1. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before?
Been in a relationship

2. Where did you study/ work?
PHASE II International.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
My sister and my brother's girlfriend

4. Did anyone close to you die?
No

5. What countries did you visit?
France, Switzerland, Germany

6. Did you move anywhere?
No

7. What sporting events did you go to?
Er...a volleyball match.

8. What concerts did you go to?
Elbow (x2)
Portishead
Camden Crawl (Future of the Left, Crystal Castles, etc.)
The Fratellis/NERD/Sam Sparro
Offset Festival
Futureheads
Some more too I think.

9. Who was your Valentine in 2008?
Nobody

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
My foot went a bit swollen and my knee is a bit odd. I probably had a cold or two as well. And tonsillitis.

11. What was your best month?
May probably - great birthday and got with Vian.

12. Where did most of your money go?
Rent, food, savings.

13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
Offset festival

14. What song will always remind you of 2008?
"Audience with the Pope" by Elbow

15. What did you do on the 4th of July?
Let's see...it was a Friday so I was at work.

16. What were the best...

i. books you read?
Didn't really read enough, although I'm currently enjoying Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.

ii. movies you saw?
The Dark Knight.

iii. CDs you listened to?
No idea.

17. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Guitaring.

18. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Work.

19. How will you be spending Christmas?
With my family at my sister's in Canterbury

20. Did you fall in love in 2008?
No comment.

21. How many one-night stands?
None.

22. What was your favorite TV program?
Star Trek: Voyager. Oh dear.

23. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Happier
ii. thinner or fatter? About the same.
iii. richer or poorer? Richer,

24. What was your favorite summer memory of 2008?
A picnic with Vian in the park by the river

25. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
My 28th birthday. I had a barbecue on my balcony and had loads of friends from work and S1L. It was great :-)

26. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Future of the Left.

27. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
None really.

28. Who was the best new person you met?
Vian

29. Where were you when 2008 began and who were you with?
In Ministry of Sound in London with Mike and Oli. It was shit.

30. What are your plans for 2009?
Move to a new flat.
Get a new job?

Well, it's been a while. It's a bit strange to think that my last entry was on my 28th birthday, nearly 5 months ago. A fair bit has happened since then. A brief summary:

1. I have girlfriend. Her name's Vian, I mentioned her before and made her a compilation. We got together a couple of days after my birthday. We're getting on well, but I'm worried that I'm a bit shy and stand-offish. Still, she's very lovely and positive and thoughtful. And she cooks. It's her birthday on Saturday.

2. My 28th birthday celebration was lots of fun. The weather was good and we got up to loads of random shenanigans. Everyone enjoyed it.

3. I've been promoted. Again. I still have the love it/hate it thing with work. Every time I think I'm doing OK something happens and I get knocked back down again. It's a strange culture where on one hand the directors want to employ experienced and responsible staff, but they won't relax and let anybody take responsibility. I'll hang on there for as long as I can, but I really can't stand the incessant emotional blackmail and blame-mongering. Sure, the money's good, but I can't imagine myself staying there forever - but then who stays anywhere forever these days?

4. I've not been to enough gigs recently. I went to the Offset festival and am off to see Elbow in a couple of weeks (and Magazine next February!) I guess that's what having a woman is doing, distracting me from music, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. We've been to the theatre a couple of times and been for meals out and things.

5. My old Creative Zen died properly - I dropped it on a railway station platform. So I've bitten the bullet and bought an 80Gb iPod classic, which has enough space for all of my music, just about. Yes it's nice and shiny, but I wish I could have got the back off my Zen to replace the HDD, as I'm sure that it was just the HDD that snuffed it and it could have been fixed with a new one. Ah well.

6. The new series of Heroes starts in a couple of minutes! Yay!

7. Dirty Pretty Things split up today. Ho hum.

How the hell did that happen?

I've planned a barbecue for today, with friends from a few groups (work. uni, S1L)...fingers crossed it works out.  I think the weather should be good at least.

Well my last full post spoke of my disappointment with my MP3 player not working on my new computer.  Well, the good news is that I got my old machine working for long enough to upgrade the firmware successfully - and apparently WMP11 does successfully sync with my Zen now!  And also the upgrade means I can simply plug my player in and drag-and-drop folders of music, which is so much easier.  The bad news is that the the listening project I was enjoying so much has been gazumped because the firmware upgrade formatted my player.  Now I'm trying to put music back onto it, which takes a long time.  Also I'll never get back that old playlist of music I had, so I'll have to restart from scratch,  most likely skipping the tracks I remember hearing up to 'Love Remains' by Mansun (which was the next track to play before formatting).

Inspiration failed to strike - still no gift for Vicki.  And I still have food shopping to attend to.

Yeah...more than one post in a there's got to be a meme in there somewhere...



