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The 200th extrasolar planet detection has been released. I wonder what percentage of the public still believe there is just nine planets? Well there are 8 in our solar system, yes the IAU (International Astronomical Union) won't do it but I am - I'm removing Pluto! Shock. Anyway outside of our solar system some 200 planets are now known, some are a littel dubious but not that many. The field of extrasolar planets is continuing to grow, luck I work in it then. The 200th planet itself was detected via the radial velocity method ([here for the paper]. Further reading: [USA Today article] on the 200th detection.

Well I'm not sure if this is good news or bad. It does look that Tony Blair might have finally removed his head from the sand and from up George Bush's.... The UK and California sign a deal on the climate, something really does seem odd. I have come to the conclusion that it is not a bad thing cause essentially it means that California is signing up to the Kyoto agreement without their Federal Governments agreement. It does seem rather odd though that we are (the UK) are signing deals with a specific state and not the USA government. Maybe this is a sign that specific states of the USA don't want to follow their stupid federal governments opinion on climate change. I do wonder if this will mean that more of the states will sign the deal, if so then, maybe, the whole USA will sign up and follow the EU. More on this at [independent.co.uk]

Now that sounds funny doesn't it? But according to a bunch of scientists, who I bet all like a drink but would never take ectasy, that is the case. If you think about what actually happens to you when you drink lots then you can sort of understand why it is so high, but I am sure it does matter how much you have at any time. If you had a low alcohol drink then how does this relate to the other contenders in the top 10? Does one glass equal one tablet of ectasy? or one mushroom? The news story I saw and now what I read (on the [independent.co.uk]) neither actually stated the exact quantities required. Does make me wonder. It even seems that they are really include the consequences of drinking lots as a factor.. i.e. if you are really drunk you might get into a fight. I guess this is a reasonble thing to include but I bet you need to take a much larger dosage of alcohol than you do of other drugs to get into this stupid stupid situation.

I rented this last night and wasn't so convinced by the cover... it looks like a typical Nicolas Cage cover! I do normally like his films so this didn't really put me off though I was a bit concerned it would just be him being tight cast to make some money.. oh and here are a few covers..














Anyway back to the family man... it was actually a pretty good film. It was a little bit of a girly film, in that there was only 1 gun during the whole film. Without letting too much out of the bag. Guy makes a decision, guy becomes rich but no personal life. Guy gets glimpse of what life would have been like if he made the decision another way. Some funny moments and quite heart warming.

Zidane's disgusting headbutt in the World Cup final has inspired a song that is now top of the French pop charts... [French adore Zidane headbutt song ]

Last week, the STS-121 crew of the Space Shuttle Discovery undocked from the ISS and completed their successful return to the Earth. This was great news for space travel and in particular the ISS as it means that shuttle missions to finish the station will resume and will be safe. When they left they took this fantastic picture of the truely international space station (currently there is one European, one Russian and one American on the station):

Credit: STS-121 Crew, Expedition 13 Crew, NASA

Do you remember the spacecraft Stardust that went out to collect particles in collector made of aerogel. Anyway these aerogel plates where almost safetly returned to the Earth and now the search to find out what particles are inside them starts. The idea with this is like the SETI@home program. People run it on their spare processor time and eventually return results to the scientists who figure out what to do with them. If you are interested I would suggest you go and take a look at [stardustathome.ssl.berkeley.edu]

Fire X-rays at a piece of old book and what do you get out? Archimedes' wonderful work! Okay its a bit more involved than that and it wasn't just any pieve of paper! Take a look at [this BBC article].

Still want to give linux a go? Fancy trying it from within Windows? Well DSL (Damn Small Linux) might have the answer. The whole point in Damn Small Linux is to get a bootable (with useful apps) version of linux as small as possilbe and infact it is damn small. For 50mb you can once again have an operating system. Another great thing is that you can boot this version of linux from within your windows installation. I wouldnt say you will get the best installation or linux experience from doing this, but it does give you a damn good start. Also for someone like me, this is great. When I use windows, linux is no more than a click on the desktop (or in my case a double click and my screen changes to my linux desktop, but thats a different story! :-) ).

