The Man with No Time

Part two of my end of year review, and I'm again looking back at 2013. This time I'm going to look at the goals I set myself for the year, and see how successful I was at achieving them. 2012 didn't go too well, so have I managed to go any better this time around?

It doesn't seem that long ago that I was writing my end of 2012 review. A lots happened in 2013, and it seems to have gone past in a blur at times. On the other hand bits of it have seemed interminable, so I suppose it's a wash really! Anyway, I'm going to reprise my set of three end-of-year posts: part 1 will be a review of the events and happenings in my life during 2013; in part 2 (tomorrow) I'll look at how well I met my goals for the year, and in part 3 (on New Year's Day) I'll be setting my goals for 2014 I rather liked this image. Quite appropriate. (Credit: linda-dawn-designs.blogspot.com)

MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYBODY!

It's been a looooooooooong weekend of Christmas carols. At this point I'll be happy if I don't hear any more for at least a week, but I know that's probably a faint hope. I guess I'll just have to avoid shops for a while (which shouldn't be hard), and console myself with the fact that it was all for several good causes.

As of this morning it’s Christmas break for the BULSCA lifesavers. In year’s gone by this would have marked the halfway point in the season, but some calendar shuffling at the last AGM means that we’re not quite there yet (this is a good thing, as it’s spread the events out a little more than has traditionally been the case). It’s been my first season as a judge rather than a competitor, and it’s been a slightly odd experience to be honest. I missed one competition whilst at playing in a concert with my new orchestra, but the rest have really opened my eyes to a completely different side of lifesaving events.

As I’ve talked about before, since the start of my undergraduate degree eight years ago the amount of television that I watch has dropped off quite sharply. The only things I really watch on television any more are sporting events, such as the 6 Nations, F1 Grand Prix, and the BTCC. Plus Dr Who and Top Gear. Part of the reason for that was time; as a student I just didn’t have the free time to be regularly watching a TV show, so some of my favourites I had to reluctantly let fall by the wayside. Some I’ve since picked up on DVD or download, and have sitting in my ‘to watch’ queue. I suppose to be strictly accurate I should have said ‘traditional television’ above, as over the last couple of years I’ve started watching more and more YouTube, BBC iPlayer, and other online streaming services. This has really allowed me to get back into TV shows, as it allows me to watch episodes when and where I want rather than being tied down to the airing time. That flexibility has been ...

Last night I took the chance of catching up on another film that I missed first time around at the cinema. The Student Cinema were showing the Lone Ranger, and I thought I’d go along and see whether it was as bad as its box office performance made it out to be. The Lone Ranger stars Armie Hammer as the eponymous hero, and Jonny Depp as his native America sidekick, Tonto. It reputedly had a massive budget from Disney, who were hoping for another Pirates of the Caribbean style success, but made equally large losses internationally. I have to say that I don’t understand why, as it’s a wonderfully entertaining piece of cinema that is simply great fun. I think the logo for the film is quite evocative too. (Credit: collider.com)

It's the TV event of the year! Or something. The Doctors, all twelve of them. That's 50 years of television history right there. (Credit: bbc.co.uk) I like to think that it's no secret that I like Dr Who. My close friends are (hopefully) all aware of this fact, and more to the point tolerant of it. Most of them watch, some of them enjoy it as much as I do, some less, some more. But that's by the by, because I really enjoy the show. Ok, so it might not be particularly highbrow; in fact it's fanciful (often to extremes) frivolous at times, and not particularly complex in terms of characterisation, character development, or storyline a lot of the time. Yes, there are convoluted stories, but that's not the same thing, and once you look beyond the misdirection and explosions, a lot of the modern stories aren't particularly challenging. Yet it has a lasting charm and appeal that belie these traits. The show's changed a lot in its 'modern...

For someone that reads an awful lot of books, and has actually increased the number this year, I've not talked about them very often on this blog. Partly that's because books are, to me, much more of a personal thing than films or television. I find it much easier to recommend those to people, as I find that they tend to appeal to a fairly broad audience. Whereas books, in my opinion, are often much more narrow in their appeal. Don't get me wrong, once I know you're interested in certain types of books I will happily share recommendations with you. But up to that point I try to fairly general in my suggestions. Every now and then though I find a set of books that I think a lot of people will enjoy. I want to talk about one such series today: the PC Grant series by Ben Aaronovitch.