Just copy and paste the meme into a comment, replace the blanks with anything you want - personal, silly, surreal or deep - and I'll answer honestly as I can. Then post this in your own LJ and see what kind of things people want to ask you!

1. What do you think of _____________ ?

2. When did you last ____________?

3. __________ or ___________ and why?

4. What did you ______________?

5. What's your favorite ______________?

6. How would you ______________?

7. Who would you most like to ________ ?

On Friday night my trusty laptop died. 

I got back from Chrissie's leaving drinks and was chatting over MSN with Vian.  While chatting, applications such as Firefox  were quitting for no apparent reason, with that annoying "send a message report" message.  That happens sometimes, I wasn't too concerned.  I also got a couple of BSODs which is substantially more unusual.  So I had to restart a couple of times, but things were working.

Saturday morning I woke up with the intention of watching the latest episode of Lost I'd recently downloaded.  But old laptop was having none of it.  The first time I booted up I had similar problems to the night before - everything worked fine for a while, but applications were crashing and I got a BSOD.  I restarted a few times but the problem got worse and worse, until I was unable to get past the boot sequence.  I tried both my Knoppix live CDs, but these suffered similar symptoms - so I'm not sure if it's a HDD problem or deeper-lying hardware fault. 

So - I could either piss around and waste time with it and try to get it fixed, or just bite the bullet and buy a new machine - which is what I am typing this entry on now.  So that quandary has been answered.  It's not the best machine in the world, but I don't play games anymore and this is fine for web browsing and MS Office and just about everything I need it for.  Bone of contention: Vista.  Yes, it's as annoying as everybody says.

Except - I can't use my MP3 player with it.  And I am FUCKING GUTTED.  Basically, the drivers don't work with Vista.  The way to get it working (from the Creative knowledgbase) is apparently to upgrade the firmware of my Zen (on an XP SP2 machine) and then I can sync it through WMP10 (that's 10 - I'll have to roll-back from 11).  Of course, I don't have a functioning XP machine (at least not with the drivers installed) so I can't do this.  Fucking hell.  And even if I manage that, there's no cast-iron guarantee that I'll be able to use my Zen on my new machine because I naievely installed the XP drivers first, which may cause some problems.  Gak.

So, a bank holiday weekend that I hoped would be fairly relaxing has turned into a dull tumble through updating/configuring/installing this laptop.  Tomorrow I'm going to try and find Vicki a birthday present - I hope inspiration strikes in the next few hours else she'll get smelly stuff again.

About the only good thing to come out of this weekend was I learnt how to pull out an old hard disk, stick it into a caddy and put my old data onto my new machine.

I should have gone shopping today, but it's too late now.

What a waste of a day.  I guess I'll play a bit of guitar later.

Going home for the next few days so this seems like a good opportunity to update.


When I get around to it I'll write something about Portishead and the Camden Crawl. Not now though.

So, as part of my two weeks of holiday, last night I went over to Brixton Academy to see Elbow complete their UK tour in support of their new album 'The Seldom Kid'. If you don't own it, buy it. It's a great record - slightly understated, typically affecting Garvey lyrics, maybe not quite so good as Leaders of the Free World or Asleep in the Back.

Anyway. Support was from Two Gallants, an bluesy American two-piece who I've heard played on the radio a few times and were very enjoyable. They didn't do much but what they did they did well. Etc.

Elbow were, once again, magnificent. This time they've boosted their sound by the inclusion of a string trio (introduced as Jyoti, Stella and Margaret) who also sang some backing vocals. They really added to the sound in both the new and older songs. So the band came onstage to Starlings, miming (I suspect) the trumpet bits in the intro. They followed up with The Bones of You and Leaders of the Free World.

I must say, much as I enjoyed the show Elbow seem to have got to the annoying bit in their career where they have to start ignoring the back catalogue in favour of the newer (better known?) material and the album they have to promote. So the bulk of songs tonight are from the last two records, with just two from Asleep... and only one from Cast... which is a bit disappointing. However we do get an awesome version of Great Expectations and Richard Hawley comes on stage to guest during 'The Fix'. Other highlights included Guy messing up the intro to New Born and asking us all to boo him! The big singalongs to 'Some Day Like This' and 'Grace under Pressure' were also pretty good :-)

All in all a great night, slightly marred by difficulties in getting home caused by the Victoria line switching off before 11pm. Grrr. Will have to bare that in mind on Thursday for Portishead.

Was for Vian from S1L. She won't be reading this.