Anyway more info on Damn Small Linux - [http://www.damnsmalllinux.org]

And this is the file you want to download: [LINK]

I gave Lizzie some flowers the other day and they were truely stunning, especially a photo taken in a darkened corner of the room:

Last Sunday I made a quick trip to the ThinkTank - Birmingham's Science museum. The point was to go and watch Lizzie as she was in charge of the Planetarium and to catch a show. The [Planetarium] is great, lots of fun and wonderfully designed so you get a great show. I also had a quick look around the ThinkTank... not like I haven't done that before. It is definetly aimed at kids but I spent a bit of time around the Birmingham exhibit that I hadn't really looked at before, heck I needed to get value for money. I probably spent a bit too long looking mesmorised at this:

I still haven't posted any real photos from my trip to Canada, well I will in more detail soon but I'm a bit busy getting ready to go off to India. I though I would give a quickly and stunning view of Toronto though... below is the CN Tower, the world's tallest manmade structure... oh I had dinner near the top and stood on the (gulp!) glass floor!

Britain's Jenson Button earned the first Formula One victory today! :-)

Good on him. It was an absolutely wonderful Hungarian Grand Prix full of action and most importantly the first British win for too long, well done Jenson!

I'm off to India tomorrow to try and use a radio telescope (the GMRT) to directly detect an extrasolar planet... hopefully the weather will hold off for me to land in Mumbai! :-(

Yep, I'm in India... Pune in particular (at the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics). It's okay here, rather wet but still quite nice. I have to say I had the most crazy of journeys here. If you think people driving around in London is bad then you should take a look at the Indian roads...arrr!! It wasn't so bad but still there were a few moments when I was only an inch away from a big truck! Oh and we definetly had the proper welcome to India when we saw an elephant on the road, shame I didn't have chance to get my digital camera out.


So why am I in India? Well we are going to use the GMRT (which is a big array of radio telescopes, one of the best in the world) to try and detect the radio emission of a planet around another star! This would be the first detection in a direct manner of an extrasolar planet, which would be cool... sorry I mean very benefical to scientific thought, nah I prefer cool. :-)

My fun in India continued with me moving on to the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope near Khodad today. It was an early morning (6am) and will be a very late night since my observation starts at 1am tomorrow (it is currently 10:16pm). Lets just say I am going to be rather tired.

The journey up from Pune was pretty smooth not many problems only near the end did it become rather, and by that I mean very, bumpy. That was fine. I slept for a while once we got here and then did some work. Currently we just finished planning our observing schedule, we even managed to fit in another interesting taget that we are hoping to get something from.. well if we don't we don't - it was a decision between trying something or basically not looking at anything new (our main target will have drfited beyond the horizon at that point and we won't be able to see it). Anyway my life as an astronomer continues, which I am not moaning about... but some decent sleep would be welcome about now.

Well we started observing about an hour ago now, things are progressing. Just so you know with radio astronomy you dont get a picture, well not till you have done the data processing so I won't know for quite a while if we were successful... either way it is pretty exciting even if it is approaching 4am here (we are GMT + 5.5 hours)

It is supposed to be a dud but pre-expected peak have shown some good signs, well people have been seeing meteors in good numbers for a pre-show. So if you get chance the weekend it might be worth standing looking at the sky for a while. Even if you don't see any shooting stars you might just get lost in the vast beauty that is space. For more than a look at the [Perseid Earthgrazers]

I have to say, though very tiring (I have had to breaks and managed to get 4 hours sleep in over 36 hours!) this is pretty cool. Earlier I took a quick walk up to the main cluster of antenna's on the site (I took pics, but I left my usb cable back in the uk so I can't post them now) and saw all the dishes move at once, to my target. Now that was cool. Anyway I'm trying to get some work done whilst I watch something that looks rather similar to:

Well I just got back to the GMRT (to do more work, I really need to start processing this stuff) after an eventful evening. We went out for dinner, but that involved going 10km! It was worth it, we went to a nice Indian chateau, they had some nice one.. one though was awful it was spicy but it just tasted as if they had used grapes that were about to go off to make the wine. The food though, was delightful, nice spicey and wonderful. I have to say I can tell something changed in me over the last year or so and thats my attitude towards food. I will now try anything (it has to be veggie of course) and though at times I am tentative I am normally quite suprised and heck sometimes you just need to eat, its that simple. Before I came here I never once thought oh no what am I going to eat! :-)


