We are (all) scientists

Y'all (well, the eagle-eyed amongst you) will have spotted a small image on the right-hand side of this blog, with a list of some random numbers and meaningless acronyms. For clarity, I've added the image again below:

This is my small contribution to the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) - a silly acronym, but a very worthy cause. BOINC allows you to take the spare processing capacity on any computer you own, and donate it to scientific projects from around the world. Simply download a small piece of software, select a bunch of projects you're interested in, and it pretty much looks after itself from there. You can choose to limit the amount of disk space / processor / bandwidth usage, as well as what day of the week and time of day BOINC will run at (I run at 100% 24/7, on both the machines I have it installed on - HARDCORE). I'm mostly writing this post cos I'm chuffed that I broke the 100,000 credits mark (you get credits for the amount of tasks your machines have completed), but I think it's worthwhile writing about such a tremendously useful endeavour anyway.

The projects that I subscribe to are a mix of very worthy causes: Climate Prediction, fairly self-explanatory; and Rosetta, a project looking at ways to combine proteins that will hopefully lead to the creation of new medicines), and personal quests: SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) - how cool would it be to discover the first ET transmission! Right now, the desktop I'm writing this at is also analysing data that was recorded by the Arecibo radio telescope on the 10th December 2008, scanning for patterns, signal amongst the background noise of the cosmos.



Make this your good deed for the day - download and install the BOINC client, and put your machine's spare time to good use :)

AEP: falling slowly

My Last.fm AEP has dropped from 4.04 to 4.02. The reason? I would imagine it was as a result of scrobbling waaaay too many Christmas tunes over the holidays. Lesson learned: sign out of Last.fm before over-indulging in Christmas cheese...

Must go and listen to some of the more obscure items in my collection to try and get back to the snobbish heights of 4.04 - anybody in the mood for some sacred minimalist dissonant modernist compositions? :)

I'm a model if you know what i mean

To complete this evening's Fionn-flood, here's the boy-wonder rockin his new outfits from Eoin and Holly. Thanks guys!

Do the locomotion...

Fionn's first trick:

Oh good, now he's mobile...

Happy New Year to all my avid readers!

Banned? Aw, come on...

Chrome (yes, I'm still using it, more on this at a later stage) has found a new friend:

This gets my vote for "least friendliest error message of the year". The site is FishingFan - I'm not sure how or why I stumbled there, but I think I'm glad I'm banned...

A "Don't F**k With Me" look on his face

I've just spent the past 25 minutes walking the floor of my in-law's spare bedroom with an 8 kilo bag of demons clutched tightly against my chest. 

Fionn has had an eventful day, travelling West, home for the holidays, and his regular sleep pattern has been disturbed. You just try and put me to bed Dad. Hands-on at the best of times, this evening's nap has quickly escalated into a battle of wills. Enraged with tiredness and a deep sense of injustice, my only tactic is to hold him close, using shush-pat and soothing words to try and get him to relax enough for sleep to take over.

As I pace, sweating, back and neck beginning to spasm, I think back on all the times I've been driven close to the edge by him - all the times he refused to sleep, refused to stop crying, all the times I came close to giving voice to every parent's dark secret: sometimes, just sometimes, you could almost convince yourself that you hate your child, that you are the victim here, that they are being so unreasonable...

I keep pacing, and before too long he let's go and drifts off. It's the very least I owe him. Goodnight Fionn.

Shout out to my crew

A big Christmas hello to the eBU - you know who you are....