1. (Rock and Roll intro - DJ Shadow)
2. Losing My Edge - LCD Soundsystem
3. Aenema - Tool
4. Life's an Ocean - The Verve
5. Moon and Moon - Bat For Lashes
6. Pulling Shapes - The Cooper Temple Clause
7. (Ghostbusters interlude - "dickless")
8. Bad vs. Ghostbusters
9. Rekkit - Death in Vegas
10. Midnight in a Perfect World - DJ Shadow
11. Jayou - Jurassic 5
12. We Will Become Sillhouettes - The Postal Service
13. Girl Anachronism - The Dresden Dolls
14. She's Attracted To - Young Knives
15. Lightsabre Scocksucking Blues - Mclusky
16. Electro-shock Blues - Eels
17. Great Expectations - Elbow
18. Coles Corner - Richard Hawley
19. A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square - Vera Lynn

It's a strange time in my life. Things seem to be changing - now I'm working out if I should be careful or just relax and go with it.

Last week was cool - I went to see a load of bands - on Monday I went to see The Picture Show (who were first on) and also a pretty good funky jazz-type band called RDA. I went along with Em and Kirsi, both of whom I met at the XFM First Friday about a month ago. They're both friendly (and also pretty hot) and we had a good evening. Thursday night, at Kirsi's request I went with her and a couple of her friends to see the band Officer Kicks, supported by Thundershock and A Silent Film. Both gigs were at The Water Rats up in Kings Cross - a venue I've heard of a lot so I was really glad to get along there and have such a good time.

Friday night was more Karaoke Rock Star - Teenage kicks this time, and it was great to see Nik and James and Mike again.

Saturday was strange-good. I spent it with Em and Vian and James - some of it stuck in a car in traffic jams, and partially at Mary's houseparty getting drunk and being a moron.

Sunday I spent with them as well. We hung around randomly in the morning, went for lunch at Wagamama's and then went to see 'The Spiderwick Chronicles' which I quite enjoyed, but Vian (ex film student as she is) slagged off mahoosively.

And I'm learning more about the politics/divisions/cliques of S1L. It's all quite fascinating and I know I'll never avoid being drawn into it, I've just got to be very careful and diplomatic. I may not go to the event this weekend - I think I need a quiet one in by myself.

Sorry, this is just a string of facts for my own reference - I'll know what it all means eventually.

Was for Nik from S1L who is not reading this. Download it below.

1. (DJ Shadow Rock and Roll intro)
2. I Found That Essence Rare - Gang of Four
3. Saturday Superhouse - Biffy Clyro
4. To Hell With Good Intentions - Mclusky
5. Underpass - John Foxx
6. Feared by the Other Children - Rhysmix
7. Country Mile - Camera Obscura
8. 7/4 (Shoreline) - Broken Social Scene
9. Hooligans - Bill Hicks
10. 14th Street - Rufus Wainwright
11. Morning Theft - Jeff Buckley
12. Lust in the Movies - The Long Blondes
13. Bring The Noise - Public Enemy
14. No Remorse (I Wanna Die) - Slayer vs. Atari Teenage Riot
15. Plug In Baby (Live Reading 2006) - Muse
16. Shot By Both Sides - Magazine
17. Faster - Manic Street Preachers
18. Black Eyed Dog - Nick Drake
19. Help Me I Am In Hell - Nine Inch Nails
20. Lateralus - Tool
21. (Lo Fi Allstars "Faith" ending)

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=F7ZTZ8AC 88.7 Mb 

Got a shitty cold. Mutter, grumble, work tomorrow

Created by OnePlusYou - Free Online Dating

This is my first ever long Easter weekend off work! On my PhD I'd always end up working it, but this weekend I can just go "no. I have done my work. I will be lazing around like a lazy bastard".  To celebrate, last night I went out for dinner/XFM's big night out at Brixton Academy with some guys from S1L/Gig buddies. It was a really good evening and I met some more guys from the group. It's nice because everyone seems to be a bit geeky (many of the men seem to work in IT...), so it means I should be able to fit in quite well, which is a really nice feeling :-)  On the other hand it definitely seems to be more of a social thing for me and I think I'm less likely than I hoped to get dates out of it all (excepting the world-of-fuck-up that was Maddy. I fear protracted fallout from that, even though she's now moving in with the guy who she probably would have met while we were dating...).  The night was good - they had three bands playing - Black Kids (good stuff), One Night Only (bog-standard indie-rock) and the Futureheads who were crippled somewhat by a 30 minute show and really atrocious sound. Never mind, it was fun. I've uploaded some fuzzy camphone photos  Marvel at my K750 skillz. Oh yeah. And I got to do crazy indie-disco dancing, which is always a Good Thing.

Actually I can't be too lazy today. I've got to go out and get Easter eggs for the family as I will be seeing my parents and siblings and their partners on Sunday. Also I've got to get my favourite blue jacket cleaned. There was some beer-throwing going on last night and I caught a lot of it. Grrr. And I'd better go to the gym too, seeing as I haven't been all week (just exhaustion from work mainly).

