I just logged on to update a couple of my links and I was checking out my stats and discovered that I can see what people who have come here from Google have searched for…

• 4 people searched for ‘chocolate birthday cake for ladies’;
• 3 people searched for ‘capybaras’;
• 2 people searched for ‘hairy Japanese’;
• 2 other people searched for ’sexy banna’ – which Charlotte and I initially misread as ’sexy banana’ which would have been way funnier. What’s a sexy banna?;
• and one person searched for ‘high five lesbian’.

Interesting.

In a more boring note, most of my visitors have been searching for information about Sony eBook Readers but I am also getting lots of hits from people looking for info about SRS and Dr. Chettawut which I feel really good about as it means that page is serving it’s purpose very well.

Take a close look at the tree on the left. This is the Christmas tree in a very well-known local shopping centre that shall remain nameless. Remind you of anything?

The second tree is ours. Much more tasteful isn’t it? It is very small, only about a foot high, but I do think it makes up for it in beauty. As on so many occasions the photo fails to do it justice. The tree and all of the little ornaments are all handcrafted in wood, and I think it’s just brilliant.

Finally, coming home from Lishi one evening I noticed all the bins in Northumberland Street had been removed and all the police swarming around with machine guns that day hadn’t gone unnoticed either. Charlotte and I were talking about it later and I said to her, ‘Do you think the Queen’s coming to visit her granddaughter?’.

Well, I’m good me. I came in to work on the Friday morning and all the talk was of a secret royal visit. One of my well networked colleagues had heard on the grapevine that if you happened to be in and around Northumberland Street mid-morning you might well get to meet the Queen. So at 11am almost the entire office all headed out in the freezing cold and I got to stand around six feet from the Queen for, probably less than a second, as she sped past me in her big posh car. Officially she was here to open the new City Library and the refurbished Hancock Museum.

I’m by no means a Royalist, but how often in your life do you get to see the Queen? It was very cool, and the coolest thing of all was that her big posh car has exactly the same interior as my Rover!

And yes, the photos are rubbish. I’m no photographer, and they were taken on my humble wittle iPhone.

What seems way back now, in the beginning of November, Charlotte and I were privileged enough to attend the premiere of The Men Who Stare at Goats at the Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle. Well, there were actually two premiers. The other one was in New York and had George Clooney and Ewan McGregor. Newcastle’s not good enough for them apparently. But we got the screenwriter, Peter Straughan who’s from Gateshead, the producer, Paul Lister, and the author of the book, Jon Ronson. It was a cracking evening, the guys gave a group interview before the movie (which is fabulous by the way, kind of Coen brothers style) and a question and answer session after. Then Jon hung around signing copies of the book – he even signed my goat poster! – and I gave him a pen advertising my department at the university because the one he had been given by the cinema was rubbish for signing, apparently.

http://www.tynesidecinema.co.uk/index.php

I’ve been rather remiss in my blogging of late, so let’s put that right today with the first of three that I’ve had in my head to write for a while…

It’s hard to believe that my exams are now over and done for the year, and I’m actually already starting to prepare for 2010. I spent the first half of October frantically revising and the second half, post-exam, mentally drained and good for nothing. The exam itself I think, I hope, has gone okay. I was able to give complete answers to all three questions and I don’t believe any of them were complete crap, but I’ll find out the week before Christmas how well I have actually done.

The first question I answered was on the theme of ‘freedom’ and this was my best and most complete answer, contrasting the idea of negative liberty as advocated by Mill with Marx’s conception of positive liberty and throwing in some Rousseau for good measure. My second essay was on the ‘dirty hands’ problem of politics with reference to Machiavelli which was okay – it was a good three page essay but it wasn’t ordered properly. I got through a couple of paragraphs before I realised that I really needed to have given some exposition first so I had to interweave it a little. My third essay was on Mill and whether or not it could ever be right for a state to restrict freedom of expression. This was easily the weakest of the three because I was starting to run out of time and had to rush it a little, but I still managed two pages. Also, unlike my first two essays, I was able to think of a different, possibly better way to answer the question after the exam.

Oh well. December 18th is the provisional date for my results.

Just a quicke because this happened ages ago, but I didn’t have the time to post about it then because I was busy revising and I’ve only just now found the photo again. One Saturday, when it was still warm enough to keep your windows open, Charlotte was sitting at her desk working on a model when a wee ladybug flew in and landed in her box. Can you spot it?

