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Today I learned that, when on a vector converging with a wall at medium to high speed, the correct course of action is to brake, or alter course. Not to put a hand out and repeatedly try to shove yourself away from it. Ouch.
Two weeks ago I bought a bike (well, slightly more, but it arrived two weeks ago yesterday). Previously, I’d only cycled successfully once – around a carpark. Gem and I cycled up the Plym Valley path on the Saturday; we got up to the car park at Plymbridge, then turned around and came back (the hard way, admittedly). That Sunday we went cycling again, but nowhere much of interest, just around Plymouth a bit.
I didn’t cycle much for a week and a half, firstly because I was away and then because I didn’t really want to cycle to work; I didn’t feel particularly confident in traffic. Lisa suggested (indirectly) that I should just go for it, so I did, and cycled into work on Wednesday. That was pretty tiring, and the way back nearly killed me; mostly due to my poor choice of route (I avoided going up hills for as long as I could, which eventually took me to the bottom of a massive hill with home at the top). Thursday was better, and Friday better still.
Today, Gem, Dan, Ed (who’s back in Plymouth for graduation, and cycled from Bristol) and I cycled up the same route; this time we got as far as the railway tunnel near Bickleigh before coming back. We could probably have gone further, but it was quite late, and got dark very quickly (the path runs through the woods, which doesn’t help; only Gem had lights, and not very good ones, so Ed went ahead holding a torch so we could see where he was and thus where the path was).
I was still pretty knackered by the end of it, but less knackered than the shorter journey two weeks ago. An improvement, at least. I don’t expect to be able to cycle up the hill home any time soon, though.
Something that I wasn’t expecting when I decided to do a placement, or right the way through until after I started working at PML, was that I’d have the opportunity to do any travelling for work.
Most of the work I’ve done at PML so far has been part of InterRisk, an EU project to develop software for "environmental risk management in marine and coastal areas"; basically, there’s lots of data that can be used to detect things like oil slicks, algal blooms, etc.; there are also lots of people who are interested in such things, for various reasons – either for research, or because it’s their job to deal with them, or whatever. InterRisk is meant to make it easier for these people to get at that data. There’s various groups involved in it – as well as PML, there are organisations in Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, and Norway, and every six months representatives of each organisation meet up to discuss progress; this time around I got to go along, with the head of the Remote Sensing Group and another of the programmers working on it.
The meeting was at the Institute of Oceanology in Sopot, Poland (just north of Gdańsk). Tuesday morning, two of us took the train up to Birmingham from Plymouth and met the boss there at the airport. The flight went without incident, though I did manage to get searched again – and once again, it was because I had change in my pocket (which I actually realised before I stepped through the metal detector, and was holding it up as I did so in an attempt to point out that my stepping through would be pretty pointless…). Oh, and screaming kids. We arrived at Gdańsk Lech Walesa Airport (not, for some reason, Lech Wałȩsa airport) and promptly got ripped off by a taxi driver.
Gdańsk, Sopot, and Gdynia form one big conurbation. Gdańsk is a big port and formerly part of the Hanseatic League, and has lots of old buildings and so on (though apparently most of them were rebuilt after WW2 – they were very cool anyway) and the largest brick church in the world (St. Mary’s; got some good pictures from the top of the tower). We visited a few museums, including one on Solidarity (though I didn’t have a chance to get myself a Solidarność t-shirt). Sopot seemed to be mostly bars and restaurants, with little to do during the daytime; it reminded me of the Barbican in Plymouth, but without the interesting old stuff. Gdynia seems to be mostly industrial/commercial; it was relatively unnotable until the Treaty of Versailles gave Poland access to the Baltic but made Gdańsk independent, leaving it without a major port – Gdynia was expanded to fill that need. We went to the aquarium on Saturday, and were pleased to see that their display on oceanography, with various sensors and instruments attached to model boats, also had a model plane and satellite for the remote sensing side of things.
The first evening we looked around for a bit then got pizza; the first full day there we spent in Gdańsk, then met up with a few of the other InterRiskers for dinner at an overly-complicated fish restaurant (where my order of "fish and potatoes" was interpreted as "fish and more fish"; luckily one of the Polish representatives was around to translate). Thursday was the first day of the actual meeting, most of which was pretty boring (lots of talk about deliverables and user requirements and so on), though the technical side of things was quite interesting – it gave me a much better feel for what the project was about and what the code I’m writing is actually for (which always helps, you know). That evening was the conference dinner; we went back into Gdańsk and were given a guided tour (the opposite way around to our previous visit) then went to some reasonably fancy restaurant place. Friday was much the same, but we spent the evening in Sopot instead, and went to a bar that played weird (but reasonably good) remixes of classic rock.