Today I want to talk a little bit about some new musical acts that I've recently found through YouTube. One I've known about for a while, but have sort of rediscovered in the last few weeks, whilst the other two I stumbled across via the magic of the 'associated videos' list that's on the right hand side of every page on YouTube. There are definitely some common aspects to the three groups, but also some big differences. I think all three have really developed their fame through YouTube though; it's great to see that that can actually work (although in at least one case there was another, pretty big factor involved in their success to date).

Yesterday I made another visit to Warwick Student Cinema to see a film that I absolutely had to see on the big screen. When I first heard about this film, the combination of director and subject material made me incredibly excited. Ron Howard, director of films including 'Apollo 13' and 'A Beautiful Mind' (which I think are both brilliant pieces of cinema) was going to be making a film about the rivalry between James Hunt and Niki Lauda, culminating in the dramatic 1976 F1 season.  Sadly, I wasn't able to see Rush at the 'real' cinema; it was released at an inconvenient time, just when I was in full-on finishing the PhD mode. But the Student Cinema came to the rescue once again. One of the character posters. (Credit: digitalspy.co.uk)

It's another Warwick Student Cinema film catch-up review. This time around I'll be taking a look at RED 2. I watched RED on one of the postgraduate film nights that we used to hold in the Astronomy group up in St Andrews. It was surprisingly entertaining, and really rather funny. I wasn't expecting a sequel to be made, but was pleasantly surprised when I saw that there was one. It wasn't top of my list of films to see, so much like After Earth  I didn't make too much of an effort to go to a "proper" cinema to see it, but when it was on at the student cinema I thought 'why not?' What a cast! For this kind of film you wouldn't expect it to work necessarily, but somehow it does. (Credit: joblo.com)

Part three of  my motorcycling season review will cover the top flight category: MotoGP. I've already written brief reviews of the intermediate categories,  Moto2  and  Moto3 , but these are the big bikes. (Credit: motogp.com) I used to enjoy watching MotoGP, but the 125cc category was always my favourite. When I lost interest in motorcycling as a sport for a while it was the top flight that really killed it for me. About mid way through the 2000s it sort of got a bit dull. Rossi was still great, and there was Stoner to challenge him. Then Lorenzo turned up, and between the three of them (plus Dani Pedrosa) the racing was decent every now and then. But on the whole it was turning into Formula 1 a little; the bikes quickly spread out along the track, and actual overtaking was often quite rare. Not to mention the fact that numbers were quickly dropping, with first Kawasaki and then Suzuki leaving the sport. So I stopped watching.

Part two of my motorcycling season review covers the Moto2 category. I've already covered Moto3 , and now it's time for the middle brother. (Credit: motogp.com) Moto2 replaced the 250cc category in 2010, and for the first few years provided the shot in the arm that the middle rung on the ladder desperately needed. The racing was close, unpredictable, and incredibly exciting. But over the last couple of seasons it's dropped off a little as the gap between the different chassis widens. This year was better than last, for a couple of notable reasons.

One of the forms of motorsport that has captured my interest in recent years has been MotoGP, not to mention its two support series Moto2 and Moto3. I used to watch MotoGP years ago, but in the early 2000s I lost interest. The top category became pretty dull, and the lower divisions were hard to find (although the racing in 125cc was epic). But over the last four or five years the BBC have started showing all three classes live, either on TV or on their website, so I've been able to start watching again . The quality of racing has also increased with new riders coming through, and some rules changes that have made a huge difference: the introduction of CRT bikes to MotoGP, and the replacement of 125cc and 250cc by Moto3 and Moto2 respectively. (Credit: motogp.com) This year I've managed to watch most of the races live, and I wanted to get some thoughts down on the page about the three seasons. I'll start with Moto3, and with Moto2 and MotoGP following in short o...

One of the things that I'm really enjoying about being back at Warwick is the student cinema. They have a showing everyday of the week except Wednesday, and two on a Saturday and Sunday. There's a different film every day (usually), and they're very good at getting recent releases and mixing them in with older films. Tickets are £3.50 for staff, which is an absolute bargain, and it's held in the biggest lecture theatre on campus; it's even got a proper cinema sized screen. The only real downside are the seats, which being lecture seats aren't particularly comfortable, particularly for taller individuals like myself! (Seriously, how did I sit through lectures in there?). (Credit: filmsoc.warwick.ac.uk) There were a lot of films this year that I didn't catch at the cinema when they were released. Fortunately the student cinema has come to the rescue! The first of many films that I've managed to catch up on this term was After Earth, the father-...

