The Man with No Time

This past weekend I made my way down to London for SmogCon V, the latest incarnation of Europe's biggest and best Warmachine convention. My first visit was last year, and I had such a great time that I just had to go back. Spoiler alert: I'll be heading back next year too. Rather than giving a blow-by-blow of all of my games, I thought I'd give an overview of what I did, where I spent most of my time, and my results. Then I'll do a separate photodump post of the best snaps that I managed to take. A blow-by-blow might follow at a later date if I can be bothered (and have the time).

In my opinion, one of the most important aspects of an academic career is public outreach. Sadly, I think it's also one of the least appreciated aspects among the people occupying said academic careers, and usually the first to be dropped when time and/or funding is tight. As a PhD student I was heavily involved in the operation of the Astronomy department's mobile, inflatable planetarium. I even coordinated the program for two and a half years! We travelled all over Eastern Scotland giving shows to the public, and I loved it. Since starting my Postdoc position I've given several public talks, mostly at careers events. These have been great fun, and I learnt a lot about presenting from one of the outreach officers in the department at Warwick. But in the last six months or so I've started getting involved in a different side of the public engagement game - press interviews. These have been simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying, but on the whole I've e...

2016 is off to a pretty terrible start, and it's barely February. 2015 was a pretty terrible year as far as deaths go. We lost so many of the great and the good, including Sir Terry Pratchett, Leonard Nimoy, Christopher Lee, Cilla Black, and Jonah Lomu. And that's just the people connected with my own interests and hobbies. But January 2016 has just been awful; we've lost three legends to cancer in the space of four weeks. First was David Bowie, who had been undergoing a private battle with cancer. While not a huge fan of his music, I did quite enjoy some of it, and I could certainly appreciate the influence that he'd had on the industry, not to mention film, television, and fashion.  Then it was Alan Rickman, again from cancer that he had kept private. This one hurt. I've watched Alan Rickman in many good films, and some great ones. Die Hard, Dogma, and of course the Harry Potter series for which he's perhaps most famous. Between them these films...

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE! Rather than making 'traditional' New Year's resolutions, I like to set myself a few goals to try and meet each year. The number of goals I set seems to increase every year, and covers the gamut of my activities, from work to gaming via TV, books, and sport. I find that doing this helps my balance my various hobbies, and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Over the last few years my success at meeting these goals has seen a rather precipitous decline! But still I persevere. At the very least it's entertaining to see how badly I do each year. As per usual, I'll be trying to make my goals relatively achievable. In some cases I'll be building on experience from the last couple of years (a '*' marks those carried over from 2015).

As part of my traditional New Year restrospective, I set myself a series of personal goals for 2015. These covered a range of hobbies, my work, sport, etc., and were designed to be at least vaguely achievable. In 2013 I did pretty well, but 2014 was a bit of failure. So how did 2015 go? Well........in a word, poorly.

Just over a week ago I had an absolutely awesome experience - I spent three days at a hotel just next to Heathrow airport. Which doesn't sound so great, until I say that it was my first experience of a convention. Specifically SmogCon 2015, the UK's biggest Warmachine convention, and the only US-style gaming convention in the UK (and possibly Europe, though I'm not sure that's entirely true).  As I said, I had an awesome time. I'd been hoping to go for the last couple of years, but was either a) in Scotland, or b) forgetful and missed the tickets sale. This year I was actually at orchestra when tickets went on sale, but fortunately there were still about 50 left when I got home and I managed to snag one. I decided pretty early on that I wouldn't bother trying for any of the tournaments; instead I'd spend all my time in the casual play area playing pick-up games of Warmachine/Hordes, or trying out some of the boardgames. I'm quite pleased with that ...

Just a quick drive-by post today - as of 9:00am this morning I'm now officially a member of the Department of Physics at the University of Warwick. That's right, I started my new job, and now I'm actually employed by the place that I work, rather than being a permanent 'visitor' (hah!). I don't expect much will change; I've been here for a year and a quarter already after all, and I've pretty much been doing my new job for a month already. But it's nice to have stability for a bit longer than I did before. The new job is 50% research, 50% project office work for the PLATO Science Consortium . Which should be a lot of fun, as long as I get to maintain my research time (which is something that I'm definitely going to have to fight for). Anyway, I guess I'd better get back to work. I hope to get some more posts up fairly soon about some stuff I've been up to recently.