I went to Fenwicks today to buy a set of shoe laces and a some nutcrackers — an eclectic mix, I'll grant you. Fenwicks is a department store which specialises in confusing geographical layouts. It's taken me quite a while now, but I do have some basic idea of the organisation there; when I first arrived at Newcastle, I used to get lost and once had to phone the fire brigade to come and rescue me, entering in the morning and leaving in the early evening.

Today, I went first to the kitchen section, forgetting that it now sells shoes, and that the toy department downstairs sells kitchenware. So, I popped downstairs to the toy department for the nutcrackers, came back upstairs to the kitchen department to get some shoe laces. Sadly, they didn't sell shoe laces — this would have been considered too logical and, therefore, against standard retail practice. Instead, they directed me to either the haberdashery department or the in-store Timpsons — people who cut keys and mend shoes. I decided against the haberdashers on the grounds that "haberdasher" is a stupid word. The Timpsons is to be found, straight-forwardly enough, in the food court, where I found the shoe laces (75cm, black, round). Sadly, Timpsons is not Fenwicks, even though the tills said "Fenwicks departments store", so while they could sell me the shoe laces, they couldn't sell me the nutcrackers. So, I walked through the sushi bar to the perfumeria which is convieniently located next to it (raw fish and perfume being natural bedfellows) and paid for the nutcrackers there.

The shoe laces are a bit short.

After my last experience with rice, I decided to get straight-back in there. Bought some more, and cooked it with beans and stuff. Managed to overcook the rice, which I haven't done for a while.

I've been thinking about why I've started to each so many beans recently; then it came to me. I've got salad obsessed recently. My fridge is smaller than my freezer. Salad goes into the fridge, beans the freezer. It's all perfectly logical.

How the world has changed. Once upon a time, rice was my main staple. I used to eat tons of the stuff. Nowadays, I have a more varied staple diet: noodles, pasta, bread, wheat, cous-cous, rice and, of course, the occasional tattie. While I was cooking some rice last night, I noticed to my dismay that it had got some infection — small mites by the look of things which, fortunately float obviously on top of the water.

I've had a 10kg bag of rice in my house for most of my adult life, but I fear now that I have seen my last. I shall be buying 2kg bags in future.

The mites were incredible though; it's wonderful to me that a thing so small, smaller than this comma, can be a complete multi-cellular organism. Wonder what species they were?

I've started trying out Eclipse; I've decided to document my experiences as I thought that they might be interesting. Well, possibly. Possibly not. I'm just going to add to this as times goes on. So far, my conclusion? Pain in the backside.

Got struck down last night with a major bout of insomnia. I was still awake at 4am, staring at the ceiling. I guess I was a bit stressed about work having come back from holiday last weekend, travelling a lot, and then straight to work.

In the end, I got up and watched my latest Amazon DVD; luckily it was light and breezy — An Inconvienient Truth. Actually, it was pretty good; wildly American-centric of course, although I guess the temperature graphs look more impressive in Farenheight as the numbers are so much larger.

This set me to thinking about my Christmas and New Year. Christmas was at Worcester, then I went to Tuscany for New Year. Most of the time, we stayed in an Agriturismo in Sinalunga. These agriturismo places don't have an equivalent in the UK; basically, you get a farm building, kitted out for living, on agricultural land. They get tax breaks so they can be pretty cheap. They are very popular because they help you get back to the rural idyll; at this time of year, this roughly translates as the freezing cold. So, we got through a ton of wood (literally) between 10 people for 5 days. Adding it all up in terms of fuel assuming the fuel is all carbon (wrong obviously).

Newcastle -> Worcester 15kg C (based on 20 litres consumption)
Birmingham -> Milan 55kg C (based on what it said on the plane door).
Milan -> Sinalunga 10kg C (shared with others, based on 30l).
Sinalunga -> Milan 10kg C
Milan -> Birmingham 55kg C
Worcester -> Newcstle 15kg C

Wood, 100kg (1 tonne by 10 people).
Kerosine 40kg

Makes a round 300kg of Carbon emited, or around 4 times my body weight (well, okay, 3.5 times then).

Which is about 1/30th of my Carbon footprint for this year, in two weeks, not including food and everything else.

What can I say? I was feeling much more relaxed about work stresses afterwards, so in a wierd way, I guess the film worked. I managed to get a whole 2 hours before I got up to give a lab meeting talk to four people.

Well, back in one piece and in Newcastle. The Claremont Tower is cold and dull. I have 300+ emails. I think I want to go back.

I found out about a fascinating report about abbreviations from BBC News. The practical upshot of it all is that medics commonly use abbreviations in their records, and traced back to a number of fatalaties when they were misunderstood.

Abbreviations have got a lot of history in medicine. In many cases, they were meant to be confusing: FLK (Funny Looking Kid) or NFN (Normal for Norfolk) were designed to express something that the doctor didn't want the patient from seeing.

The whole problem here is the user interface is wrong. The person writing the notes is trying to save themselves effort, to the detriment of the reader. What we really need is something better to interact with, which is quick to input the data but where the underlying representation is precise. Difficult to do with the paper and pens that most doctors still seem to use.

At the same time, I saw a blog post about Scrivener. This is a new form of word processor, which is attempting to consider the way that authors work. As a long term LaTeX user, I am somewhat isolated from the horror of word, but I can still appreciate the desire. To be dealt with by the application like an author rather than a typesetter is something that word has still failed on. Scrivener has features like a proper outlining and the ability to attach notes. LaTeX gets outlining right (word fails because most people use the physical style markups rather than the "heading" markups), but I love the synopsis idea that Scrivener has. Notes I currently do as comments in LaTeX but something better would be good.

The irony here, is that the problem is backward from the medical notes. The author wants to write much more than than the reader actually sees. Word is more scalable than 10 years ago, and has more fonts, but the user interface basically is the same. Perhaps it is time for a change?