And so another N.A.M. has ended – I am writing this on the long train journey home. Luckily I booked my seat long before Eyjafjallajokull started to stir, and ground all the planes (unlike many that could not make it, or get back). The N.A.M. was at Glasgow University, close to the centre of the city, the university is an ancient one with many pretty old buildings that look like they belong in a work of fiction.

My main reason for coming to the N.A.M. was the launch of the SuperWASP public archive. I have been working on this for around a year now, and on Monday it was officially let loose on the public. This first data release has 14 billion data points and over 3.5 million images now available to be queried and downloaded. The general consensus among the people I spoke to about it was that it will be a very useful resource. The trouble I am having is that it is rather difficult to get people excited about an astronomical data base, and then getting them to tell their friends!

As ever with N.A.M.s there was a wide range of sessions to go to, one that I particularly enjoyed was the software astronomy session. In it the chair introduced the term astroinformaticsto me as a way of describing what it is that I do – a much sexier title than archive scientist me thinks

As you would expect there were a few people rather irate at the open forum which had representatives from the funding councils. One poor guy told us how he had his three year post-doc ended one year in, with one months notice, due to the current funding issues. Needless to say, this is precisely why more and more of my friends are moving abroad.

Besides the conference I did get to do some other stuff – mainly revolving around drinking of some description. The conference dinner was in the Kelvingrive museum, which was pretty cool. And so it is that I am heading back to Leicester with a bottle of double matured lagavulin in my case, and a head full of new ideas…

So I am in La Palma doing my astronomy thing. Or rather not doing my astronomy thing because of the weather I am supposed to be using an instrument called FIES on the NOT to do radial velocity measurements with some of the folk from Queens to look for exoplanets, but alas it is too cold.

(The rest of my photos are on the photos page.)

Last night we observed until about 1:30 when it got cloudy, and when I say cloudy what I mean is the clouds descended and we were in them. Then tonight we got as far as opening the dome when it got too humid again, so we had to stop. Ordinarily when the humidity drops you can start observing again, but the temperature here is cold, very cold, so everything is freezing. We had to drive down from the telescope to the residence, and we had the support astronomer drive with us – as the roads were frozen. His advice to us when driving down was not to wear our seatbelts so we could jump out of the car if we start sliding towards the cliff edge. Hmmm. Oh well we made it down anyway and am now sitting in the residence. The temperature is rising now though, so we may end up going back to the telescope tonight….

My journey here was fairly uneventful, I came via Madrid (and didn’t lose my luggage), then Tenerife. The only thing that did phase me somewhat was when I saw the tiny little plane that goes from Tenerife to La Palma, it was a tiny little two propellar engine jobbie. Ho hum, it got me here I suppose.

Tomorrow I go back down the mountain in the afternoon, but my flight back doesn’t leave until Sunday, so I have to spend a night in that four star hotel with the indoor waterfall and heated swimming pool.

It’s a tough life this astronomy malarkey.

So I have spent most of today tinkering with my server, it now runs php5 I had to do this as I am thinking about playing with the facebook API and that needs php5.

All the pages on this site are finally valid CSS (including the family tree page – screw you microsoft!). The question now arises of weather I have a go making the whole site xhtml strict instead of transitional.

And who said I don’t have a life?!

Well I finally made the leap into true geekishness and got my own server to play with (actually its not my own it’s shared, but you get the idea). After much research (actually I just asked Mike which one he went with) I went with Memset, and for less than £30 p/m I get 15GB to play with on a Debain server.

It took me AGES to get it all set up, but now I think I am on top of it, I am running a couple of domains from it and think I know where everything is, so all is good. Ollyandbecca is now hosted on there, so, in theory, it should be more stable now and so all you lovely people can keep up with my endeveours easier. Enjoy

The work I’m doing for the schome people in second life has taken a bit of a turn, now they want me to learn ruby on rails so that I can help out with the development of new stuff and also be a backup if our ruby guy falls under a bus. So with less than two weeks to go before the big launch day I have started to read around stuff. It is something I have been toying with doing for a while, so to be getting paid to do it is great. It claims to be the best thing ever, I am dubious but I’ll give it a shot. So who knows, in a few weeks I may have thrown wordpress to the gutter and have written my own blogging engine!

I was just looking for a rss feed aggregator and I happened across google reader, this is awesome! It lets you subscribe to as many rss feeds as you want and it displays the newest content on one page for you. You can even make a public page of your feeds so you can share them with your friends. Is there anything google can’t do?

The only downside is that it means no one will ever vist my blog again

RSS (Really Simple Sydication) is an easy way to keep up to date with stuff without having to go to all the effort of visiting a webpage! So with this is mind I have made your life a little easier and enabled it on the blog:)

There are two main ways of doing it (that I have figured out so far),
1 – LiveBookmarks – These are dynamic bookmarks which show many things, so a livebookmark of this blog will show the most recent posts, that way you know when a new post is made.

2 – Syndication – Those enlightened few that use some kind of RSS feed reader can paste this link (http://www.ollyandbecca.co.uk/blog/wp-feed.php) into it and any new stuff will scroll seemlessly across the page at your leisure. I use this, it’s ok.

Any other suggestions/problems are welcome.

I have been thinking about the future direction of my blog, I think that I am going to start posting more often and about more stuff. Bint is thinking that she may start posting things like recipes and generally venting her anger about life.

Now that I am getting better at CSS I will make this page pretty Also, I will probably start syndicating the posts/comments so the lazy among you can just RSS it. I may put the most recent entry on the front page too. If anyone has any suggestions/ideas of what else would be good to have then that would be cool.

I have almost finished migrating the house stuff into here (see the house category), just need to do the comments, then I shall do the fattie stuff.

As even the baffoons among you may realise I have made a new blog. This is going to serve as a general purpose blog for me and Becca. I will also move all the old house stuff and fattie stuff over to this too.

I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to let Becca have the freedom to do what she wants here, but I guess I can always delete her stuff, I am the administrator after all