One Man's Notes

It’s very much a Gray Day today.

I’ve just realised what I miss most about face-to-face lecturing: the after lecture chats.

Nobody hangs around to ask questions or chat after Zoom lectures. And often some fascinating ideas came from those chats.

Maybe next academic year…

Taken this afternoon.

Spring is coming.

Some weekend nature-centric reading and viewing for you.

Cooking “last day of half term” pancakes for my daughters.

New fancy coffee brewing method to kick off the weekend right.

Mask upgrade.

The combination of stupidly fast yet silent when dealing with lots of video and other tasks is still making me very happy I invested in an M1 MacBook Pro.

First take-out coffee of the year.

I do like the geometry and colours of this image.

This sign has met a premature end, but I look forward to the day when its ilk are no longer needed.

I’ve seen how this movie ends — and it’s not pretty…

Finally got a flexible boom arm for my Mevo streaming cam. I’ll have my home training studio just about perfect by the time we go back to training face-to-face!

I do miss the days when my home office was my home office (as a self-employed person), rather than one my wife lets me use on occasion…

This is quite an important intervention from Nature: Coronavirus is in the air — there’s too much focus on surfaces.

In short, we’re spending too much money and time on the easy but not useful sanitisation of surfaces, and not nearly enough on better masking and ventilation.

It may be cold, but the beach is the beach.

I think they’re plotting something.

I’m not saying it’s cold — but here’s a frozen boat we found.

I think we were making him nervous.

New hat!

9 days until we need to homeschool again. Bliss.

One of my joys during this year of lockdowns and restrictions has been rediscovering photography with a camera, rather than a phone. My trusty Canon M50 has seen a serious workout, as I’ve turned my daily walks into an opportunity to really focus on and capture the peninsula where I live.

I hadn’t been paying much attention to the development of Canon’s M-series of mirrorless cameras over the last few years, but I was becoming slightly frustrated that, with my lens set, I couldn’t easily capture most things with one lens. And when you’re out walking with two children, on the beach, in windy conditions, lens swapping is not always an option. 

And so, I was delighted to find out that there was now an 18 to 150mm lens that would be perfect as an all day lens. But I was less delighted to find out that it sells for nearly £400 — which was more than I can justify right now. 

However, after a couple of weeks eBaying old camera kit I no longer use, I had both more shelf space, and enough money in my PayPal account to pick up a second hand lens on eBay. 

Here are two photos, taken from exactly the same spot, at the extreme edges of its range:

18mm

150mm

This is great. I’m really looking forwards to putting it through its paces on our daily walk today. 

Well, this morning I had to reset my router to factory settings and rebuild my network to get everyone online again.

How’s your day going?

One thing that being married to someone with a PhD in immunology has taught me: take any pronouncement on immunity from anyone who isn’t an immunologist with a whole truck of salt.

Not the morning conference(s) I expected to be attending at this point in my career, but it is what it is…