Something else that is worth thinking about whilst here, which I really like, they have a Veg menu and a non-Veg menu. I have even noticed signs saying.. "and non-veg food". Thats cool. :-)

Whilst trying to work here in India I also have a need for evening entertainment, so I encoded a couple of DVDs so I could watch them off my laptop. Anyway I must have done one with a different audiocodec or something, well eitherway quicktime on my mac refused to give me sound. So whilst looking for a solution (and reinstalling a bunch of codecs) I came across VLC media player. I gave me the solution immediately and seems like a rather useful tool allowing me to do lots of different thing from within one application. Also it is cross platform which is rather useful. So you windows and linux persons can also use it. I'll probably install it when I reconfigure my fedora o/s at home to a debian based one. Anyway take a look [VLC media player]

What with changing time zone, effectively losing 5 1/2 hours, and then having some long days and nights due to observing I have found it odd to get any proper sleep whilst in India. Last night, however, was different. Once I convinced myself that in fact it wasn't a bug, scary, goliath of a cockroach running around my floor and it was just the room fan on occasion making an odd sound I fell asleep. I actually managed a nice solid 9 hours. I can't moan about that. Now its time to do some data analysis so I best get on with that.... and then I can justify watching the charity shield later (yes.. ESPN carries it, yay!).

I think that Pluto is not a planet but end of the day that is just my opinion. The members of the IAU are meeting during the next week and hopefully we will have a ecision on whether this small planet like object is to be reclassified or not. If not then we might see our planetary system gaining 4 or so new planets overnight. If that is the case, lets hope there is also a rename for a couple of the objects... for more take a look at this [BBC Article]

Today I get to be the Brit on the celebration of this country's independence from British rule. It was in 1947 that the Indians drove Great Britain from its territory, a thing my country should have done long before, well from what I read it is. I don't want to be drawn into the rights and the wrongs of the British Empire. It happened, there is not much I can do about it. Though the British at certain periods in history did some awful things they also did some great and indeed good things. Thats the thing that keeps me proud of being British, that and the Premier League, lol! :-) On a side note I keep watching the tv and I can't get used to it being refereed as the EPL! Anyway back to Independence Day. I think the country is as proud at celebrating this as the American's are on July 4th. There will be a flag raising ceremony here at the NCRA this morning and I will go and watch and take some photos. I just hope there isn't a tradition of teasing the Brits like I hear there is in the USA. If there is, I will just keep my head down and work even more! I will post some pics when I return, as I stupidly left my usb cable back in the UK.


If you want to know more about Indian's Independence then I suggest you take a look at: [wiki]

We had the raising of the flag here at NCRA and lets just say I did feel a little like the token Brit. It was quite fun and we all had biscuits and tea afterwards which was rather nice. I'm now learning quite how long and hard it is going to be to do the data analysis! ARGH.

Now this just seems that a couple of apple's trademarker lawyers (I guess they will be lawyers) have gone stupid and maybe a little crazy! Take a look at the case of Apple sueing a product made for arcades called: PROFIT POD, and nope it has nothing to do with music and looks nothing like an Ipod. The full article can be found at: [engadget.com].

I personally really like apple products, thats why I own a powerbook and a Ipod. Shame they employ some ultra-aggressive lawyers. Oh and apple for future reference here is the dictionary (http://dictionary.reference.com/) definition of pod:

" 1. Botany.
- A dehiscent fruit of a leguminous plant such as the pea.
- A dry, several-seeded, dehiscent fruit. Also called seedpod.
2. Zoology. A protective covering that encases the eggs of some insects and fish.
3. A casing or housing forming part of a vehicle, as:
- A streamlined external housing that encloses engines, machine guns, or fuel.
- Aerospace. A detachable compartment on a spacecraft for carrying personnel or instrumentation.
4. Something resembling a pod, as in compactness.
" - there are many more variations at: [http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/pod]

well that's what google say... they would rather you not use the term "I googled it" and would rather you use "I used Google to". Personally I probably use the later more but.. still when did google become the authority on the English language and its day to day usage? It seems that Google are afraid of losing their special trademark and if it was just to become another verb then they would lose the capitilisation or something like that, as if that is really going to affect their stock price! Read more [vunet.com]

