Ah ha ha ha ha.

I have no idea if this has been in the b3ta newsletter or something similar already, but Derek sent me a link to a fantastic video of a DJ scratching cars on a double roandabout. Brilliant!

Hang on, just messing about with the k2 theme, potentially with an eye to moving over to k2 reloaded because I’ve been excited by “one column” layouts recently…

An amusing comment over at Nature on how PhD students wouldn’t make good telly. He compares PhDs to Scrubs:

One, people actually die on Scrubs.  “Professor Frank, I just don’t think this E. coli is going to pull through” is unlikely to drive ratings.

Two, they have patients. The best we can offer are ideas and blips on a graph. Bloody operations are more fun to watch than percolating ideas.

Three, people have been to see doctors. They might reasonably wonder what it’s like to be one.

I think PhD TV should be more in the line of This Life, and focus on the sex, drugs and rock and roll side of things rather than spending too much time on the actual work.  Actually that sounds like most student’s priorities anyway!

A Guide to Mobile Cooking, or how to cook an egg using two mobile phones. I’ve not really trusted the idea that carrying a 1 watt microwave around next to me is perfectly safe, and this does nothing to reassure me. I wonder if it works with just one phone rather than two, because the obvious reason this page shouldn’t worry people is that if you’re as close to the other person’s phone as is required by this method, I doubt you’d use the phone to communicate.

Played my second gig on bass with Casa on the Saturday just gone. Most things went fairly well, but the major problem I suffered was cramping in my wrist. I’ve now realised that the neck of my bass is quite simply too large for my hands. A wide string-spacing makes slap bass very easy but is murder on those of us with stubby fingers! This means that I’m dropping my wrist to allow my first finger to reach the E and B strings, so rather than the nice flat wrist you’re supposed to keep, mine often ends up to 60 degrees, compressing all the tendons. Tendonitis here I come. I did notice how narrow the neck on Steve’s five string (a Carlo Robelli) was; in comparison, you can drive a bus down the neck of my Yamaha. I think my first effort will be to really watch my technique, see if I can play adequately while maintaining a flat wrist position, which might be helped by hanging the guitar a little higher up on the strap and angling the neck a bit more towards the vertical.

I tend to avoid Rupert Murdoch and all his works, but MySpace has become so ubitquitous these days that I thought I’d take the plunge and make a MySpace page for Acuphuncture. Not quite sure what to do with it, but hey, it’s a handy place to keep some mp3s.

Come to my gig, damn you! Saturday 11th, Darwin college bar, 9-midnight. See me play bass; it’s like guitar, only bigger (and bigger is officially better). It’s particularly worth sticking around for the third set because at the last gig, that was when my wrist cramped up really badly. You might notice it’s called a bop. For those not in the know, this is a quaint term for an evening with music used by everyone’s favourite fen-based anachronism, Cambridge University. Even their slang is stuck in the 50s.