....or Loki 3 as I've seen some people refer to it, which is somewhat fitting given the popularity of that character and the  resulting screen time that he gets! (Loki 1 being Thor, and Loki 2 being Avengers Assemble of course). So I went to see Thor 2 at the cinema yesterday. The latest step in Marvel's dominion of blockbuster cinema, it continues to advance the Marvel Universe's cinematic storyline in several parallel paths. But is it any good? I thought Thor 1 was one of the surprises of the pre-Avengers phase of the Marvel superhero film craze, so I was interested to see how the second instalment would compare. The poster image for Thor: the Dark World. Oddly similar to the Iron Man 3 poster in many ways. (Credit: hdwallpapers.in)

Hmmm, when did I last do an update on this challenge *looks at date on previous post* - April! Sheesh. So much for my 'monthly update plan' that I had at the start of this! I'm going to play the 'real-life' card here. Although I've got a reasonable amount done since my last update, August was pretty much a washout with flathunting for my new job. Then I had to start said job, move (twice), attend a conference, defend my PhD thesis, and deal with some personal issues in September and the start of October. I'm only just resettling into some vague resemblance of a routine, and my new flat is finally looking like someone lives there rather than a squatter's residence! So I haven't forgotten about Venethrax and his dragon slaying posse. Before the upheaval I got the Mechanithrall unit quite far along, and the Lich Lord himself isn't looking too bad either. I just haven't been able to work on them over the last couple of months. ...

Just a quick Astronomy related update today. This morning saw a notable achievement in the field of exoplanetary science - when the preprint ArXiv updated with new submissions, there were three papers from the WASP project (which I'm part of). Between them they detail the discovery of 13 new hot Jupiter planets, taking the total number of WASP planets up to 100 (although not all have been published yet, and there are many more in the pipeline as well). But more significantly, they took the total number of known exoplanets past the 1000 planets milestone! This is a fantastic achievement for a field that's not even twenty years old. The Kepler mission, now sadly departed, has of course greatly contributed to this total. Particularly in the regime of smaller planets, multiple planet systems, and more unusual systems. But the contribution of WASP cannot be underestimated; to date it still holds the greatest number of confirmed discoveries by a single project, and the amoun...

I really, really hope that this is the last part of this post series. At least for this particular house move. Because I'm fed up, and I'm not sure what else can go wrong. 

It is complete! My PhD is over, and I can finally relax for a couple of days. I've been in St Andrews all week, and have just got on the train back to Coventry after staying at my Granny's last night. My viva voce was on Tuesday afternoon, and I spent Wednesday to Friday making the corrections that my examiners asked for. It was a pretty intense week, and I'm glad it's over. For so many reasons. (Credit: Figure-of-L on deviantart.com)

Well, moving still sucks. This whole process is really starting to take the mickey; I naively thought that it would be relatively simple, but I'm starting to realise how lucky I was with all of my previous moves. Each time I had people to help me, and I was moving in with other people so there were bodies around. This time it's a completely different story, and I'm starting to get a bit fed up. Admittedly it's only been a week since I got they keys, and a busy week at that. It's also been stressful.

This weekend I took a trip up to Glasgow for my first competition of the new season, the Scottish National Lifesaving Championships. I say a new season, but I suppose that's my university-lifesaving bias showing through; really it's part of the 2013 season according to the RLSS. In any case, it was the first competition I'd participated in since the St Andrews event back in February! Spoiler alert - it didn't go too well.

Moving still sucks. But at least I now have the keys to my flat! It's taken long enough for me to become immensely frustrated though - it's not like I moved down here over two weeks ago, or applied for my flat almost a month ago or anything... There's been a lot of waiting around for people to do things over the last two weeks.

So a new job, in a familiar department, at a university I know well, and in a city I lived in for three years. I've been there a week, so what could be more sensible than taking a week off to go to a conference! Ah, the life of a researcher. In fairness, I hadn't been to a conference for quite some time. I missed out on the large meeting in Canada that many of my colleagues went to, so my last one had been NAM in St Andrews . So after traveling down to London last weekend for Proms in the Park , I stayed on to attend the European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) 2013 at UCL. EPSC is a bit broader in scope than many of the conferences I go to, as it mostly focuses on Solar system planetary science, with a bit of exploration thrown in. Exoplanets are a relatively recent addition to the lineup, and for this year were mostly present in a dynamics/atmospheres capacity. The EPSC 2013 logo is rather spectacular. (Credit: isar.cnrs-orleans.fr)

I'm spending this week in London for a conference, so my girlfriend and I thought that we'd take the chance to spend the weekend in the capital too. It was a good chance to catch up with some friends, and to do something that I've wanted to do for a few years - the BBC Proms in the Park. The Last Night of the Proms, Hyde Park style. (Credit: David Brown)