Well Dell I recalling batteries from their laptops... and this is why: [dell_fire_2.jpg], [dell_fire_1.jpg], [dell_fire_2.jpg - dif]

Looks as if the IAU are about to keep Pluto as a planet but a subclass known as "plutons", which means Ceres, the current known largest asteriod, will become a planet! This is interesting as I had expected they would discount Pluto, but I think this new mass range also makes sense. The BBC have an interesting article about this [here]

I just gave my first public talk outside of the UK. It was a short, half an hour affair, but I am rather pleased. It was to a bunch of amateur astronomers, who were a nice bunch, at the Inter-University Cetnre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) outreach centre. I mostly talked about what we, Birmingham University Astronomical Society, do as amateurs but I also spoke about what I do for research. It was lots of fun. I do love giving public talks.

I have to say it was worth me waiting up to watch the game (on ESPN) for kick-off at 12:30. This is another reason why I coudln't stay here (nevermind the fact that I am missing a certain special person, family and friends) for a long period. You just can't watch football at normal times! :-) It was a good game and Crouchy played rather well again. I have to say though that the second half wasn't as good as the first and I found myself drifting off - well it was 2am and I had a long day!

..now that sounds like a good way of promoting safe sex and AIDS awareness doesn't it? Well thats exactly what is going on in India today. It is mostly aimed at the rural areas but stiill a very good idea. They are trying to distribute about 10,000 condoms a day! For more: [hindustantimes.com]

Well things are winding down here in India. I just gave a short talk about my work and trying to express how we are optimistic we will detect a signal. I'm hopeful and I have to say I have a much better handle on the data analysis. Give me a few months and I might be telling you of our excellent work or of our failure to find anything, hopefully the former. Anyway my short talk went well and I for once I wasn't too nervous when talking about my work. I do prefer to talk to the general public..

It looks like NASA has lost a bunch of historically important tapes and not just any tapes, the ones from the Apollo missions! I'm sure this will help fuel concepts of conspiracies about the Moon landings being faked. Oh well, some people just won't believe that large organisations occasionally misplace their most important documents, argh! For more see: [www.smh.com.au]

Well I guess adventure would be the wrong word to use, I mean I have spent most of my time staring at a computer screen trying to understand what exactly I am doing.. and mostly why?!! The last week in learning how to go about radio data analysis has been like I felt when I first learnt how to do optical spectroscopy.. I'm sure I will learn it all, cause in the end on the optical part I wrote a manual (if you are interested: Image Reduction Manual).

The last week has been pretty eyeopening. I have seen wonderous things, looking at the whole radio array at the GMRT (thats some 30 radio dishes) all looking at the target I told it to go to. I have also seen the absolutely poverty that some people live in here but one thing I noticed is that these people seem happy and isn't that the true aim in life? There is a big different between people working and living at the NCRA to those in the villages outside of the big cities, as you would have expected. I have also, probably for the first time in my life, just eaten food and not worried. I know it is veggie and I know I will, ok some cases omitted, like it. I haven't been able to indentify all the veg that I have eaten but the food has been delicious. I have to keep eating so healthy, I feel like I have already started to lose weight.. and not through not eating correctly (yes mom I have been eating fine!).


Anyway this afternoon I head to the airport with an early morning (late evening UK) flight back to the UK. I will land at some point in the early morning in Zurich, stay there for too long and then head to the UK.. home for lunch... I hope! Then it will be time to sleep and recover before I get ready to go off to the Reading Festival at the end of the week. Should be fun. Can't wait to see Muse play live.

I have decided, that slowly, I will introduce the topic of extrasolar planets here as I often speak about them I though it might naturally be a good idea to give you a bit of an incite further than me going "ooh look another one". Anyway lets start at the begining like any good story...


