Nick Gibbins

The tear in Thatcher’s eye as she left Downing Street. Off to work now.

…when you turn off the breakfast coverage on BBC24, and turn over to UK History, which is showing The Rise and Fall of Margaret Thatcher. Yuppies, the glory of greed, selling off the family silver in the name of privatisation, Jeffrey Archer with his fragrant wife post-allegations (but pre-perjury verdict), “Tell Sid”, the 1987 election, the poll tax, clause 28, and Michael Howard in a position of power – all these things are making me feel less down than today’s news. In other news (since hasn’t posted on the subject), we’ve put an offer on a house in Southampton which… Read More »You know the news is depressing…

The wife of one of my colleagues gave birth to their first child in the early hours of this morning. This was how he announced the birth on our project mailing list: <?xml version=’1.0′ encoding=’UTF-8′?> <!DOCTYPE rdf:RDF [ <!ENTITY rdf ‘http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#’> <!ENTITY kb ‘http://protege.stanford.edu/kb#’> <!ENTITY rdfs ‘http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/PR-rdf-schema-19990303#’> ]> <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf=”&rdf;” xmlns:kb=”&kb;” xmlns:rdfs=”&rdfs;”> <kb:Person rdf:about=”&kb;Instance_1″ kb:name=”Harith Alani” rdfs:label=”Harith Alani”/> <kb:Person rdf:about=”&kb;Instance_2″ kb:name=”Samar Alani” rdfs:label=”Samar Alani”/> <kb:Person rdf:about=”&kb;Instance_3″ kb:date_of_birth=”2 November 2004″ kb:gender=”Girl” kb:name=”something Alani” kb:weight=”3.02 kgs” rdfs:label=”Meriam Alani”> <kb:has_parent rdf:resource=”&kb;Instance_1″/> <kb:has_parent rdf:resource=”&kb;Instance_2″/> </kb:Person> </rdf:RDF>

Just spent the last half hour being filmed for a promotional video for my school, which was an experience that I’m not prepared to experience again any time soon. It isn’t as if I can’t talk about why I like working in ECS (I’ve been here for seven years, so I had better like it), nor of what my research is, nor why the support I’ve received from ECS is valuable, nor of the importance of ECS’s research excellence (these last two being last minute requests from our marketing manager), but saying it to camera in a pithy manner without… Read More »I’m ready for my close up, Mr DeMille

Last Tuesday, I dug out a pair of old, undeveloped black and white films and took them to be developed at the branch of Boots on Portswood high street. The results were rather good, so I dug out another pair of old, undeveloped black and white films last weekend and took them in this morning, only to be told by the assistant that they don’t do black and white unless they’re C41 colour process. Right. Pointed out that I had, in fact, taken two identical films (Kodak TMAX 400) into that very branch some seven days previous, and that they’d… Read More »New Adventures in Retail

Been a very busy Nick this week. After last week’s fun and games at EKAW, I was hoping that this week would be a little easier. I certainly wasn’t counting on being bundled off to a symposium on information assurance at Ernst and Young’s Southwark HQ yesterday (up at 0515, back home at 2130). An interesting if overly high-level day, with a number of the great and good in attendance (Dame Pauline Neville-Janes, Professor Sir David King, etc), but but with its downsides. For a start, I’ve learned never to expect unbiased reporting of a breakout session by a knight… Read More »All work and no play

Completely missed this when it was released last month, but there’s a new version of myTunes that lets you download tracks from iTunes 4.6 shares.

Of interest to Gmail users may be this: a transparent filesystem based on Gmail. It is a Thing Of True Horror, but could be quite useful. And yes, this is my third post of today. Yes, they are just like buses.