Jonathan Stott

It’s been a while, but I’ve finally found time to upgrade Wordpress and actually get my blog fixed. All I need now is something to blog about

I’ve never really done the whole resolution thing for the start of a new year, but seeing as this is the first full year where I don’t have any Ph.D. to worry about (well, apart from the graduation in July!), I thought I’d think up a few and see how I get on.

So, in no particular order, here they are:

• Be less lazy (aka. stop putting things off until “later”)
• Get to know some people near where I live (because I just haven’t had time up to now!)
• Build a scale model of Canterbury Cathedral in Lego (this will be the hardest of the lot!)
• Walk the South West Coast Path (I’ve already started on this one having walked from Studland to Swanage yesterday - just another 623 miles to go!
• Explore more of Dorset (it’s a big county and I’ve hardly seen any of it since moving here nearly two years ago)
• Start saving for a deposit towards a house (and hope that the market doesn’t start recovering until the end of 2010!)

We shall see how far I get with these this time next year!

Google Maps is keen to show place names in the local language, which is why it will say “Deutschland” instead of “Germany” and “Italia” instead of “Italy”.

Which is all fine and well, but they have made a slight faux pas with Wales. Along the border with England, Wales is written as “An Bhreatain Bheag” as opposed to the more usual “Cymru”. Turns out that An Bhreatain Bheag is Gaelic for Wales!

Things have been rather hectic for the last few months, mainly because I’ve been finishing off my thesis corrections and also been very busy at work.

The good news is that my thesis is now finished! It went off to the bookbinders (all 366 pages of it) a couple of weeks ago and I should have a bound copy in my hands in the next couple of weeks. It hasn’t quite sunk in yet that it is finished - I suspect that will only happen when I have a copy of it all bound up! We are hoping to put together two journal papers in the next month or two, mainly covering the empirical experiment and analysis that we did.

The only disappointing aspect of my PhD is that I will have to wait until next July before I can graduate as I missed the deadline for the November graduations by a week. It wasn’t for want of trying though, but I was more concerned about getting everything right rather than rushing it and missing stuff.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get everything tidy and sorted out. Hopefully by the end of the year I can be properly organised and everything will have returned to normality. Not that I’m sure what “normality” is yet!

So we’ve finally moved into our new offices at work. And quite swish they are too! I even get my own whiteboard to write stuff on, as well as a desk next to a window so that I can get real fresh air. Of course, there’s loads of stuff still to sort out - I haven’t worked out the tea situation yet and I think we are going to have to decide on a rota for biscuits for the development team (otherwise we will all grind to a halt!).

The main difference for me is the commute. It still takes about the same amount of time but instead of getting the bus or walking to the old office at Southampton University I have to take my bike and cycle to the new office. At least it will get me some much needed exercise!

At the same time as moving office we also shuffled a couple of servers into a new data centre. This was a bit more stressful than I’d anticipated - we had to fix a non-existent networking problem on one of the servers and make sure they were configured for the new network. Then there’s the hassle of some stuff that was still referencing one of the servers by IP address (bad!)… I was still at the data centre after 7pm on Friday - a time that no self-respecting sysadmin would expect to be at work! Luckily most stuff went without a hitch, even though it did take us rather longer than expected to work out how to install the servers in the racks. And more importantly, all the disaster plans that I wrote in case the van with the servers was rear-ended on the M25 or hijacked in Basingstoke weren’t needed!

Anyway - I need to go and sort out those blasted TPS reports…

So I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of doing the corrections for my Ph.D. thesis this weekend after being ill for a while. I’m pleased with what I’ve managed to get done so far but I’m probably only about half-way through with the corrections.

There were nearly 200 corrections after my viva back in January - some of them were rather fundamental and a lot of them have required a lot of re-reading of the literature. I’ve also had to add new references in to quite a few places to reinforce what I’ve been saying. As a result, the whole thing is now some 60 pages longer than when I submitted it! This is mainly as a result of having to expand in some detail pretty much all of the background chapter as I had misjudged the amount of detail needed when I was discussing existing research. Hopefully an extra dozen figures and 20 pages will help!

Hopefully it will be finished by the end of June. I really don’t want it to drag on any longer than that and spoil another summer. I also need to make sure that I am finished in time for the graduation ceremony in November!

Just one week ago, it was snowing!

Yet this week it is lovely and sunny!

Something I didn’t expect I’d see after moving to Bournemouth!

I don’t know when I’m likely to see snow on a beach again!

I splashed out £1932 at the end of December to get a season ticket for the trains between Bournemouth and Southampton. Seems a lot all in one go but it works out significantly cheaper than running a car just for the sake of getting to work and back.

I had previously been spending £10.10 a day on return tickets and the service had proved very reliable for the time I was using it between April and December last year. In fact, I think the longest delay that I had in all that time was 10 or 15 minutes.

Since I got my season ticket though, that’s all changed! In just the last fortnight I’ve had to endure two and a half hours of delays. First a train broke down just outside Bournemouth fouling the line. Unfortunately this was on the morning that I was going to Canterbury for the viva voce for my PhD! Not a good start! Yesterday, a broken rail at Brockenhurst meant that there were no trains running to Southampton all morning. I had to wait 45 minutes for a bus which then took an hour to get to Southampton rather than the half an hour that the train would take. And this morning the guard for my train went AWOL and was “delayed” for 20 minutes!

Last month my journey home on two successive days was screwed up by someone jumping/falling in front of a train at Hinton Admiral and by flooding at Sway.

Sadly, with a season ticket you don’t get any compensation on these delays until you renew. If I’d bought tickets on the day I would have been entitled to refunds on the price of my ticket for at least the problems with the broken down train and the broken rail.

Hopefully things get better soon! I don’t really want to be leaving an hour earlier than usual just in case things go pear-shaped :-/