"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1)


Can we add "and extrasolar planets"? I'm not sure if we could use this definition with the IAU for how planets are created! Anyway moving away from that I'm not going to bore you with formation models, yet. Instead I thought I would describe the first and probably the most important finding in modern planetary physics, and no I am not talking about "senda" or "xena" or whatever crazy name they give to the new solar system candidate planets. I am talking about PSR B1257+12 and 4 objects around it. PSR B1257+12 is a pulsar that is some 980 light years away (1 Light Year (ly) is the Distance Traveled by Light in 1 Year.. thats a long way away!). This object lies in the constellation of Virgo and was discovered by Polish astronomer Aleksander Wolszczan in 1990 using the Arecibo radio telescope. It is a millisecond pulsar, a kind of neutron star, and was found to have anomalies in the pulsation period, this is not normal for this kind of object and led to the discovery of the planets. It was odd to think that planets would exist around objects like this. The whole scientific community at the time needed some convincing but once the evidence was put forward it was quite hard to say no to it (the research paper for this can be found on [ADS]).


I intend to keep up this small series over the next few weeks discribing a few other systems and some key physics.

So then... I'm sitting (well almost lying I guess, nice big seats!) at Mumbai airport awaiting my flight. I have a couple of hours yet, more like 3... I'm going to have an even longer wait at Zurich, actually probably about the same again as I have already been here for 2 hours. I decided to get the car down from NCRA at 4pm... I though I should make sure that I got down to the airport in lots of time (it took Ian 6 hours to get here the other day). I was lucky, no Independance Day the next day unlike him and so it only took me 3 hours or so. It was smooth, well bumpy, sailing into Mumbai, then like every other big cty we hit the traffic and we were doomed.

I'm happy to say I will be back in the UK this time tomorrow, probably quite happily wrapped up in my own bed by this point. I have had a good time in India and done lots of work (the fact that over half my lab book has been filled in the last week or so says it all). I'm looking forward to relaxing and seeing a few people (and one person in particular). I have to recover from this long haul travel as I'm gong to the Reading Festival on Thursday and want to be on top form for that. One thing I am looking forward to, not that I have particularly minded it, will be a meal where rice doesn't feature... oh the possibilities, pasta, potatoes and of course pizza(!) - looks like that healthy eating will be going out of the window. No, of course not. It will be nice to have a bit more variety though. I do love the food here but I like to sample different things everyday really... though I probably do normally fit into the pasta meal or pizza quite (and probably too) often.

I'm in two minds to do more work now or not.. I'm tired but I did just read two papers and that made time go flying through. Oh and out of interest, the woman from Swiss Air (why do I keep wanting to call it Zurich Air?) told me not to take liquids, toothpastes or any gels through immigration... guess what the immigration person said... oh thats fine. I wonder if I will actually have an issue at the security check point just before I get on the plane...I guess so, so I think I will just remove the bottle of water from the equation and drink it. :-)

Oh and I finally just beat this blasted computer at chess... woo hoo!

... addon.. I'm now through security... gosh that was a big big farce! Firstly I had to wait about 30 mins in a queue just to get to the front and wait a further 10, I'm sure this is nothing compared to the recent stuff at home but gosh there were only 15 people in front of me. I understand why they sent us through to security control so soon.. I did have my wonderings. After the scan, every part of my bag was checked.. and they even got a nice message of Henry (the teddy bear that Lizzie bought me).. lets just say it took a minute to explain!! ARGH, its a bloody bear! They even took exception to my Malaria tablets (but once they realised what they were and the fact that there was prescription advice on the front of them they put them back in my bag. Luckily I avoided the turn on and off of my laptop, I guess my laptop does acutally look like a laptop!!! Time to just sit back and relax.. and why do I keep finding Indian currency in my pocket, I'm sure I excahnced it all back to Pounds Stirling.

