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Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester is one of my favourite novels. It’s a complex, evocative story set in Hong Kong from the 1930s to the late 1990s, told through the lives of four characters. It has an amazing sense of place – of Hong Kong as a city – so I decided to re-read Fragrant Harbour on the plane out. Due to an electrical fault at Manchester, a midnight race through Helsinki to make my connection, a loudly snoring neighbour and a frankly shite collection of movies on Finnair I was unable to spend much of the journey time watching movies, sleeping or drinking inRead More →

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I’m currently at ICIP2010 in Hong Kong, which is a massive multi-track image processing conference organised by the IEEE. I think it’s one of the larger conferences I’ve ever been to – there are over a thousand people here, and at any one time there are 10 sets of paper presentations (lectures) and 10 sets of poster presentations. It’s at the Hong Kong Conference and Exhibition centre which is a humungous building built on reclaimed land to the north of Hong Kong Island. It’s supposed to look like a seabird, but I’m not so sure it manages to pull that off. There are quite aRead More →

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I’ve not written much on this blog lately, but I have had a few guest posts published – one on womenintechnology.co.uk with advice for people starting a PhD, and several on the VITAE blogs most recently on search engine tools for researchers. I’ll think of something interesting to write here soon, honest.

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I’ve just been contacted by someone who runs the blog yourbikeisrad letting me know that my blog contains the only google hit for the “word” yourblogisshit. This is due to a throwaway joke on the “about me” page. I’d like to take this opportunity to state categorically that myblogisnotshit, and mybikeisnotrad.

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In: France, Geekiness
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I’ve been playing with a javascript zoom thing, which is available free from this site, as a means of displaying panoramas better. I think it works quite well. Here are a few examples – Grenoble after sunset, the Chartreuse mountains and a very snowy Grenoble from the memorial to the troops of the mountain. I think the last one came out best.

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I mentioned a while back (in this post) that I’d applied for a paid blogger job with VITAE, the organisation that supports UK researchers, but didn’t get it because I couldn’t make an induction session in London. To my delight I was contacted a few days ago and asked if I was still interested. So I’m now on the official team until it’s reviewed at the end of March. The theme of the blog is staff development and career support for researchers, but people seem to be interpreting that quite broadly. My first post as one of the core bloggers has just gone up hereRead More →

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I’ve been using Citeulike to manage my references for a few months now and there are some things about it that are great. I love the browser button (available from here) and the way that it means I don’t have to type in article details any more. However, there are a few glitches. Sometimes, upon import, a conference paper is incorrectly entered as being a journal paper or a full conference proceedings. I’ve not worked out which sites this happens with yet, but I’ve definitely seen it with Springer LNCS imports and maybe some others. To correct this, you need to edit the article details.Read More →

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VITAE (a UK organisation to support researchers) recently advertised for paid blogger positions on their career development blogs. I wasn’t successful in my application, as I couldn’t make it to their training day in London, what with me living in France and all. But they said they’d publish the submission from my application and it’s now up: ranting about powerpoint overview slides. Seriously, I have, in the past, considered adding a slide to my conference presentation which says: Waffle Other people’s stuff What I did How it worked Waffle The other thing I’ve considered doing is photographing every overview slide in a conference and turningRead More →

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I’ve taken up dance lessons – partly because I enjoy dancing, partly because I know I’m not very good at it and lessons will help, and partly because it’s something sociable that gets me out of the flat and doing some exercise. I’ve been to six or seven lessons now and am beginning to be able to string a few moves together, but I’m always counting in my head and trying to remember stuff. There are a few sentences that repeat and I am sure I have a look of absurd concentration on my face – I don’t think it goes as far as stickingRead More →

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The last post contained lots of StreetView frames, and it took me a while to work out how to get them to appear properly. WordPress automatically adds <BR /> tags to the line endings, which is kind-of ok for text, but really messes things up if it chooses to do it in the middle of a block of embedded HTML. There’s a plugin which fixes this – it’s called PS disable auto formatting. It doesn’t work quite how you’d expect though. What it does is disable auto-formatting completely, therefore changing the appearance of all your past posts, and means that for all future posts you’llRead More →