New mobile ‘phone

My old T-mobile contract was costing me a small fortune per month. I mainly make calls in the daytime, so all the contract free time in the evenings and weekends was essientially useless and unused. The new contract with Orange nets me 200 min free calls anytime and costs £30 per month. New contract promotions [1] change this to 400 min calls and £15 for the first 6 months add to that the free [2] ‘phone and I think I got a pretty good deal.

There is something a little strange in the fact that my new ‘phone runs somewhere between 10 and 50 times faster than my first ever computer and has a shade over 320x the RAM. I wonder if there is a Sinclair Spectrum emulator available…

k700i - new phone

[1] May require the acceptance of vast quantities of spam email and just mail by post. I don’t care, I use a spam filter and have a paper shredder.
[2] Free in the sense Orange hope I’ll spend enough on the contract to pay for the ‘phone in the first 12 months.

bah!

That didn’t last long. I’m not even in the top 10 any more for “Papal Explosion” do not even apear if you search for the term with quotes around it.
*sulk*

New Camera

I’ve traded in my old Sony DSC-P32 digital camera for something a bit better – the Fujifilm S3500. I now have quite a bit more control over the images I take. Not quite full manual control, but a lot better than point and shoot.

This was one of the first pictures I took with the new camera, it is far for technically perfect, but I rather like it.
Taken on the Mile End stretch of the Regent’s canal.

About

Why is this site called Affable Lurking?

Well there are several reasons…

First off, several personal sites in the alf.fan.pratchett fandom take the form affordable-X where X depends on the site owner. I didn’t want to follow this convention for my new site (not really being an AFPer as such) so I went with Affable.

The Lurking in affable-lurking comes from something I’m pretty terrible at. Namely lurking (reading but not posting) on various usenet newsgroups.

It works because I’m a pretty affable chap anyway.

Who am I?

I’m Dave.
I’m depressingly close to 30.
I lurk.

What I do: My Research 

For the last few years I’ve been investigating the action of pulsed excimer laser light on silicon and titanium surfaces in the presence of various plasma etch process gases.  The aim being to understand and direct the processes that lead to the formation of Laser Induced Periodic Surface Structures (LIPSS), holes and areas covered by mesoscopic conical pillars (black-Si).

Techniques have been developed to allow a large degree of control over the positioning of holes and pillars formed by the laser-surface interation and post-processing has been used to drastically alter the morphology of the material, producing silicon structures with aspect ratios 10^4 and both ordered and disorded macroporous silicon.
More recently I’ve also been investigating the process of Solidification Driven Extrusion (SDE) – a process we discovered that scales from  macroscale objects (Ice spikes) to the nanoscale with ultra-sharp silicon spikes protruding from the apex of silicon pillars.}