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I went to primarily see Mohair on Sunday at Bar Academy. It is a small venue but there was still a decent crowd there, thoughI think there was more along for the first band than for the main act.

On first was the inkLings who were quite good, though Tom didn't help when he said "this sounds like man I feel like a woman by Shania Twain". If I am honest it did, must have been the chord pattern. They were good and I have given them a listen to since, however they don't have much available on their [website]. I might have to go to another one of their gigs. I think it will be have to be Sun 11th Sept at Bar Academy as the other one is during Reading. Actually that reminds me, I won't get to see the Crimea as they have a gig in Brum during Reading - argh.

Second on was [the Mexicolas], they sounded like they must have been around a bit longer and are used to play in front of crowds (unlike the inklings who didn't seem at all relaxed!). They were good though I wasn't hugely taken by them, probably worth a listen to if I can find some of their mp3's.

Finally it was [Mohair]. We saw them at Reading last year and they were great. Along with Agent Blue, in my opinion they were the find of the festival. We got to see their whole set this time - at Reading they were cut off early. It was a great set - very enjoyable. They are a good band. At one point me and Kat had thought they might not have gone anywhere as there was no news, well that's when we saw a poster for this gig in the Academy. Well worth the £6. Mohair rock.

Or is it just a Satanic hand gesture? Make your own mind up:















Here is the original article titled [Satan Displays Bush 'Hook 'em' Hand Gesture; Is The Devil a UT Fan Too?"]

Today I was working on the new Astrophysics and Space Reaserch Group's website and I thought "why don't I add a lunar phase script onto the page". Excellent idea as I was never happy about just taking the image off the [USNO website]. I then decided to add it hear as I made some lunar images and it all looks nice a pretty. I'm pleased with my effort. The actual guts of the script was not written by me, more info: [phpclasses.org]. I did have to do some altering for it to work like I wanted and so it did the image display correctly. So enjoy - you can now find most of what you need as stargazer on this page.

I recently posted a picture of M8, the Lagoon Nebula and I also posted some of the surrounding regions including M20. I came across this marvelous image of the Lagoon Nebula.



Ok this is a very narrow field of view image but the colours of this wonderful object really come to life. I came across this one today on APOD so thought it would be nice to post it since we have had lots of this object but not any so closely zoomed in.

This spectacular image of the Lagoon Nebula was created by using a very scientific method. Instead of just relying on filters (which cover a wavelength range that corresponds to a specific colour) the colours are assigned from light emitted in very specific colors by hydrogen, silicon, and oxygen.

[Larger Version] and for more info [APOD]

We went to Snobs (my favourite club) last night. It was fun though I feel the atmosphere in the place has changed over the last year or so. Its not the same. At least the music was good last night, more classic rock than normal - something I will not moan about. They also played Joy Division - "love will tear us apart" which is a song that in my opinion is synonymous with Snobs. I haven't heard this there in a while so that made the night even better. There was a fight on the dance floor, its been a while since I saw a full on fight on the dance floor at snobs. This is where the blood came out title comes from. I hate to see fights on the dance floor, its just dangerous especially when my female mates are nearby (not that they can't take care of themselves or anything - I wouldn't wanna cross them ;-)) - I just don't like it. This is where my physical presence comes in of use. People where already trying to pull them apart so I helped and used my weight advantage to push them apart. Then I got sprayed with blood from the guy who got smacked in the face, nice. It wasn't too bad but ewwwww! After washing myself down and being told by the guy who works in the toiled "wash your hands for the pussy"(!!) I realised it was on my shirt aswell, argh! It wasn't too bad but thankfully it washed out. All in all a good night, plus I wasn't as drunk as on Wednesday which is a good thing.

Firstly I hate the Sun, I will not buy it. I normally do not even look at their website. (I'll stop now otherwise this will turn into a huge rant against the Sun and their commetns after Hillsborough). A friend, however, brought to my attention [this].



What complete and utter bollocks this is. Most of the stars are too faint too be seen easily, I'm sure they can all be seen. I bet any excellent amateur would not be able to make this out. All I will say is "Victor Meldrew in space" - ummmm maybe not and "RESPECTED astronomers" - probably not now.

This is two bright emission nebulas nicknamed Heart and Soul and are found in Cassiopeia. Its official name is IC 1805. I prefer the heart and soul nebulas! :-) Though it doesn't look that much like a heart, however not much in astronomy looks like what people say it does. I have spent hours on objects and still can't see what is supposed to be there!

