Blog Roger

Photonics West is the largest photonics conference in the world. ~15k attendees, 3680 talks (before ones that were cancelled) and a couple of massive trade exhibitions. I went this year for the first time. In case you’re not sure, wikipedia reckons that photonics is “the science of photonics includes the generation, emission, transmission, modulation, signal processing, switching, amplification, detection and sensing of light”.

I went to present some of my work on making cameras and maybe learn some other things. The whole thing was a week – Saturday at 8am until Thursday 5pm, although thankfully I didn’t have to stay at the conference the whole time. More on that later.

My talk was on Thursday morning, so I’d already had chance to see lots of talks – some good, some less so. There were stacks of rooms (as you might expect for 3680 talks) all a variety of sizes. I found the room I’d be talking in on the first day and it was one of the big ones – I did a count of seats and there were around 200 or so. The small rooms could fit maybe 30 people, but if it looked like an interesting talk they’d be overflowing with people – I’m not sure whether that would’ve been worse.

I was the third talk of the session. The first talk went well, the second was a bit difficult to follow and then it was me. There were about 40 people in the session, which was a good number. I talked, I didn’t clam up and I looked at the audience. I probably could’ve done with a bit more gesturing with a laser pointer on occasion, but too much of that annoys me in a talk. Overall, it went well. Everybody seemed to be paying attention which is a good thing and I got about six sensible questions, which I could answer as well. One of the questions was “are these cameras available to buy?” – actually we’re after collaborators at the moment really rather than customers as such. I had four or five people come express interest after the session and have to get in touch with them.

All in all, it was a good success. I gave a good talk and went to a lot of talks as well. I learned quite a bit!

When my car got hit, it wasn’t the end of the world because I’d bought a motorbike just a few days before. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages, so I’m glad I’ve actually got round to it. To give you some sort of idea – I was buying kit around this time last year, having done the CBT the previous September. I took a leisurely approach to doing lessons (and was busy)and finally took the test in July.

I’d originally planned to go for a Suzuki SV650, but it turned out that I’m the wrong size so my knees ended up in an awkward place on the petrol tank. After trying a few different bikes, I settled on this Honda CBR600F. It’s nice. It also looks good, unlike a significant proportion of the others I’d seen where the designers had decided that it’d be a good idea to see just how many colour clashes they could fit onto a single bike. Amazingly, this is the only photo I have of it.

Peak power (that’s actual power, not power to weight ratio) is more than my car was, which is a bit daunting, but that’s a 11,000 rpm and it’s pretty sensible at lower revs.

I’ve ridden a reasonable amount now, but nothing too interesting – mostly just going to work and back because, again, I’ve been too busy on weekends.

The sad thing is, of course, that it’s been locked up for almost two months now. Never mind riding on ice, I just don’t want it to go anywhere near the nasty salt that’s on the roads.

Roll on spring time!

There’s lots I want to write about, but that just means I never get round to writing anything.

So. Something that’s new – I have no car for the first time in about 9 years. Some bugger crashed into me on the way back from hockey (overtaking in a village at ~50 mph) and didn’t stop. The damage was reasonably minimal considering, but it smashed the driver side headlamp and put a big concertina pattern in the wheel arch. It was still ok to drive after getting a new headlamp fitting, but I wasn’t 100% sure of its structural integrity and the MOT was due mid December. With the damage and a few other problems it didn’t seem worth even trying for to get it through, so on the day before it was due I sold it for the staggering sum of £40.

I am looking for a new car, but it’s difficult to be enthusiastic about spending that much money. I want something at least half way reasonable, with better fuel efficiency, etc. etc. The damn scrappage scheme seems to have resulted in used prices increasing so there’s not much out there for me. I’m tempted to see how long I can manage without.

Having set up this new blog, I’ve been checking the server logs a little bit to make sure things are getting redirected properly. One thing I noticed was an awful lot of hits to a certain few pictures. It turns out that if you do a google (or bing or yahoo) search for beard dye, some pictures of me pop up. I’m the top image for google!

If this is my fifteen minutes of fame, I want to return it and try again thanks.

I got bored of my old blog and stopped updating it. Lots of things have changed since then and I feel like putting pen to paper again. I rejoined twitter (as ralight),but some times that just isn’t quite enough. I’m looking forward to using some of the many fancy features that wordpress has that my self coded site didn’t have.

The old blog is still online at old blog, and I’ve got rewrite rules in place so none of the old links should break. No guarantees though!