Nick Gibbins

“The name’s Bear. Edward Bear.”

Seen here on : I see from USA Today that Christopher Robin is being replaced by a “tomboy girl” in order to appeal to the youth of today. http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2005-12-06-winnie-the-pooh_x.htm. Undoubtedly Disney have done lots of marketing research on this. As we learn from the article, “We got raised eyebrows even in-house at first, but the feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only the introduction of someone new could provide,” says Nancy Kanter of the Disney Channel. Whatever next? Antidepressants for Eeyore? I know that Milne’s books aren’t perfect. They’re a little sugary at… Read More »“The name’s Bear. Edward Bear.”

False Memories

As seen and responded to on and : If you read this, if your eyes are passing over this right now, (even if we don’t speak often) please post a comment with a COMPLETELY MADE UP AND FICTIONAL memory of you and me. It can be anything you want – good or bad – BUT IT HAS TO BE FAKE. When you’re finished, post this little paragraph on your blog and be surprised (or mortified) about what people DON’T ACTUALLY remember about you.

Work as normal / A day at the zoo / Birthday redux

Things are starting to settle down here in ECS. This morning, we were allowed back into our offices in Zepler, so I’ve been able to commune with my books again. My umbrella plant is beyond saving, however. I’ve donated my meeting table to one of the secretaries from Mountbatten who is being rehoused in Zepler, and a bunch of my shelves (most of which are empty) to a professor from Mountbatten who is moving the contents of his old office into the rather smaller office next door to mine. We’re only allowed into the building during business hours (0845-1730), which… Read More »Work as normal / A day at the zoo / Birthday redux

Fire aftermath

Well, it’s Thursday, and I’m still working from home. The reoccupation of Zepler (the building I work in) has been put off until next week at the earliest – we’ve been told that there is no firm date. The salvage contractors are in Mountbatten, and staff based there have been told that they’ll be able to give directions to the contractors in order to retrieve up to one plastic crate of belongings each. Given the book collections of some of the professorial staff from IAM in Mountbatten, this is likely to be a difficult choice. For up-to-date news, there’s a… Read More »Fire aftermath

ECS Fire

Big all-hands meeting this morning, with senior University management in attendance (vice-chancellor and registrar). The upshot is that the clean rooms are completely destroyed, and that the top two floors of Mountbatten are badly damaged. The fire spread downwind from the clean rooms to the upper floors of Mountbatten (which is a separate building). The comms group on Mountbatten level four have probably lost almost everything, though the damage is less severe on the north side of the building (facing away from the clean rooms) and towards the Zepler bridge at the east of the building. Mountbatten level three has… Read More »ECS Fire

Addendum to previous post

Of course, with ECS out of action I’m not receiving my email as normal, so LJ may be the best way to get messages to me for the time being.

Oh no, not again

See this? That’s where I work, that is. Fortunately, it’s not the building that I work in, but the building next door which holds the electronics half of the department. and I drove up to see where all the smoke was coming from before we actually knew any details. Looks like the School of Electronics and Computer Science has lost the entirety of its microchip and fibre optic fabrication facility, which was the leading such facility in a UK university. No details yet as to how the fire started, but there were at least sixteen appliances present, from as far… Read More »Oh no, not again

Buzzword 2.0

The BBC have been carrying a story today on the rise of Web 2.0 and Flock, to tie in with a report on this evening’s Newsnight (the report can be seen on the Newsnight website for the next twenty-four hours). I can’t say that I’m too impressed. I’ve tried Flock (see my earlier comments), and have found it to be a generally unimpressive experience, in that it doesn’t add any significantly new additional browser functionality that was not already available as extensions to Firefox. Given that Flock is probably about 98+% Firefox in terms of lines of code, this doesn’t… Read More »Buzzword 2.0