A larger version can be found [here]

Tonight was one of the nights when I go outside and stare at the sky in the hope that I will see a few trails of light go across the sky! Its a bit more impressive than that though. I have been a bit busy tonight and decided to pop out for only 20 minutes (I also have bad look with meteor showers). Tonight, however, in the 20 minutes I was out there I definitely saw 4 and I saw another 4 that I wasn't entirely convinced about. I am sure about the ones I saw as they originated in Cassiopeia which is where they should have been coming from (or so). It was rather cool. I love watching "shooting stars". For more take a look at [Sky and Telescope]. Oh and if you haven't seen any yet well have a look out on tomorrow, there should be more than usual around still (the peak was tonight)

Today I set myself up a research page on the ASR server. Take a look at it [Research Pages]. On this section of the site I intend to write about my research and it will be used as point of call for my academic matters.

Well according to [bloginspace.com] it is. If it is being transmitted then cool. They even produced a certificate for me:

My brother-in-law decided he wanted to have a go of [Star Trek: A final Unity] today and asked my help to get it to work, it seems it didn't want to work in windows xp. This is a curse that many old games suffer with xp. This game was releases in 1994 so I wasn't expecting it to be easy, it shouldn't have been this hard though (I remember doing this the first time round and it was a bitch then though!)! The first major problem was it was not detecting the hardware correctly and was telling me that the computer doesn't have the minimum specifications to work! I thought this was funny but it was also causing a huge problem. Why oh why isn't installing anything easy. Essentially because this failed it would not allow me to install the game. Argh! I then immediately though [DOS Box], which is a program that emulates DOS and does it expertly. I first came across this when I was trying to get [X-COM: Terror from the Deep] working (another brilliant game from a similar era). It did the trick then, it didn't now. In all fairness it was probably because I didn't use the correct setup, but before I started playing around with this I came up with another idea.

I decided to copy over all the *.lst files from the cdrom to a new directory on my computer, this directory is where I will "install" the game. Once this was done it was just a process of unzipping STTNGINS.ZIP which is on the Cdrom.

Now that this is completed it essentially means that the optimal version is "installed". This is not quite true as we haven't setup the configuration file which would normally have been setup during the install.exe process. To do this all you need to do is change, in your new directory, the STTNG.ini file. This is a rather simple parameter file and contains all the settings you need to get this to run. The settings I used were (you can probably use the defaults but will find no sound!):

Audio=SB8
Port=0x220
IRQ=0x7
DMA=0x1
Video=HI8
Sound=ON
Music=ON
Voices=ON
Movies=ON
Advice=0x0
VolMusic=0x7fff
VolSound=0x7fff
Dialogs=ON
Scale=ON
DPixel=ON
Path=C:\STTNG\
CD=D:\
UniVESA=OFF

I occasionally feel in the mood to play some old games and I go off on a hunt around the web to see if I can find it (normally quicker than hunting through countless boxes). Today I came across [oldgames.org] which has quite a few good oldies. I actually haven't tried many of them but SimFarm seemed to work! It is all abandonware, so I guess it is legit and saves you having to hunt around for old games. Most can probably be found in a bin at [gamestation] for 50p! There are some great games on there. At a glance I'd recommend giving Dune 2, Prince Of Persia, X-Com: UFO Defence (probably my favorite on the list!), SimCity 2000 (close behind the previous!), SimTower (I spent ages of my first christmas at home from uni playing this...only 3 years ago!) a go! You probably need [Dos Box] to play them though.

I've finally gotten around to posting photos of my MSci (Physics and Astrophysics) graduation day. These can be found [here]. It was a very enjoyable but hot day and you can tell this from a few of the photos of me. Here are a few that I decided warranted a show on here!

This is probably my favourite shot of the whole day, me with "old joe" (the clock tower) in the background (oh and a sunbathing person!):



It was one of those days and the tension was getting to me :-) (no, seriously I wasn't trying to hurt my mother!):



Me and me dad! :-)

Tonight I am giving a talk to Brannel Astronomy. If you are around St. Austell and want to hear me rant on about Galaxies then I'm sure your welcome to attend. Time for that 4 hour or so train journey...I just hope I get my connection at Plymouth on time.

I've had a fun weekend. I traveled all the way down to Bodmin to give a talk to Brannel Astronomy Club. I think my talk went well, people seemed interested and asked me some interesting questions (at least they were not too random). I got asked by the organisers to try and fit something into my talk. I either had to mention "toilet seat" or "food processors". I went for the toilet seat. Thus meaning that NGC 6822 is now known as the toilet seat galaxy! I have to say Cornwall is such a wonderful place, it looked cleaned and rather picturesque. I thoroughly enjoyed going down their, even though it did take about 4 hours on the train there and the same on the way back. At least I got a seat. The annoying thing on the way back was that Virgin's seat reservation system was down and so I thought I'd struggle to get a seat as the train was packed. Luckily I managed to get a seat quite easily. Once back in Brum I went to Pizza hut with Kat and then to the Troc for a beer or two ...which was needed after that journey. Here are a few images I took during my visit:


On the train:





Plymouth station...just got my connection





Part of the audience, I thought I'd take a photo for a change





Lovely Bodmin Parkway





Lovely Bodmin Parkway, again.

