Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

...photograph the cats!

So here's the yellow cat, Calli:



And for everyone who thinks he's the imaginary cat, here's Ben (with Jeoffrey providing depth of field cues):



Travelling to the US last week, I took advantage of the duty free prices^* at Heathrow to pick up a shiny new Nikon D40X. I'm still learning how to use it, but I'm very pleased with the image quality - even with the packaged lens.

^* for some reason the only pieces of high tech equipment where there's little or no difference pricewise between the US and the UK are digital cameras, so duty free is the best place to get one - as long as you've made you your mind in advance...

Waiting for my flight home from this week's flying visit to Silicon Valley, I sat with a coffee and watched passengers get on the Virgin America flights that share the international terminal. In the silence of the emptying terminal I watched this man slowly pull his bags to the gate.

He could have been me.



San Francisco International Airport, California
December 2007

Last week in San Jose, I got to be a genetic engineer for thirty minutes.

The Tech Museum of Innovation is somewhere I've been meaning to go for a while, and Cisco had booked it for the evening event at their C-Scape analyst meeting. There's only so much networking I can do, so I wandered around the exhibits for a while, and found one where I got to sit down and insert jellyfish genes in bacteria. Armed with a test tube of genetic material from a crystal jelly, some bacteria, a cooler and a heater, I first mixed the genetic material and bacteria, then cooled and heated them to fix the genes - and finally left them to grow in an incubator.

The Tech Museum's web site has an area where you can collect the results of your experiments, so here are my glowing bacteria:



So what's next? Glowing cats?