General

I've not written anything in quite a while - it's been a hectic few weeks and I am still behind with everything! It was a year since Aaron died on Monday, and so I have been feeling pretty down in the last week or so. You try not to let you get it down, but it's hard not to let it. Tends to be worsened by those around you hassling you, and having a go.

Enough of that though. I have managed to accomplish a few things this week. I fitted the new potentiometer to the trough, and that worked really well. Also managed to get the program to save the new calibration data successfully too - all the files were read only and once that was changed it worked. It is a bug in the program though - it should report that it cannot write to the file.

I took Monday off to keep away from people more than anything else. I also took Tuesday off to go to a Linux conference too at the Sheffield Wednesday ground. It was OK, but I was hoping for better speakers. I really don't know if I would bother again - Sheffield probably isn't the best place for big conferences

I have booked the X-ray reflectometer for next week too - hopefully Monday and Tuesday. Jon has agreed to show me how to use it to do some work on my samples. I am going to do my absolute best to make some good samples tomorrow - hopefully they will produce some good results.

I also have lots of simulation to do as well, and a few new material models to hopefully tweak to the point where they can be published. It's a very busy time - do have some Physoc stuff on too, but I am really not willing to put too much time into it.

This is my first ever blog entry! Not too sure on this whole thing just yet, but I thought I would give it a go... I am hoping to make this place in to some kind of record of my life as a PhD student, and a user/developer of open source software. Hopefully others out there might even find it interesting enough to read

I am an avid user of open source software on the Linux platform. My distro of choice is Gentoo as it allows me a great deal of control over my particular installations. I have gone through the usual distros such as Red Hat, SuSe, Mandrake, Slackware and even Debian. Recently I have been tempted to try one of the BSDs too, but haven't had chance yet.

I am doing a PhD at the University of Sheffield on thin Langmuir films of metallic nanoparticles (specifically gold), and the structural characterisation of them as well as their gas sensing properties. Only just started, but it seems OK so far.

Anyway, I don't want to wear myself out with my very first post.