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My brother Edward graduated with a degree in Chemistry on 26 October 2005. I've already given him a personal congratulations but I can now give a very public one as well. He graduated from Imperial college, London who hold their ceremony in the Royal Albert Hall. I think the surroundings got to everyone as the ceremony was very staid and people didn't start to loosen up until the very end when the Med students decided to bring some fun into it by cheering and clapping their friends.

Royal Albert Hall: The Royal Albert Hall where Imperial college, London's graduation ceremony was held on 26 October 2005.

I have become just another statistic in the local authority crime figures. After returing from my brother's graduation yesterday and heading to my car I found that along with millions of other people in this country my car had been scratched and the person who had done it had not left a note on my windsheild to confess to it. I'm pretty easy going and with my old clapped out car of before I would not have given it a second's worth of irritation but with my new one it warranted at least 10 minutes worth. The reason for this is that the scratches, although not long, are rather wide and therefore more noticable and more prone to encouraging rust patches as they are down to the bare metal. Added to this the car hadn't even tripped the 1000 mile mark on the odometer. I was so close - only 25 miles to go.

My car is currently parked in the space by the entrance to my block of flats so you have to walk next to it to enter the block. On the way past I noticed that the door was open. Obviously I'd forgotten to lock it. The thing is though that I haven't actually driven it since Sunday so it has been sitting, completely unlocked for three days!

I must live in a quiet area. I can't imagine it staying untouched anywhere else I have lived. Even the CD's that were in the centre well are still there.

Or maybe my music taste sucks so much that no one would want to knick them?

The image recovery program finally finished at 0015 this morning and it worked like a charm. I would highly reccomend it. It's called Zero Assumption Digital Image Recovery and it's a freeware data recovery tool geared towards recovering images. I've just put some quick and dirty versions of a couple of the pictures I took up here. The sky was particularly grey that day so the backgrounds are certainly nothing to shout about. I may play a bit more over the weekend and sort out something better but for now...

Today shall officially be known as the 'Kat, you're an idiot' day.

To celebrate the successful production of 37 years of Pegasus engines (they go in Harrier aircraft) there was a fly-by today at work consisting of a couple of Harriers the company Spitfire and friend and I believe a Hercules. We were allowed to bring a camera on site just for today so this morning I packed my zoom lens and camera and looked forward to geting some good pictures.

Living in Bradley Stoke can be both a blessing and a curse. Quite a few people live there but there is no real town centre and no high street at all. One of the good things about it though is that there are a lot of 'green paths' around so although you are near to very busy roads you can still feel like you are surounded by nature. As I'd been having trouble recently finding places to park legally when out exploring with my camera I decided I'd just explore what I could walking from my house. I'd finally bought the OS map for my area so map, compass (I like the security it gives), water and camera in my bag I set off.

My wrist feels naked.

For the last couple of years I've been wearing a silver bracelet that my mum picked up at a boot sale or charity shop or something. It's hardly ever left my wrist. I only ever took it off a few times when playing badminton but normally I'd just leave it on. The band fits semi-tighly around the wrist so in order to take it off you have to bend it out so that a gap big enough to pass the wrist through is present. Any engineer worth their salt will tell you that constantly subjecting a material to cyclic stress like this is a 'Bad Thing' and so it has proved with this band. Today the band finally snapped in half.

Being the engineer I am I immediately examined the fracture surface and I freely admit to this being a rather sad thing to do :-) I took a photo of it anyway although I only have a couple of close up filters rather than a macro lens so there's a limit to how close I can get.

Stress Fracture Surface

I finally got some papers through for the job that I have been working at for the last couple of weeks. There's the standard offer letter (which is wrong - have to sort that out Tuesday when my manager gets back in) and the terms and conditions. There's a slightly higher wage attached which is always nice but at the back of the pack a nasty surprise lays in wait - The Security Check \ Counter Terrorist Check Questonaire.

Dear Kat, (Cust: 1234567)

Thank you for contacting us.

The system administrator has informed us that a hacker/attacker has tried to abuse one of your scripts (cgi/php)....

Oh well, it had to happen sometime. But why did it have to happen when I was having so much trouble actually logging on to the ftp server and staying on?

True horror is when you've deleted half of what makes the site tick, the ftp software refuses to connect and you know you'll have to force a restart of your browser to get a connection back, in the full knowledge that it'll log you out of your site when you need to stay logged in to make the update work. Still hopefully it'll be fixed now.

::sigh::

It's been an interesting week. I've spent most of it revamping the departmental intranet site and worrying about where I will work once my attachment in my current department finishes next week. Thankfully it looks lke I finally have a permanent position in the works so on the 18th I'll join a new department as a Designer although my paperwork saying that I'm employed there might take a while to catch up.

The only day this week that I didn't have to do website design was yesterday when I was due in central London for a forum held in the Victoria Plaza. Everyone already knows what happened in London yesterday so I won't reiterate but as someone caught on the (very extreme) edges of what happened it was a weird day. I got on the train at Bristol about 09:00 and was due into Paddington about 10:30. Just before Didcot Parkway the Train Manager gave a message on the tannoy that it looked like Paddinton had been closed and therefore the train may be terminating at Reading (the stop before Paddington). We didn't really know what was going on but people around me with mobiles after a short while started to say there had been explosions in London and that they may have be terrorist acts.