If you happened to catch the local North East news on Tuesday evening you may have seen a feature on the opening of the new Planetarium in Newcastle’s Centre for Life, the largest of its kind in the North. Well, Charlotte and I were there.

Actually, it’s not so much a new planetarium, I know, because we’ve been too it before! But it has been enlarged and the projection system upgraded. Before the grand opening we were treated to an excellent lecture on the origins and nature of the universe by one of the country’s leading cosmologists, Professor Carlos Frenk. I know it was good because I enjoyed it and learned a few things, and because it made my head hurt. Hard science always has the tendency to make my head hurt.

After the lecture we got to spend some time in the centre’s exhibition space playing with the dinosaurs while enjoying some specially commissioned ‘space’ cocktails – they made my head feel light and fluffy – before the opening of the planetarium itself and a thirty minute compilation of some of the centre’s best planetarium shows, one of which was in 3D. That made my eyes hurt, but it was very impressive none the less. There’s nothing quite like the experience, it’s so much more than what you can ever get at a cinema or anywhere else because it’s a total immersion experience. The new planetarium is a dome 10 meters in diameter which provides a full 180 degree immersion experience. The 3D animation sequences made me feel like a goddess in my chair, floating through my creation to admire it and the visual experience is complimented by an equally impressive sound system powerful enough to make your chair shake and vibrate at all the right places.

The planetarium show didn’t make my head hurt, or go light and fluffy, but it did make my legs wobbly.

http://star-www.dur.ac.uk/~csf/

http://www.life.org.uk/life-science-centre/news/life-news-press-enquiries/astronomy-expert-launches-regions-largest-planetarium

Just to let anyone who is interested know that I was able to return the PRS-600 to the Sony Store without any problems, although the sales girl did try and get me to part exchange for the new PRS-300! I declined, politely. If my 505 goes down the crapper for whatever reason it will be the 300 that replaces it, but I’ll not worry about that unless it comes to it.

http://www.sony.co.uk/hub/reader-ebook/block/3

Is Gizmo a war criminal?

I have Gremlins 2 in mind specifically. Yes, the Gremlins bully him. You could go so far as to say they torture him, but the worst they do is put him in a photocopier and pull velcro off him, not really bad torture like pulling out finger nails or cutting off limbs… But Gizmo’s reaction is to kill Mohawk! And he doesn’t make it quick and clean either – he sets him on fire and watches him burn to death. Isn’t that a little disproportionate?

Back in February I bought a Sony eBook reader, the PRS-505, and I wrote an epic review extolling it’s virtues. Well, the new one is out now, the PRS-600 or Touch Edition, and me being me I bought one almost as soon as they came out. (Oh, how I bemoan my lack of impulse control sometimes…)

The new design of the device itself and the user interface is much more polished than the old one, much cleaner, nicer, and the new features are all fabulous. It has a touch screen display which allows you to make annotations and notes on the books you are reading which, as a student, should have been a killer feature for me, and a dictionary that allows you to tap on a word and the definition will pop up along the bottom – a not essential, but very handy feature.

There is only one, tiny little problem… Actually reading books on the device  sucks.

To add the touch screen features a layer of plastic has been imposed on top of the eInk display underneath, and this layer makes the screen murky and highly reflective.

Of course I’m not daft, I read reviews of the device from other bloggers before buying and there was a consensus that the screen wasn’t as good as the PRS-505, but the verdict was around 50-50 on whether or not it was good enough. I went to a Sony store, where of course the lighting was perfect, played with their display model for five minutes and thought the screen was just fine and dandy, but once I got back home with my newly purchased one and took it out in my living room I was really disappointed. In even slightly imperfect lighting conditions I found the reflections too distracting and the screen too dull and murky to be able to read. When I got my PRS-505 out and put them side-by-side it was depressing. It’s sad when an old model so completely outshines the new, shiny one.

I want to like this device, the new design and features are impressive, but the whole point of eBook readers is the brilliant eInk display which is like reading print on paper. The PRS-600 has one of these brilliant eInk displays, but Sony have gone and ruined it by putting on the horrible plastic touch screen in front of it.

I’ll be returning mine tomorrow, and sticking with my fantabulous PRS-505 for another year.