What a farce. When we got on the plan I thought it was odd that not many people where on the plan very quickly, it turns out that they were still all in security. The Mumbai airport staff where overwhelmed since two planes loads worth of people where going through the same check point. Absolutely ridicolous, I can't help blame some of the passengers, the notice to go through security went up about an 1 hour before... so they definetly had the time to go through. Anyway the plane was an hour late from taking off, not really a huge issue for me as my connection from Zurich to Birmingham isn't until midday. It has meant some people have missed connections though. I'm also not very happy as i had some inconsiderate wanker sat infront of me, who noticed when he originally tried to move his seat back that my legs were pushing against it, and still did it. I really wanted to argue with him about it and then show him what it is like to have a sleeping idiot apply pressure on his knees. Well I thought better of that, I didnt't want to cause an incident and once I feel aslep I didn't think about it. The plane and the crew were quite nice (the one forced him to put his seat up for the breakfast meal and he then kept it up...), I have never been on an A330 before but it was really nice with inseat screens.. not that I used it I did just want to sleep.

Zurich Airport is quite nice.. I paid an over the top ammount for a newspaper but at least I got the news that Liverpool drew with bloody Sheff Utd, argh.. that was worth paying for! Anyway nice seats bit too stylish but I'm going to sit back relax and maybe do some shopping as I have a good 4 hours here.

Ever need a boot cd with loads of handy utils to get your system back up and running? Well I recently cause myself to have a rather large MBR (master boot record) problem with my hard disk whilst installing, failing to at the time, ubuntu over fedora. I now have it fixed by using the tools on the Ultimate Boot CD. I actually found that I couldnt repair grub at all and fdisk wouldnt allow me to remove the mbr, but a couple of the tools on this did. So yay... now I have ubuntu :-) Oh the ultimate boot cd is available for free: [here]

Probably a bit of bad taste here, but still pretty funny:

My, now annual, trip to the Reading Festival was not as good as it should have been. I was ill, something which I was hoping would not happen. It was hard just to muster up the energy to even walk at times. Well it was a bit more relaxed on my part, I was sat down for most of the time and did look older than I should! lol. Anyway I am going to post some pics soon, if I am not being too lazy. Who did I see?

Friday:
Dashboard Confessional, Panic! at the disco, The Subways, Fall Out Boy, Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand

Saturday: Giant Drag, Wolfmother, The Automatic, The Fall, Feeder, The Streets, Arctic Monkeys, MUSE(!)

Sunday: Taking back Sunday, Less than jake (does in the toilet count?), Bullet for my valentine, Slayer, My Chemical Romance, Boy Kill Boy, Placebo, Pearl Jam, Maximo Park...

Oh the fun of travelling! This year was a bit different. We normally get the train down at a stupid time in the morning and then have the fun of the hike from Reading Station to and then across the camp site. It's not too bad but this year we had the 'luck' (I would have rathered not got these types of tickets) of getting coach tickets down there (the others had sold out so we had to get these). Anyway it wasn't too bad. We got dropped off at the rivermead centre around 1pm. This was perfect as our mates had already setup camp (they drove down) and we just dropped our tent in next to theirs. Was pretty easy actually. I might have to do the same again (... the return journey was not so smooth though).


The cold I had just developed had really taken hold of me by now so after a slow walk into reading I was feeling awful. Anyway a weatherspoons stop for some food and a sainsbury's trip we were heading back. I just needed to crash as I was feeling awful. This continued all festival but heck I still had fun...

And yes we had to get out the glow sticks!

A camp fire was greated and some glowing effects started appearing...

Day 2, it started off sunny... but was this to last, well it did long enough for me and Lizzie to enjoy it and get a bit of a tan..

This good weather lasted throughout the afternoon.. we got to see the unimpressive Dashboard Confessional. The wicked Panic! at the disco, who played on eventhough their front man got hit in the face with a bottle (of water I hope).. stupid crowd, I would have been rather dissapointed if they had stopped. The subways were next on and they played a great set but by the time Fall Out Boy came on the heat (plus my cold) had really taken the best of me so after we listened to their great set we headed back to the tent for a bit of a rest.

The Kaiser Chiefs played a good set, was a bit bland and not the same as in a small arena.. I do also think they spent rather too long playing around with their rather simple lights

The highlight had to be Franz Ferdinands wicked set that gave me some energy, enough to even dance!! Great set.... and I was off to bed nice and early. Old man alert, that and being rather tired and flu riddled.