After all the traveling I did yesterday I thought I'd pop into the Church to say hello to my dad and gareth who were helping out with a VE Day 60th anniversary celebration party. I decided to stay for a drink and that's when the fun the began. Firstly we had a rather wasted young man claiming he had no where to go and that he needed some money to get to town. Well we were not gonna give him any cash as he was claiming that he also needed it for a free hostel! Anyway we gave him some food and drink and he went. He then came back!! Argh, what do you do now - call the police? It was obvious by this point that he probably did need some help. In the end we called a homeless shelter in the centre of Birmingham. They said they would take him, which is what he was concerned about. So we said we would pay for him to get to town on the bus. He seemed pleased. We gave him a bunch of food and I went to take him over to the bus with a lady. As I walked across to the bus stop, BANG! A car crash. So grabbed the attention of Gareth (who later told me he though I was in some sort of trouble) as we did not want to leave the guy alone without an escort. I went running up the road. It turns out that some guy had hit two stationary cars and turned his on its side. Luckily he was ok and no one else was hurt. The emergency services were called and took care of this. I went back to see what was going on at the bus stop, got there as the guy got on the bus. Later on I found out he went one stop (as the accident was blocking the road) and ran. Well he had his chance and at least he had eaten something.

LucasArts have released the first trailer for the upcoming Empire at War game and it looks brilliant!

See the trailer at: [LucasArts]

This is to be probably the most graphically detailed space stratergy game ever made and promises a huge amount of control. The only problem is we have to wait till february.

I'm not one for resisting change and I'm definitely for the Euro but I think this image says we should think about it.....





I found this image on my computer earlier today when I was tidying up. It is off the launch of the Euro. If this is the way a new major currency was launched then I think as sensible people we might want to have a rethink!

Time for another piece of SQL code. This might, like the [previous one], be useful to someone. What this one does it from a database in the SDSS database, with objID and plate in, returns them in a random order. Now why would you want to do this? Well, maybe, you just want to return a random sample from the SDSS without having to download the sample (due to its size it is unfeasible to download it all) and run some C program. This allows the randomization to be completed without having to download any data. The idea for this came from [SqlTeam.com].

-- don't bother with useless row counts

set nocount on

declare @rand_temp float

CREATE TABLE #temp (objID bigint NOT NULL, Ran_Num float NULL, plate int NOT NULL)

INSERT #temp (objID, plate) SELECT objID, plate FROM z_table

--assign a new random value to each key value in #temp

DECLARE Random_Return CURSOR

FOR SELECT Ran_Num FROM #temp

OPEN Random_Return

FETCH NEXT FROM Random_Return

into @rand_temp

WHILE @@Fetch_Status != -1

BEGIN

UPDATE #temp SET Ran_Num = rand()

WHERE CURRENT OF Random_Return

FETCH NEXT FROM Random_Return

into @rand_temp

END

CLOSE Random_Return

DEALLOCATE Random_Return

--export the data from the temp table

select *

INTO z_random

from #temp

order by Ran_Num

Last night we went to see We Are Scientists at [Club NME] in Birmingham. This takes place at the medicine bar down at the custard factory. I've never actually been down there, I don't go down digbeth too often. It is actually quite nice down there, I was surprised. My past experiences of digbeth, past the bull ring that is, haven't been great but these have normally involved the coach station. Anyway the gig! It was ok. The room was well suited and there weren't many people there. The first band, who I have no idea what they were called since I don't think they mentioned their name (good publicity lads!) weren't bad. They were entertaining, though I did have the feeling they must have taken huge influences off the Strokes and the Chilli Peppers. We Are Scientists were good. I'm looking forward to seeing them again at Reading this weekend. If I do, then it will be the first time I have seen two bands within a week! Scary thought really, but they are good. Probably my favourite song of the moment is by them "Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt". They were very entertaining and I'd like to get hold of more of their music.

The only problem I have with Club NME is the bands are on late as it is supposed to be more like a club but it doesn't really turn into a club night and it means that you have an expensive journey home. Luckily for me last night - I got a lift!

I'm off to the reading festival tomorrow! I can't wait. Expect there to be some rather odd images and many band reviews to be posted on my return but now I have to get ready and get prepared to carry a heavy rucksack and not go the toilet for a few days..

Last years pics can be found [here]
and last years reviews can be found at [blog page] to start with, in total there was 4 blog entries but I'm too lazy to link them all

A friend drew my attention to [this] incredibly funny prank. It's long but definitely worth the read. If you don't fancy it just take a look at the front page image, I'm sure you will be intrigued to read it by that point.

I'm tired, exhausted, rocked-out, wrecked and sleepy. I've had a great time. I'll write more tomorrow but for now its time for bed.