Seriously, no really, i never thought there ws a point to commenting. Was I ever wrong. Check out the comments for my last post :D thank you thank you thank you.

I'm off to an IE using machine just to test that my counter is working there as well...


...and yes...it works!!!

Thank you Gnomon!!! You're my hero.
- posted by scott @ 4:39 pm

 
Ok, so I use NedStat as my web counter. It's easy and it works and it has lots of useful statistics. I went to my account, and created a new counter. I pasted to code into my blogger template. It's not working. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll not see it, even though the code is not there. I'm not sure what's going on.

Any suggestions? Does blogger not allow other web trackers? What's going on? Feel free to comment :D
- posted by scott @ 3:14 pm

 
Cool. My blog is now supplementarily powered by Enetation. It was that easy, even for me. Sign up. Make code. For blogger please. Insert one line here. A couple of lines there. Reload. test. and we're away. You can now comment my blog. how cool is that. Next thing I fancy is some sort of page counter thing...and since i already have some on my own pages, it shouldn't be too hard...should it?
- posted by scott @ 2:40 pm

 
LOOKIE LOOKIE!!! First thing i did was save my original template, just incase i muck it up. Which is very likely. The first change I made was to add a small "about me" bit to that box at the top on the right. It's not much, but to me it feels like a good start.
- posted by scott @ 2:32 pm

 
hmm. nothing friday, saturday or monday. I had a look on the website, and there doesn't appear to be anything today either. I mean, it's understandable really...it's not like it's earth shattering news or anything...it's only little old me.

still though, it'll be nice to finally see it.

so anyway, I had a meeting with my second supervisor yesterday. we had a nice chat about stuff over coffee. I say coffee, because that's what you say, but really she had tea and i had a hot chocolate. I say hot chocolate, because that's what i ordered, but it wasn't particularly hot nor chocolatey. but i digress.

Personal issues have been weighing heavy on my mind (i wonder if i should start another blog :) recently, and so my work has suffered. Even though it's relevant to wrok, i'm not going to go into it here. So, together we looked at the work that i have planned. It was all meant to be done by the end of this week, but clearly that's not going to happen. So we talked about what was easy to do, what was interesting, and all the things that come with that, and we came up with a new plan of action. It's all been reorganised to fit into the next 3 weeks, and whilst it will be tough, it all seems do able if i set my mind to it.

I'm wondering if i should put my plan here, and that way all y'lall can hold me to it. If you know what I'm doing then...i'll think about it. Either way, starting my analysis has now been delayed by at least two weeks. Sorry to everyone who is interested in how this turns out, but i will get there eventually. Thank you for being so patient.

In other news, it has been suggested to me that i add a commenting system to my blog. I was pointed by a kind heart to enetation so I might spend a little time this afternoon playing with that. Watch this space...
- posted by scott @ 2:17 pm

 
Well, a lot has happened recently. And none of it to go here, cos it is all personal stuff. sorry. One thing though, I cannot believe i didn't post about possible THE most exciting news!!!!!!!!!!!!

Multiple exclamation marks!! that's just how exciting it was!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

so it begins on my way to work last wednesday. I got a text message, it was from my office mate:

"Hey media whore get your ass in here. the newspapers are after you"

I believe my reaction was "eh?!"

I got in, and not only did i have a direct phone message saying the A lady from the The Herald (a Scottish broadsheet newspaper) was trying to get in touch, but i had en email from one of the secretaries here telling me as much again, AND a letter from a girl in the University press office asking if i was prepared to speak to this journalist.

WOWSERS!! (nice use of 80's cartoon referencing there huh)

So after speaking to my supervisors to make sure i was allowed (they let students speak to the press?) and a quick chat with the press office, I phoned The Herald. no answer. Rats.

so later on she phoned back and arranged to call the next day. But then she called because because she was free, and we did a phone interview. 30-40 minutes my office mate reckons. It was really cool, she was very nice. so we talked about blogs in general, about journals blogs, and about what i was doing with them. Sadly i couldn't give her any results, because I don't have any.

So isn't that cool? i'm going to be in the paper!!

I spoke to her briefly about a few things at the beginning of this week. And apparently the piece is due in the paper some time at the end of this week. probably.

I bought the paper today, but there appears to be nothing. I'm going to be gutted if it's in tomorrow, because then i won't be able to email everyone i've ever known and tell them I'm in the paper. :D

I mean really, how. cool. is. that.
- posted by scott @ 5:26 pm

 
let's right something more...hmm...well, do you know what, I've been getting more data. Isn't that great. It seems that someone came across the mail I sent them oh so long ago, and did my experiment. And put up a link. And so people are coming from there. Also, plenty of people are finding me through search engines.

This you might imagine was quite normal, but for most of the time i was actively seeking respondents, i got one, maybe 2 people coming from search engines. It's only now that I'm starting to get significantly more. It's not loads I admit, but it's some. Which as we all know is better than none. mostly.

so at the weekend i was looking at XML. You know, it doesn't seem to be as hard as i had imagined it to be. It's like, if you will leave me alone and not berate me for getting this totally wrong if i do, a data storage language, but you don't have to learn it, you just make it up. Yeah, so, there are formatting issues to pay attention to, there has to be some formality otherwise it would called WYLML (whatever you like markup language), but you can do whatever with it. This seems quite cool.

So the plan (did i mention this already?) is to get all the data in HTML files (for those people that did not submit in HTML format i may have to re-get the data, or otherwise convert), tidy that data so it's nice simple HTML (using sometihng like this) and then convert it to HTML. this should put all my data in a really nice format for later manipulation and analysis (PERL scripting i imagine).

I still need to do more reading and writing. i'm trying to teach myself to multitask. This is hard. not least because i'm a male, and apparently we are bad at it. But not quite like that. When I work, I always focus on one bit at a time. I read. Or I write. Or i research. but never all at the same time. What i really need to do, is come into work, read a paper, look some stuff up, do some writing...basically do a small amount of lots of things in a day, rather than focussing on one thing. Imagine, as i often had, even reading just one paper everyday...that's a lot of papers in the course of a PhD.
- posted by scott @ 4:59 pm

 
more than a fortnight since I last updated? my apologies, i did not realise it had been so long. still, i am now moved into my new permanent accommodation. at least for the next year. so that's good.

and what's that bar I can see on the right. you won't be able to see it when you are reading this i imagine. and I'm sure it's only there for cheap skate freebie bloggers like me. Change time and date? so...i could post this and claim it was last week and pretend i had only not updated for a week? how devious. I might paly with that some time.

So, a slow period of time has elapsed. Had a meeting last week, at which it was made really quite clear how much work i have to do. This made me quite miserable for a while, because it has meant i have had to be quite realistic about things. I need to work more, so i need to do less other things. I did have a big outside project coming up, and I was really looking forward to it, but I've had to give that up. which made me really sad. I mean, I have to be realistic. Being a PhD is a full time thing. But unless you've time manged your first two years your third year (the year i begin in october) is going to be really REALLY busy. I didn't, and so i must accept the fact that I'm going to have to work my ass of. Becoming a medical doctor isn'ta walk in the park, why should I get to take it easy.

So i'm reading, i need to speak to people, I'm planning and preparing...come october I am going to start my analysis. The data is still coming, but very slowly. there were a couple of good ones last week, which was nice. Still attention on the website hasn't completely vanished, though it's tailing off. Dribs and drabs.

Anything else you need to know...err...I still haven't got a nice looking blogs yet. Sorry. Still no useful information other than when i include it in posts. actually, when was the last time i did that...3 weeks ago? but it was only two posts ago. oops.

sorry.
- posted by scott @ 4:41 pm