Oh the wonders of a Weatherspoons breakfast... and the use of their toilets! :-) Thats what started off the day. I, however, actually felt slightly worse for the trip but at least I have eaten well... if you can call a veggie fry-up well that is! We also had to make good time to get back to the arena as the first band of the day that Lizzie wanted to see, Giant Drag, were on earlish. We did miss a bit of their set, but fourtunately not too much. I was pleased as they were pretty cool to listen to... something to go on my download list... ;-)

After Giant Drag was Wolfmother who were pretty cool. I'm not a huge fan but I do like one or two of their songs and I definetly would not have missed them. After Wolfmother we made quick time back to our tent to get the stuff we would have taken into the arena earlier but didn't have time due to Weatherspoons taking longer than expected. After a quick rest we were back to see the Automatics. WOW! I was really glad we went to see them and they have to be one of my bands of the festival, they were great! And what is that, a monster?!!

We then decided to stay and watch the Fall, they are supposidely legendary. They were crap and so left quite quickly. Feeder followed, another band I just couldn't wait to see. Shame I had no energy and had to stay near the back but heck I still really enjoyed them, though I'd love to see them in an enclosed environment such as the Brum academy, would be much better.

A quick trip to see a band on the Carling Stage, who I don't know who was (my page fell out my little stage guide...argh!) but they weren't bad, useful I know. Oh and it was raining quite badly at the time so this was to be considered! :-)

Lizzie then got the stage times wrong, yes hun I am blaming you - lol, causing us to see a bit too much of the Streets. Though we did get to the world's largest "GO LOW"... WTF! The music improved by loads when on came the Arctic Monkeys who played a good set but really still don't have the commandment of a stage that a headliner should. Then finally it was time for the band I have been wanting to see for years and been awaiting this moment for ages. It was time for MUSE!! Woo hoo! I was well prepared:

They were absolutely great! They have to be my favourite band and they played a mix of new and old stuff which I was really pleased about. I do like their new album but I have been wanting to hear them play Origin of Symmetry for a while. They didn't disapoint. A nice continouous set where they didn't mess about and just got down to the music.

A finish with the guitar raised put an end to a brilliant set...quite ghostly really

Day 4 and the final day of music again comes .... shame that as I am finally feeling a bit better but alas not much can be done about this as I don't own a device that would let me travel in time and heck if I did I can think of better things to do! :-) Anyway onto Day 4!

The day for us started with Taking back Sunday who were pretty cool, I do like them and they played all the songs I like. After Taking Back Sunday came Less than Jake who played a great set, though I probably did spend half of it waiting for the loo and then in the loo. 2 out of 4 toilets shut near the stage... argh! Anyway Less than Jake really did get the party atmosphere going for me and really setup the day.

Oh and don't ask me what my mates were up to hear:

Bullet for my valentine were next and they played a rather indifferent set that I was not to pleased with, quite a shame really - they just replaced singing with shouting. ARGH! After them on came My Chemical Romance who were greeted with loads of bottles, argh... less just say the Slayer fans weren't the most welcoming (Slayer were on next). Fair play to My Chemical Romance who told the crowd to give them what they had. They played a good set which I really did enjoy. After these were Slayer. After a few tracks I got bored and so we went around the stalls were Lizzie got a new hoody, woohoo! The Sun was setting on the last day so I had to take my customary shot:

After the shopping Boy Kill Boy gave us some great late afternoon music with a great set. This is the second time I had seen them and again they played wonderfully well really getting a rise in the NME tent.

Placebo then provided the fun with a good set which was marred with a few technical difficulties but they still played a great set and we got to see boobs whilst the issues were dealt with (the reading crowd was beemed on to the screens and a few women took of their tops...). Next were Pearl Jam, I'm not that familiar with their music but I as well impressed as they played really well but we left about halfway in to go see Maximo Park (my sixth time of seeing them, ah!) and they really played well getting us all jumping and singing. I have never heard a crowd so loud, some huge cheers wen't up at the end and the band were obviously taken-a-back. Great fun.

8th - 10th September... in Brum... looks like there might be soem good entertainment. Take a look at: [http://www.artsfest.org.uk/]

Whilst I was in India I got to take a look at a scaled-down replica of the 18th century Jantar mantar in Jaipur ([www.jantarmantar.org]) which was pretty cool. Jai Singh, one of the kings in western India, built seven of these! Here is the replica: