Our Cover is Blown (by sarah)

Yesturday me and Ella went for a walk in Cranham - she took lots of photos including some of Betsy (a cat) for Barbara. We walked to the Black Horse, our village pub, in a sort of round about way. Ella many listerning to me being sad about Alex and I mainly held her camera lenses which she seemed to be changing every few minutes.

I realised that I hadn't got to tell him that I would be back doing geology and i was upset becuase I had realised that I had been sending emails about his funeral and all the rest of it too his inbox. I run a mailing list for the goelogists and of course he was on it - I felt very bad about this and it was helpful for me to go through my feelings with Ella. Though she didn't know him she is an Imperial person and also went through Wilson's death with me two years ago. She knows what its like to loose a peer.

At the Black Horse we met Andrew another old Imperial geek and abit later Alaric arrived. We then proceeded to have one of the most stimulating conversations I've had for months. There was physics, there was politics, there was maths, there was philosphy, there was engerneering, there was info on the second world war, there was pyromania, there was science and reasoning in all its guises and then of course there was the Scifi!

And there was a pub full of villagers, a pub full of people who have now seen the true geekness that is me and Al and you know what? Though those who know us smiled and said hello there where some people in the pub who where glaring! Glaring at us becuase it would appear that we had the audacity to tell maths jokes and talk about science fiction plots deconstructing them into real science and speculation.

So after three years our cover is blown - I wonder slightly what the long term affects of this are going to be? Hopefully if people are acting as proper adults - nothing.

A nice toolboard for my workshop (by alaric)

As an exercise in her art class, Sarah made some pictures by cutting out shapes in coloured paper:

Coincidentally, at about this time, I was thinking that I ought to screw a bit of wood to the wall in my workshop and hang tools from it to make them more accessible, and to store them more compactly than having them sitting on a shelf (which is the worst way of using a shelf EVER). So I was delighted when Sarah announced that she'd thought her pictures could be stuck to a piece of wood to make me a toolboard...

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I dropped my laptop (by alaric)

Rather, the strap of the bag failed, dumping it onto the pavement.

Amazingly, it still works. Well done Apple!

However, there's another impressive dent, and the corner that hit the ground seems to have a small stone embedded in it:

TechAdventure 2008 (by alaric)

Sarah and I went to TechAdventure in Bristol on Saturday.

It was fun! We'd both been rather sad about the fact that we'd not really gotten into the local geek scene. Almost all our nerdy friends are London-based. So we were keen to go to a local geek event...

So we swapped some EPROM programming and erasing gear for some books and a patch panel at the swapshop.

I was rigged for motion capture:

We have a video of me moving around with the rig on. It's rather dark, so you need to turn the brightness and contrast all the way up to see it properly...

We saw John Honniball and a tiny subset of his extensive collection of ancient computers.

We saw a guy who'd made a plotter from a turntable and a horizontal carriage from a printer.

And we saw and participated in a whole bunch of other stuff...

And we met loads of people. Which is great, since we want to meet more tecchie people from this neck of the woods!

We’re back! (by alaric)

We're back in our house! We just spent the first night back in it...

We've got upstairs cleaned out enough to move back in, but downstairs is still a pile of bags and boxes and furniture, waiting for us to put the furniture into place so we can unload all the stuff onto it.