The smell of polycarbonate in the evening

While trying to find one of the 472342 win2k install CDs I thought I had laying around the place, I came across a pile of ancient backups and debian/knoppix/gentoo install disks.

In these blighted times, with identity thieves hiding around every corner and plundering every rubbish bag, the only sane course of action prior to disposing of the disks is to snap them in two nuke them on high for several seconds in the microwave.

My microwave is glitter coated. My kitchen smells of warm polycarbonate. The identity thieves are foiled again. And I have a large grin on my face.

Some things you never tire of.

An ‘R’ in the weekend

Saturday:

Regent’s Recreation: Recording rhythmic revolutions.
I took photos of friends at the Alfresco dance event in Regent’s Park

Sunday:

Reading: Requesting / reacquiring requisite resource.
I gave the Dagenham Town Show a miss and went instead to an electronics fair in Reading

Clueful evil

The visitor turned out to be of the clueful-evil variety – a scientist turned administrative bean-counter. Luck had it that the lash-up experiment was buried under a pile of other equipment I’d just moved into the lab. I was honestly able to say I was working on sorting everything out.

There was a brief discussion regarding the future direction of the project and I showed him the results that had been emailed to me, deflecting his questions due to lack of knowledge of how the results were gained. The next (first?) milestone to hit is verified results by early September. I’m going to be very busy for a few weeks…

Bullshit baffles brains?

The new job is going reasonably well, I’m not sure that I’m over-keen at being introduced to people as the solution to all their troubles, but I hope I can be useful.

Tomorrow I have to entertain, persuade and divert some industrial partner visitors. Progress on the project they are coming to see is pretty much non-existent and the person working on it is, rather conveniently, away from looking after her sick child…

Tomorrow I’ll probably quickly set up a laser and some optics to launch some light into the sensor to at least make it look plausible (it might even work…), but explain I can’t show any results yet because I don’t have the samples (this is true, I don’t even know what the samples are).

Hopefully a spot of hand waving and illusion will send them off thinking they’ve seen something great, after all we are supposed to know more about this side of the project than they are.

Of course if they send someone possessed of a clue, I’ll just explain the situation and pick their brains for some ideas.