answering as they had mistaken her for someone else on the ward who had become dangerously ill.
I didn't know this - just that she wasn't answering but it wasn't going to voice mail or anything either so I panicked and thought that perhapse it was an old number or something - I nuked my phone a few months ago and reinstated my numbers from a piece of paper that was pre-gloucestershire move :/.
I then tried to phone dad but couldn't get out of him how to get to the hospital - I had also had the issue that no one had been able to get hold of Al and dad was a)locked out of the house, and b) going hypo as he needed his breakfast that was in the house - so via the phone I had to talk him into hitting the bedroom window with things in the vague hope of awakening the Alaric!
After that was sorted I tried phoning my brother but to no avail - this was mainly becuase being a muppet I was phoning the wronge David :/ I didn't actually have my brothers phone number in my phone :/
I then found that I didn't have my aunts number or anything - sigh.
Then to the latest faff of trying to get registered at college and of you knopw trying to libary access - today was a stressful day. People in suits knocked me over as if they didn't even see me - I was wearing a rainbow coloured jacket and a huge great rucksack - the result of this has been the lose of usefulness of my left arm and hand yet agian :/
Mobile Earthquake Recording in Marine Areas by Independent Divers
This was last week it was the second one of the Departmental Research semiars which UCL's Earth Sciences department are having. This turned out to be about the project I had heard about when doing the MRes before becuase back in those days Frederik Simons was at UCL and thus took some of the Birkbeck classes - he's now at Princeton. I remembered his stuff from before so well as it involved fourier transforms which at the time Alaric was having issues in using himself. It was intersting to see how the project had evolved and to also to here yet agian the run down on the gaps in our knowledge of the earths structure due to the uneven distrabution of earthquake detectors - ie on land!
The interesting things I picked out of this talk was that the presance of mantle plumes below certian volcanics - ie the stuff that occures in the middle of the oceans away from either subduction zones or mid ocean rifts. I hadn't realised this and thought it was all sorted out!
In fact it turns out we are still asking questions like:
What is the convection style of the mantle
What is the nature of mantle plumes and what is the heat flow like
Then another interesting thing is are the siesmic data consistant with mineral physics.
Again Tomography came into it and he showed some really groovey pictures of like the who earth though there are lots of gaps still!
It also turns out that not only do you have to deal with the fact that the earthquakes are not evenly distributed but that they are often of the wronge size - now it's obvious that the majority of quakes will be too small to get any useful data out but what I hadn't appreciated was that they can also be too big! They fail as they are too big to actually be used as a point source!
He ran through things like Argo which have floating devices but these are tethered and there fore pick up alot of noise and stuff. If they get the funding for their floatation devices it seems that we would get much better data.
I remembered that there was a low velociety channel in the oceans but I hadn't known that the whales use it as obviosly the sound waves travel further. This can cuase problems as there are sound waves that can initially look like the p-waves from earthquakes - you seem to need to put the data through a few processes and then they look different this is important as it turns out you can use the initial 2 seconds of p-wave to predict the size/magnitude of the earthquake - p-waves are the first ones to arrive but they are what are known as body waves and they dont do any damage it is the surface waves that lag behind them that destroy buildings and if there is going to be a Tidal wave then there is even more warning for that.
This is still a highly contested idea but it would be cool if it worked - Japan seems to be the most lickly place to find out!
I went to the drinks afterwards but didn't get a chance to actually ask my questions about what type of batteries they are using on the devices as they look like one of the main issues - I also wanted to ask about how the positioning system worked but never mind.
Sarah, Work | sarah | 
Sat 25th Oct 2008 10:14 am | 
Comments (3) 
Subscribe