This evening marks the end of my first week in my new job. It's been a little odd at times, and a little frustrating at others, but I didn't expect it to be a cake walk. I'm cautiously optimistic though, and I think I'm going to enjoy working with alongside the astronomy group at Warwick. Sadly, none of these buildings is the Physics department. But it's a nice panorama of part of the Warwick campus, so I'm using it. (Credit: en.wikipedia.org)

In this whole mess that is me moving to a new job, moving house, putting stuff into storage, and trying to finish up my PhD all at the same time, there is a ray of hope. That's right, my thesis is complete! Celebration time! It's finished! I actually finished it last Monday, but I left the complete version with my supervisor for him to take a look at before Friday. Needless to say he'd forgotten to do so, so we spent half an hour going over a couple of sections on Friday afternoon, then I printed it out. Which took 3 hours! Yes, I was printing three copies, but I'd forgotten just how badly my high-resolution png images affected the printer. Every time it got to a page with one of more of my plots the printer sat there thinking for a minute or two, and there are a lot of plots in my thesis! Sadly this meant that I couldn't get it handed in before I left, so I tasked a couple of my friends with securing my supervisor's signature, getting it bound, ...

This is the first in what will likely end up being a series of posts. Because lets face it, moving sucks. And this particular move doesn't look like it's going to have an end any time soon... My last post was about my flat hunt  in Coventry in preparation for my new job. That was my penultimate week in St Andrews. My last week in St Andrews involved a lot of driving up and down the UK, and actually not that much time in town! Oh St Andrews, how I will miss thee. (Credit: David Brown)

Last week I finally decided to do something about my living arrangements for my new job, and go flat-hunting. Yay! I just love looking around for somewhere to live <\sarcasm> The first choice was whether to go for Coventry of Leamington Spa. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Warwick I stuck to Coventry, and after some deliberation and research decided to do the same this time around. I wanted to stick close enough that I could cycle to work, didn't particularly fancy dealing with the traffic getting to and from Leamington at rush-hour, and the prices in Leamington seemed to be a little higher. So Coventry it was.

It's a funny thing, but over the four years that I've spent in St Andrews I've only been to the Edinburgh Fringe festival for one day. Even that was only because a friend was up in Edinburgh and asked if I fancied seeing a couple of shows. I think it's one of those "you could go anytime, so you never actually get around to it" things. Well this weekend, with my girlfriend visiting St Andrews for the last time, I decided to do something about it. We spent most of the weekend in Edinburgh, and managed to see nine shows over two days. Since there's so much happening at the Fringe, we decided to limit ourselves to comedy shows., and to stick to free events as much as possible. We had a quick look through the website on Friday and picked out a couple of things we wanted to see.  But we weren't prepared for just how busy the Fringe was, how many people there would be, and how early we would need to start queuing for some of the shows! (Credit: s...

And now for something a little different from the run of Hollywood blockbusters and superhero films. Simon Pegg is back with the last in the 'Cornetto' trilogy, which means that it's comedy time. A loosely thematic trilogy rather than a story-based one, the 'Cornetto trilogy' comprises films that each involve a different colour, i.e. a different flavour of Cornetto. The 'red' film was "Shaun of the Dead", an excellent zom-rom-com (as Pegg termed it) that I've seen many times. The 'blue' film was "Hot Fuzz" which I'm told is an excellent buddy-cop style film. I own it on DVD but, to my chagrin, have never watched it. The final film is the 'green' instalment: "The World's End". Figuring out why it's the 'green' film is part of the fun, but the film as a whole is an excellent experience that had me laughing out loud the whole way through. I love this poster. It's so old-sc...

The summer blockbuster deluge continues with another superhero movie. This time it's the latest in the X-Men set of films, and the second one to focus on one of its most popular characters - Wolverine. The first standalone, "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" was an average film with some interesting but poorly executed ideas. Does "The Wolverine" rise above it to match "First Class" or "X2", or is it more of the same? The poster for this film is very, very cool. (Credit: thewolverinemovie.com)

It's been a long time since I had the opportunity to go to a decent gig. Almost five years in fact; the last one was Feeder at the Warwick University Student's Union in 2008! St Andrews isn't exactly blessed with decent opportunities, and I never knew what was going on in Dundee. Edinburgh and Glasgow weren't even worth looking at until I had a car. But now I do, and several months ago my friend at work asked if I fancied going to see "We Are Scientists" in Glasgow. It seemed like ages away but gradually snuck up on us, and yesterday the two of us made the trip across Scotland to go see the band. We Are Scientists on stage at the Oran Mor, Glasgow. It was an awesome gig. (Credit: David Brown)

