Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog

I am going to Phyics 2006 poster presentation event at the House of Commons on Tuesday. I designed my poster using LaTeX and the a0poster class as I have for previous conferences. I am really happy with the poster and hopefully it will be well received at the reception.

The poster summarises the three main elements of my PhD work - structural characterisation, UV lithography and sensing/electrical characteristics of the thiol encapsulated gold nanoparticles I work with. I will put up a PDF of the poster after the event - don't want to give anything away until then. I have it here along with my invitation and train tickets.

It was a hectic day Friday getting it all printed and ready, making sure that it is narrow enough and that all the diagrams and gradients came out OK.

Well I got my bill on Thursday from Orange. They haven't refunded anything to my account and they have charged me again for the internet access products I never asked for! I am frankly amazed. I spent over 30 minutes on hold on Thursday night before hanging up and have been on hold for 33 minutes and counting as I write this post. The only redeeming thing is that the call doesn't cost me anything but I really don't have the time to sit around on hold like this. Surely I can't be the only person in the UK getting service like this?

I signed up for a 12 month contract at £30 a month and with these charges they decided to add on top it is costing just under £40 a month before you add any extra calls over my allowance. I think that would count as false advertising at the very least so I think I will also contact my local trading standards office. Not sure if I will actually get through to the call centre, and even if I do I am not sure if I will get to talk to anyone more effective than the poor excuse for a customer service agent I spoke to last month. On hold for 36 minutes now.

I really should be writing up my thesis but find it hard to do that with this terrible hold music in my ear and the "We are currently experiencing a very high number of calls..." message in my ear. Are they ever not currently receiving a very high number of calls? After 37 minutes I got through to a very nice lady who said nothing had been done on my account last month and no notes or anything had been made about my call.

She did however say that she would get the items removed, and that she would refund the amount the other lady said she would and even sent me a text confirming this in writing. Hopefully she has done what she said, she was a lot more polite, I could understand her (I think a slight Scottish tinge to her accent) and I can stop ranting on about how terrible Orange are being! Still 37 minutes on hold is pretty damn poor no matter how nice the staff are.

Back to writing my thesis.

I recently bought the The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and couldn't put it down. I attended a Roman Catholic primary and secondary school and learnt quite a lot about religion. The more I learnt the less I believed, I think I was about 13 or 14 when I realised I was an atheist after spending quite some time reading the available literature and talking with some of my teachers, friends and family. I have been in situations where it has been difficult to discuss my beliefs and have had several people try to intimidate me over the years, as well as the odd attempt a "saving me"...

I have to say that this book is very well written, and I recognised so many of the arguments used by religious people as well as many of Richard Dawkins' very well thought out responses as I have had similar discussions over the years. I really think it would do many people a great deal of good to read this whatever their particular theological stance. To me it was extremely refreshing to read such an honest and well thought out book that looks at every major argument used by religious people in turn and respond to it. This book will certainly be taking pride of place on my book shelf and after reading it I have been convinced that I really should be more outspoken about my own particular stance.

There is a web site with more details about his book along with details of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. It is absolutely great to see work like this being undertaken and I for one will do what I can to support it. People should not be ashamed or worried to come out as atheists, although some of the statistics and quotes in his book do make me realise that I am lucky to live in England where there is far less fundamentalism than in other parts of the world; although it does appear to be creeping in quietly and so vigilance is required.

In closing this is a very good book, and I intend to read it again once I have finished my thesis and I have a little more time. I have so many other books I want to read too but I am glad I bumped this one up the queue!

It seems I get less and less time to post about Gentoo recently as it is becoming harder to make time for it in between diving and writing up my thesis. I have updated the BOINC package to the latest stable version in portage and have gained a somewhat better understanding of their versioning. It is tough keeping BOINC up to date with my very limited time right now so any help is appreciated.

I also looked at updating the setiathome client but I am afraid I failed. I couldn't find a version that would compile against 5.4.11. Any help on this would be great - finding information on the web is tough but may be I just haven't looked right. Debian seem to have a version but I didn't get time to dig through where the source is from etc.

If anyone knows anymore about SETI@Home please let me know. There aren't any nice stable tarballs and instructions I can find - but if you could point them out then may be I will manage to find enough time one weekend soon. Until then I am mostly inactive as I still haven't finished my thesis and really need to get it done ASAP!

If any other developers feel like taking up the slack I won't shout at you for updating packages I maintain - I would actively thank you for it. I will mainly be using LaTeX, Kile and kBibTeX until my thesis is done [places proverbial do not disturb sign on the door]...