Fuzzier Logic » About Me

7 ‘interesting’ things

Simon — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 09:43:35 +0000

I’ve been memed by Dan.

The challenge

Write 7 interesting things about myself, and pass on the meme, chain letter stylee.

So here are 7 facts about me, my family and my life. Interesting-ness is in the eye of the beholder. I suspect its largely self-indulgent twaddle.

I got married over the anvil (actually an anvil, not the anvil – a wedding in the Blacksmith’s is much more expensive) in Gretna Green, and we had paid the only guests (2 witnesses) to be there.

We had been engaged for nearly 2 ½ years, with no hope of being able to afford a ‘proper’ wedding in the forseeable future. We had joked about eloping, like I guess many long-term engaged couples do, but suddenly we took ourselves seriously. We wanted to be married, the sooner the better, and this actually seemed like the most realistic way of making that happen.
In the spirit of the way we seem to approach life, we jumped in feet first. About a week later, everything was arranged, from the ceremony itself to the honeymoon, via the flowers. We took a train to Gretna on the 4th June 2006, without telling any family what we were doing, and were married the next day by a friendly registrar in front of 2 hired witnesses in Anvil Hall, Gretna. We flew to Fuertaventura on the 7th, posting Gretna Green postcards to all our family before we left. Looking back, I still wouldn’t want to do it any other way, it was the perfect day.

My paternal Grandfather was a PoW in WWII, and was forced on ‘The March’ away from the advancing Eastern Front at the end of the war.

I don’t know enough about the details. He didn’t talk about it, at least not with me. But he did write about it. My father has his war diaries, and is slowly transcribing them.

Mendelian Genetics made me want to be a scientist.

My first school lessons about genetics when I was around 13, I guess, fired the passion for Biology in me. On a subsequent school visit to Nottingham University we were given a list of all the degrees you could study there, and asked to mark those we would consider. I marked a number of science subjects, and put a double asterisk next to ‘Biochemistry and Genetics’. I then forgot about this list, and rediscovered it years later when chucking stuff out at home, having just completed my Biochemistry and Genetics degree at Nottingham Univerisity.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Park_Guell_Terrace.JPG

(Stealing an idea from Dan for this one) My favourite place in the world is Parc Guell in Barcelona.

Sitting on the Serpentine benches early on a spring morning, eating a delicious breakfast from a Gràcia district bakery, and enjoying how deserted the place was at that time of the morning. Listening to the parrots nesting in the palm trees. Looking out over most of Barcelona spread out below, picking out the sights, la Sagrada in particular. The place is my favourite piece of Antoni Gaudi genius in a city that is full of it, and I could walk round there for hours.

I finally got together with my wife when she vomited down my back in a club.

I’m not sure this story needs much elaboration.

During university holidays, I had a job washing up in a seafront kitchen in Great Yarmouth.

Prior to the introduction of the minimum wage, this job involved working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, for 110 pounds. That’s £1.31/hour. In an un-airconditioned kitchen. In summer.

When my son was born, one of my first thoughts was ‘He’s got no nipples’…

A newborn’s nipples are often very small and pale. They were practically invisible, I was slightly high on adrenaline. Luckily I did not vocalise this thought at the time. I think the midwives would not have been kind. Odd, the things that go through your mind at times like that. Also note I said one of my first thoughts, it wasn’t my very first thought.

Could you tell I was struggling for things by the end? I think I covered that up quite well…
I don’t know 7 bloggers personally who I can pass this on to, as Dan already tagged them all. So if you fancy taking part in the meme, and haven’t been prodded by anyone you know yet, feel free to claim your place in the comments (maybe I’ll get some comments… maybe not).

FriendFeed and Me

Simon — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:36:35 +0000

Apparently its bad for a blog to be introspective, and always about the author. But I’m unrepentant. What do people write about if not themselves, even indirectly? So here’s another post about me, and about my participation in a small web revolution.

Next week marks 6 months since I registered my account at FriendFeed (and simultaneously, Twitter). Ally posted yesterday about her moment of epiphany with the ‘lifestreaming’ site, and I know other people have blogged about it’s impact on their online lives, and I thought I’d do the same as a bit of a retrospective.

Briefly, FriendFeed is a site that aggregates information from other sites, and shares it with the world. I collate the feeds from this blog, Twitter, CiteULike.org, del.icio.us, Flickr, Google Reader and a few others there. People can subscribe to this amalgamated feed, and get an idea of my interests and what I am upto.

I try to limit my activity on FF (and, consequently, Twitter) to stuff that’s purely work-related (although real life does occasionally creep in), and because of this ‘work-stream’ approach, it has become an increasingly indispensable tool in the pipeline of information discovery and my scientific ‘social life’.

The following are a (direct or indirect) result of my participation at FF:

I have finally learnt Python, and made it my programming language of choice
I have adopted Git for version control, and have several repos on GitHub
I bought this domain, and set up this blog
Found countless papers and blogs I may have missed

As a more concrete example of the power of FF, I am currently involved in a project looking at co-evolution of bacterial proteins, and am employing Statistical Coupling Analysis to score multiple sequence alignments. This method produced thousands of scores across an alignment, and the best way of viewing them is by constructing a sort of heatmap. I was using Gnuplot to do this, and my maps looked something like this:

This is not terribly useful, because you keep having to check the legend to see whether red is ‘hotter’ or ‘colder’ than yellow, etc. Then, one morning last week, I saw a link on FriendFeed to this blog post, and following the very wise suggestions in that post, I worked out how to redraw my plots so they now look like this:

This makes it much easier to tell at a glance where the hotspots are to be found in the alignment. It is just one blog post, but I would never have found it without FF, and it is a useful illustration of how this new workflow has changed my productivity.

So, for the next six months, and on into the more distant future, what role do I see for FF in my work life? Well, for a start I need to participate more. I am constantly aware that I should comment more, and even just ‘like’ more stuff. Contribution should also take the form of propogating things to FF for others to see. Most of my Feed consists of articles at CiteULike and Tweets. By posting more stuff to FF directly, and by sharing interesting articles on Google Reader, I’ll be providing more grist to the mill of conversation than I currently do. And I want to be an active member of this community, I like the people, I’ve got a lot out of the last 6 months of (relatively) passive interaction, and want that to continue, but I should no longer be a passenger.

Nightmare awakenings

admin — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 19:12:19 +0000

Yesterday, a Cold War script written for broadcast in the event of a nuclear attack was published. The script was penned in the 70s by the BBC and the government, and was released by the National Archives.

Most mornings I am woken by my radio alarm clock, which I turn off by hitting the radio on, this radio is tuned to Five Live, since my alarm goes off on the half hour I like to lie and listen to the news before getting up (if I haven’t been rudely awakened by my son before this that is). Yesterday morning, Five Live was dealing with the release of this nuclear warning script by broadcasting it, in full, voiced by a very grave sounding announcer. They were doing this at the precise time my alarm went off.

Made for quite a sudden awakening, I can tell you.