After 12 years of trusty service, with 5384 miles on the computer, my old bike, a Dawes Giro Audax, has finally given up the ghost; it was an excellent purchase. I got it just after I moved to London, really didn’t have much cash, immediately post-PhD. At around 600 quid, it was expensive, but turned out to be worth every penny. It was quick, comfortable, usable for training, usable for commuting. And after 12 years, the paint job and most of the rest of it is still flawless.

Well, this is it; although I have been using this blog for a week or so now, I haven’t told anyone about it because it wasn’t quite ready. Today, with a little VirtualHost hacking and it’s finally up and running. I’m not totally happy with the theme yet, but that can change over time. The basic content uploaded, commentary and permalinks seems to all be working. Many thanks to Dan Swan who set up wordpress and has lent me a bit of his virtual machine. An excellent job, as ever.

I got this great idea a few months back, but never got around to writing it up; in the course of doing so, I realised that it’s not entirely novel. Still, as this is going up on my all new blog, I’m going to post it anyway. It serves two functions now: firstly, it’s got an image it it, which I’ve not done before and need to see whether it works; and, second, the image has been created with Inkscape, which I haven’t used before. Okay, onto the idea.

I’ve been thinking about the decline of the honeybee population after watching a BBC documentary on it; I’ve decided that it is all the fault of the theory of comparative advantage.

While it’s not a major problem, the inability to uniquely and reliably identifier a particular scientist is a niggle; a few years ago, I was distressed to find that I was scheduled to give a talk at an eScience conference about security; anyone who knows me, will understand how implausible this was. I hadn’t considered the possibility that there was another Phillip Lord in eScience. It’s not that common a name.