Saturday was the last day in Poland, but since our flight wasn’t until 21:00 we had plenty of time beforehand. We were assured by our representative from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute that the weather would be sunny (with some cloud) all day, that their forecasts were completely trustworthy and that there’d definitely be no rain. To be fair, it never actually rained, but there was no actual sun, either, and it was bloody cold. We suspect that met.no’s definition of "lovely weather" is "no snow on the ground". We went into Gdynia, visited the aquarium, had some very expensive coffee, then went back to Gdańsk to see the Solidarity museum.
The flight home was again uneventful. My laptop bag got searched, as far as I can tell because the metal nibs of my pens looked suspicious and threatening; on the other hand, I remembered to take the change out of my pocket this time. A small child screamed for almost the entire journey; unfortunately, nobody seemed willing to put it out of its misery. Stayed at a Travelodge in Birmingham overnight, then drove back on Sunday, stopping off somewhere in the middle of Somerset to visit some canal thing that was open for National Heritage Weekend. We didn’t find the canal, but we did find a very nice pub for lunch (the Martlet Inn, near Wellington, if you’re ever in the area). Then off down the M4 listening to obscure (but, admittedly, rather good) music, provided by the boss again (the least obscure parts were the Dune and Blade Runner soundtracks; the best parts I don’t actually know how to spell).
Now I just need to work out how to fill in this expenses claim.
Today was the first day of my second week at PML, and I appear to have survived so far. The work’s pretty interesting; I spent the first couple of days writing Perl, and seem to have won; the last few days have been spent getting to grips with one of the major projects I’ll be working on. It’s a bit of PHP and a lot of Javascript, and my first task has been adding session support, rather than passing dozens of parameters in the URL (which will lead, hopefully, to being able to make the whole thing a lot more user-friendly, or at least developer-friendly).
This afternoon, I also started the second part of my role there – I’ll be doing some sysadmin-type stuff, on a rather more serious level than I’ve had the opportunity to do before. I’m setting up a brand-new (had to unpack it and everything) server to act as a master for a cluster, and then experiment with SystemImager so that we can easily roll out upgrades.
It’s a pretty cool place to work, too; there’s various sport and social groups (including cycling and running, helpfully), and there’s also apparently an agreement with a gym nearby to allow PML staff to use their facilities.
Looking forward to the rest of the year. (Hopefully not famous last words…)
So, as I mentioned recently, I had an interview for a placement at Plymouth Marine Laboratory. I heard back from them a couple of days ago, and so from July I’ll be working in the Remote Sensing and Modelling groups. I’ll be developing software to deal with scientific data, I think mostly satellite images of Europe and the north Atlantic, for measuring things like ocean surface temperature, chlorophyll levels, etc. Rather cool stuff, and I’m looking forward to it.
A couple of days ago I applied for a job with Plymouth City Council, as an “ICT Support Assistant” at Plymouth Central Library. It’s pretty standard stuff - supporting the public systems as well as their internal stuff. Plus, it’s on North Hill, which is just round the corner from me.
It’s basically the first real job I’ve ever applied for, so although I’m pretty confident in my ability to do the job, I’m not so confident in my ability to actually get it in the first place. Wish me luck…
The results for exam and coursework resits get published tomorrow, and I’m rather stressed about it; I have a feeling that I haven’t done well enough in my Stats module to pass (ditto Business and IDAT), which’ll mean resitting the year (or, at least, the modules I’ve failed). Which I really don’t want to do.
It’s not like those modules are relevant to anything I’m likely to do in the future: I want to keep out of the business side of BlueStamp as much as possible, IDAT taught me nothing I didn’t know already, and Statistics taught me nothing I ever wanted to know.
Unfortunately, despite my having learnt more on my own in a few months than I learned on this course, a degree is still practically mandatory; although part of me is tempted to drop out if I fail the year, another part knows it’d not be a brilliant idea. Possibly I’ll hold off on it a month or two, at least to give me time to look for useful work (on the other hand, Gem hasn’t had much success finding IT work in Plymouth, and she actually has qualifications).