The server that this website runs on has just had a major OS upgrade, and has also just changed from 32-bit to 64-bit at the same time. This took the better part of a day to debug and poke into working. There may still be some rusty bits that fall over if poked too hard.
One annoyance I have right now is that my old wordpress theme has been declared unworthy and is no longer offered. I have a choice of three themes, no one which seem to put a side-bar up, all links are relegated to the footer – probably so things look good on mobile.
I’ve had a new job since my last New Job post but I didn’t post about that one for some reason. I migrated away from water sensors years ago and took up playing with X-rays. Now, my new new job is an evolution of my old new job playing with X-rays.
My new new job is as a lecturer in Imaging and Calcified Tissues in a dental school. I’m not a dentist, I’m still a physicist, but one that’s now slightly less squeamish about teeth.
I’ve been tidying up. I found an old work book from my last year at primary school. On the 7th September I wrote a story called The Magic Sweets. I have no memory of writing this, but I present it here.
The Magic Sweets page 1
The Magic Sweets page 2
The Magic Sweets
One day I went into a shop I had never been in before when I went in I saw it was a sweet shop. Inside were rows of jars. On the counter were two jars of sweets. One jar said magic sweets and the other one said UFO pills. I didn’t like the sound of UFO pills. So I got some magic sweets when I got out I had one I felt a bang in my head I was back in time. I looked at my watch. It had turned into a time gauge I was at the time of the beginning of the universe. Everything was black then I saw a flash a fireball had exploded and everything was created. But then the sweet wore off. So I took a blue one then I went into the future. But the sweet wore off so I went to school and saved them for a different day.
An interesting idea David. Take care with letter shapes. (Mr Luxford, my teacher)
I live in the UK and I’m an amateur astronomer, I’m very familiar with the vagaries of the weather and how a run of seemingly perfect days (nights) before an astronomical event will come to a crashing halt with a sky of clouds scant hours before the event starts.
With this in mind, and after a run of days with perfect blues skies, I’d decided to not make a great effort to view the eclipse; instead I just took a small, cheap spotting ‘scope to work with the intention of using it to project an image of the sun if the sun ever became visible.
Ten minutes before maximum eclipse there was no sun to be seen, not even a dim disc though the clouds, just a diffuse glow. Undaunted, I set the telescope up on a crap tripod I had laying around the lab and got it roughly pointed at the sun. I improvised a sunshield around the objective lens with a bit of cardboard box. The projection screen was some copier paper suck to a Tea-tray.
The sky cleared several times around maximum eclipse and I managed to snap a few photos and do a bit of impromptu science communication with people wondering what I was doing.
I took a short trip to Dagenham East for the first of my vaccinations this morning. No queue at the site, I was in and out in less than 10 minutes. The staff were very insistent I took a sticker, I wanted one anyway.
No side effects so far. Injection site feels a little bruised, but that’s all.
