Work Blog 1: Office move

We're moving offices at work. Our floor gets it doubly bad because we have to move upstairs for a week before the full move, so I am currently 2 metres higher and 5m closer to our final destination.

I've been tidying up in preparation of this for the past month, but I still ended up being the last one carrying piles of junk upstairs. This has also provided all sorts of opportunities to find interesting stuff.

I awarded myself the 1999 Quality Editorial Gold Award (just need a black pens to change the names).

Uncovered a Rubik's cube which I can very nearly do... two thirds so far - this last side is just impossible - but it provides a great distraction and I'm getting super fast at getting the top and middle so that's some kind of progress. Do you think they have world record attempts that only cover those two levels? A world record would be nice, but I think my hands are too shaky for it. Before anyone suggests it; I will not be pulling off the stickers, and I'd also rather not just check the internet for the solution, as actually using my brain to try and figure it out is equal parts frustrating and fulfilling. All corners are in place now, but I couldn't tell you how I did it. Sigh.

Best thing that I found would have to be the carton of Smoked Haddock Chowder I found while clearing out my superior's desk. Unexpected, hilarious and some how still in date. Could be I only find Smoked Haddock funny because it reminds me of Red Dwarf and Ace Rimmer. Those that don't know "Smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast" are definitely missing out and need to track some quality British TV at the next opportunity. Strangely Red Dwarf popped up again today while I was checking Twitter, as it seems the Leicester Space Centre is having a Movie Mania weekend with a heavy Red Dwarf theme to Saturday.

Unfortunatly I can't go to that because I have used up my Geek quotient for this month by attending Doctor Who Live last weekend. It was all the music and monsters, really loud and hilarious to see tons of people dressed up. I took my sonic screwdriver and as the lights dropped the crowd filled with dots as other similarly minded individuals lit theirs as well. Pretty and quite funny to see.

Also mildly related to fish is the news story I tracked down first thing this morning. A Sea Snail that shoots a harpoon-like tooth full of paralysing venom into it's victims! Luckily for me they analysed the thing using TOF LC–MS so I get to read up on it. Sweet! It's also fun to discuss poisonous snails with people who only get to write about pharmaceuticals all day - sometimes my job is nice ;)

Blogging for work: The Prequel

So I'm blogging again. Professionally. As part of my job. My boss told me to think of it as like a commission, but there's a chance he was trying to convince me to do something he didn't think I'd want to.

This, in case you hadn't guessed, is not the real blog; that goes out fortnightly, but probably the other fortnight to this one. Or the alternate. I'm not to clear on the terminology, but I do like the word fortnight because it confuses our American colleagues. The plan in my head is one week of not for profit bloggage and then one week of problogging, in some kind of fresh keeping method. I'll see how that goes.

The logic behind this that I've been told to put some personality into our social networking site for chromatographers; the thing that worries me is that that means these guys are going to be getting my personality. These are people that our company feels the need to tell that if they want to get "fun" with their profile picture they could perhaps use a pet photo; and I would be happy to write Alice in Wonderland every other week and list all the unusual sounds I've heard that day.

So my new blog is going to be about science. And I guess science related things, things of interest to people with potentially serious minds. Technically it should be about chromatography and chromatography related things, but there's a good chance that would become a fortnightly bitch about how nothing interesting ever seems to happen in the world of chromatography. (This isn't actually that true, my job also features news writing on the subject and I have managed to cover sharks, dinosaurs and mummies, but it hasn't been easy).

Then again... I may listen to this over and over and write about spaceships, and movies, and TV, and monsters, and my dreams (you've missed graveyards; ash; playing cards covered in blood; me as Homer Simpson; Tron; and people pixelating and merging their faces in a seriously creepy fashion). Did you know they're making a wiimote that looks like a sonic screwdriver? There's a good chance that's going in there. Oh and stuff like this.

Yay, for dashing about and being marvellous!