Today I took part in the second of two Convergence of Cyriss release events for Warmachine. Like the first one it was sadly rather poorly attended (even more so this time around in fact, with only five of us), but fun in spite of that. A couple of last minute drops owing to real life issues contributed to the low turnout, and sadly took care of our two potential Convergence players, so it was fight to the death between Trollbloods, Pirates, Cryx, Cryx, and, errrr, Cryx! Actually it could have been all Cryx all the time, but the Pressganger had some Trollbloods with him and one of the local players popped home to get an alternative when he arrived to find so many undead players. 

I've just got back to St Andrews after a quick mid-summer family holiday. We didn't go anywhere particularly exciting, just to Center Parcs like we did last year. It was really enjoyable, and very relaxing all in all, although my brother and Mum might disagree! We're in the middle of a bit of a heat wave here in the UK at the moment, and so we didn't cram as much in to our visit as we have done in the past. A quick game of bowling on the Friday night, some Badminton Saturday and Monday, a quick go on the driving simulator for Dad, my brother and I, a pedalo on the lake, some American pool, and quick swim (it was really, really nice to get back in the pool and swim some lengths) were pretty much it. We did get in a few boardgames though, and I finally got to try out Battlestar Galactica, which is everything I was led to believe and more. The big event of the weekend was the spa evening that my brother, myself, and our girlfriends went to. I'd never been...

One of the staple television shows of my early childhood was "Power Rangers". I remember watching the original "Mighty Morphin" series right up through "Power Rangers in Space". I even watched "Lightspeed Rescue", "Time Force", and "Ninja Storm" before I fell out of touch. I think that's where my love of giant robots started. I then moved on to Mecha-based anime, with "Big-O" and the various "Gundam" series getting me hooked. Giant monsters also started with Power Rangers, and I have a curious soft spot for the mid-90s Godzilla film that everyone else seems to think is rubbish. There's something about giant fighting robots piloted by plucky heroes taking on giant monsters (or other robots) that's inherently cool in my mind. So you can imagine how excited I was when I first heard about "Pacific Rim". The fact that it was being directed by Guillermo del Toro was even better; I'...

Yesterday I travelled down to Worlds at War in Livingston for the first of two Convergence of Cyriss release events for Warmachine that I'll be attending. It was great to break out the Warmachine models again, and I had a lot of fun.

Some astronomy news today that I thought was too cool not to share. Astronomers have, for the first time, determined the colour of an exoplanet ! (I've linked to the free PDF preprint there, as the journal article itself is behind a paywall here ) Using the Hubble Space Telescope, a group led by astronomers from the University of Oxford observed secondary eclipses of the exoplanet HD189733. A secondary eclipse if the opposite of a transit event: the planet passes behind the star, leasing to a slight dimming of the total light from the system. In this case though, the group were observing the light that was reflected from the planet's atmosphere. Generally this is mixed in with light being given out by the planet thanks to its high temperature, but at the short wavelengths used for this work these 'thermal' effects are minimal, so the only light is the reflected starlight.  I'm very excited by this piece of science. A blue planet, with clouds made of part...

The summer blockbuster season is in full swing, and it's looking like another good year for geek films. We've already had a swathe of sci-fi and superhero films (not all of which I managed to see unfortunately), and the next few weeks see several more hitting the big screens. So lets take a look at the latest one, and review "Man of Steel" As I think I've mentioned before on this blog, my childhood superheroes of choice were Spiderman and the X-Men. Both are Marvel properties, and as I've grown older I've tended to prefer Batman to Superman as far as the DC stable goes. That's not down to the Dark Knight trilogy either, but to the excellent cartoon series that Batman has had over the years, mainly the original Animated Series and Batman of the Future. However, I do remember watching "The New Adventures of Superman" with my Mum. "It's not an S. On my planet it means hope." The new logo looks very cool indeed, and has ...

This week has been a busy one for astronomy here in St Andrews. Not because of any goings on at work, but because there's been a big conference in town! Several hundred astronomers descended on our little corner of Fife for the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting (NAM). The 2013 edition (dubbed 'St NAMdrews' by some witty folk) finished off yesterday, and it's been an enjoyable week.

Today was a said day. I've spent the weekend packing up all of my stuff, and today I moved out of the house that I've lived in for the last three years.