Much else to report? I don't think so really.Here's to the long weekend! :-D

I finally got a first author paper!

Alright, so my supervisor didn't tell me about it (I chanced upon it when bitterly looking over Pubmed to see what she'd published recently - it turns out that the giggling wank-spasm of a 3rd year called Richard has also published recently), but there it is anyway. I got my sister to send me a copy. Here's the header and abstract so you can all go WTF? at it:

Jenkins DC, Sylvester ID, Pinheiro TJ. The elusive intermediate on the folding pathway of the prion protein. FEBS J. 2008;275(6):1323-35.



See it on Pubmed here.

I'll be keeping a close eye on it to see just how many publications cite it. Or not.

Still, that's the final box ticked from my PhD. Now at least I have a publication to put on my CV so I can say at job interviews "yes, I'm a medical writer with a PhD and I had my work published properly.

AWESOME.

I just had to quickly record this, as memories of dreams don't often stay with me.

I was working with a group in an office, although there were a few groups in the office. Groups of around 10 of us sitting around in circles. Our managers had given each of the groups a list of questions to answer, but nobody in our group could answer the questions. I turned to talk to a member of another group (her name was Alex) and she said they were having trouble with their questions too. But when I read some of her questions I realised my group could answer them...and likewise her group could answer ours.

Fairly simple, but what I remember was the details - like her name, and the fact that she was on a saline drip, which I moved at one point and I saw bubbles rising through the solution. She got quite angry at that and I apologized.

I don't think the dream has any meaning (I'm fairly certain it was just my brain sorting through odd images), but it's always the small details that make these things seem real.

I want to go for a run today but have cramp in my left calf. It was there yesterday too. I'll do my stretches and see if it goes away.

The internet seems quiet this evening...not much happening on either FD or S1L. Just time for an update (the third in one day! What's going on?!) to catch up on some things I never mentioned when I should have done...

1. British Sea Power live at Koko, 31 January. OK, so it was over a month ago, but it was a bloody great show! Support came from Joan and Jean (or something like that), These New Puritans (who I quite enjoyed, but they do seem to be milking the new-wave choppy guitar and shouting thing that was old when Forward Russia  were doing it), and Eamon (ex-BSP keyboardist, since departed to form Brakes).

So the stage was decked out with flags and foliage, which was good to see, although I thought they'd stopped doing that. Good light-show and rear-projections too, especially during 'The Great Skua' where they projected some rather lovely footage of seagulls. The whole gig was awesome - the crowd were bouncing from Lights Out... all through and the atmosphere was great, especially with Noble climbed onto the balcony during The Spirit of St Louis. The encore was the typical BSP A-rock chaos, with Eamon returning to stage dressed as a wrestler (he's a skinny, balding guy...so that's quite comical) as well as the 10 foot bear, loads of climbing all over each other and guitar-abuse. Top stuff.


2. Athens. Yeah, I don't want to dwell too much on this on. It was a complete shit-show. We've had the de-brief session now, so I think we know what went wrong. Her name is Crystal. She started doing a bizarre mixture of not bothering to do the jobs she was supposed to have done (like printing out name tags/welcome letters/personalised itineraries for the 500-odd delegates before we went out) with coming up with new jobs to do instead. Also, when we all rallied around to help her out (distracting us from the jobs we needed to do) she stayed arsey with us and had tantrums everywhere. She was an absolute liability. Chrissie doesn't want her at another conference.  As far as my part goes, I think I Was the only one to come out with good feedback on what I'd done, in terms of writing the newsletter and slide-set reviews. I wasn't too pleased with the quality of my work, but it all got done and was approved by the client. So it was exhausting for me (3 20-ish hour days) but I came out looking good. I've just got to be certain that the post-event stuff looks good too. Then keep it ticking over until my 12 month review in June...damn...12 months in a proper job in the real world. How did that happen?

So, in the continuing mission to Meet New People and Get Over All This Social Anxiety Nonsense, last night I went out indie clubbing with a bunch of people I've never met before from the Facebook group Single in London (S1L). We went to the XFM first Friday night at Islington Academy, where they had (fairly average) indie tunes, a couple of live bands and the main draw was "Rockstar Karaoke" (http://www.karaokerockstar.com/). For those unaware, this is essentially indie-rock karaoke with a full band. Which is quite exciting. In the main room. That's a room with a few hundred people in there. This I found out not many minutes before I 'performed' Mr Brightside. So, I had a couple of options - not sing or have a few drinks and go for it. So I did the latter. And it was great. I don't know if I was any good or not, but it was a hell of a buzz! I'm not even sure if I'd do it again. Maybe I would.

I met some cool people too - I wouldn't call them friends and I will probably never give myself the opportunity to get to know them properly (or vice versa), but it's people to say hi to and not feel so lonely in the future