My Dog

At home we have many pets, I have to say I miss not having pets around – well we have a hamster but they aren’t the most entertaining of pets. Probably our most entertaining pet is our dog, Max (otherwise known as Maxwell, Mac, Maccy, Macca and various similar terms). Ok by now you will be thinking why the heck is he going on about his pets? Fair enough question but there is an easy answer. My mom was moaning that I said I would put some pictures online of our pets and I didn’t, so here you go:

It’s hot – too hot

As a typical Brit I am now complaining, not because it is wet dank and cold but because the thing that we always complain we don’t have is here. Yes that’s it, the warm weather. I have to say I prefer the winter – at least then I can turn up the heating. The summer has its benefits but I just hate it when it is so humid. This weather gives me a huge headache – well that probably isn’t helped by using a computer all the time!

Wonderful Images of the Quintuplet Cluster

All I have to say is wow! I love some of the X-ray images, they just have such a cool contrast, I am not entirely sure what it is but something really appeals to me. Credit: NASA/CXC/Northwestern U./C.Law & F.Yusef-Zadeh For more about this take a look at: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/quint/

Fun with my new phone

Today I played around with my new phone more than I did work! Well that is not quite true, I got quite a bit done. After a chat with my supervisor I now know how to insert pictures in LaTeX – actually I think I did all along I just think I am having some sort of problem with MikTeX. I am going to figure that out at some point – not now since I have access to the Astrophysics and Space Research server. Oh and look at this beautiful Hubble image just released: Credits: NASA, ESA, J. Blakeslee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University) See: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2004/21/

Three is a magic number

I have gone 3G! Yep that means third generation mobile phone. I have got the NEC e313, and I got it for cheap – well it was cheap but it was a gift of my mom, so a big thanks to her. It is brilliant, some of the features are wow – especially my cool video camera – expect many posts to now contain dodgy pictures taken by this. You may not think great, but I will. I always see things that I would like to comment on whilst I am out but alas no camera – that’s all changed now. All I can say is I hope Three’s service is as good as the cool gadgets!

Saturn’s beautiful rings

Cassini is getting "up close and personal" with Saturn and recently captured some wonderful images of its rings, well I will not describe them (that would be stupid!) – go view them! see: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05421 or look below: Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute If you go and download the high resolution it is wonderful the pixelisation is tiny and I bet they have even better photos.

I’m number 1 on Google!

At last if you type in "samuel george" (click on the link for the exact search string) on google.co.uk (the worlds best search engine) you get me! I am so pleased, it means that people actually come here! 🙂 I am very pleased, I wonder how long it will last.

Information isn’t lost

Hawking has backed down about his ideas of information being mangled within black holes and possibly being sent to other universes. As he even said this is bad news for the sci-fi fans out there (Hawking: I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes."). No!!!!! bye bye the sci-fi dreams. For more, see: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996193

Rugby, the curse

Last night I was convinced by Steve to go and play rugby – something I haven’t done in a long time. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed myself, well up till the point that I pulled my hamstring. Since we were only playing touch rugby my usual charge and hit the deck tactic does not work, it is more a question of speed. SInce it is about speed when I got the ball in a very attacking position instead of charging through I tried to increase the pace, I managed to do it but at the same time by over extending my hamstring, ouch! I scored, I was happy – then in agony – bye bye rest of game. It was lots of fun – even just watching was.

Learning LaTeX

I am in the process of learning LaTeX, my latest endeavor to increase my computing knowledge and help me with my summer project. It is going well. I am currently installing MiKTeX so I can use it on Windows, I could do it on Linux very easily but I do like to use windows still. This is mainly so I can just have a game when I want a break from work and the fact that I am still very new to Linux. To help me with learning LaTeX I am using "The Not so short introduction to Latex 2E" (pdf version here), this is quite funny with comments in it like "Real Men Use Unix"! (see page 22 of the pdf file). Anyway back to it I think.