What keeps you up at night?

The topic I have chosen to write about this week is

What keeps you up at night?

I work as a resident tutor in halls at The University of Bath. Part of my responsibility as a resident tutor is to deal with any fire alarms that occur. This involves making sure that the students evacuate, locating the source of the fire alarms and assisting the fire brigade when they arrive. Today and yesterday we ran drills for the new students. These were conducted at 7pm both nights and ran quite smoothly. Usually however, when the fire alarms go off they are not planned. Therefore, I could be required to deal with them at any time. In the past, the alarm has gone off at 3am. On these occasions, I do not get back to bed until one hour later. Even after getting back to bed, with my ears still ringing and heart still pounding, it is incredibly difficult to get to sleep.

What is your favourite word?

Last Thursday’s topic on The Daily Post was “What is your favorite word?“.

To be honest, I did not have to think of this one for very long. My favourite word is one whose sound and meaning are both beautiful.

Serendipity – The ability to make fortunate discoveries by accident. For example, “Serendipity led him to find this blog whilst searching for information on looking after stick insects”.

When teleportation is finally possible, where will you beam yourself first?

Ok, I’m going to twist the question a bit this week and talk about which I would prefer out of being able to teleport or being able to time travel. Whilst time travel sounds very exciting, I think the concept is overrated. To explain why I think this, I would like to refer to a scene in the sitcom Red Dwarf (perhaps in my top ten list of British comedies ). In the scene, the crew are in deep space, three million years into the future. Upon finding a time travel machine, they use it to travel back to the present day. They are of course still in deep space. Therefore, without a method of getting back to earth, the time travel machine is completely useless.

So, I would prefer to be able to teleport. I just think it offers more opportunities than time travel. I would love to be able to go and have dinner with my friends on the other side of the world.

What’s going on in your life right now that’s driving you nuts?

The topic from The Daily Post that I have chosen to write about this week is:

Whilst there is not one specific thing that is “driving [me] nuts” right now, there are many things that annoy me. Here is a (not so serious) list of three of them:

• You know those double doors that only open one way? You know, the ones with that little sticky outy thing on one of the doors that means you should open it before the other? Well anyway, it annoys me when people open the wrong door (i.e. the one without the little sticky outy thing), causing them not to shut properly.
• In one of the restaurants on my university campus, there is a vegetarian bar that serves couscous and rice. When serving customers, the catering staff always (and I mean always) carefully measure out one and a half spoons of whatever has been ordered. Measuring out that extra half wastes so much time. Why not get a bigger spoon!!!
• I get really annoyed when I arrive at a pedestrian crossing only to find that the people already standing there have not pressed the button. Often these people are standing right next to the button, requiring me to walk round them in order to press it myself!

What is your favorite sound?

The topic from The Daily Post that I have chosen to write about this week is:

What is your favorite sound?

Firstly, a bit of context. For the last three and a bit years, I have been doing a PhD in Orthopaedic Biomechanics (see ‘My Work’ page). Coming to the end of my PhD, I still have some computer models to run. Since I need to run a number of models and each model can take days to complete, my computer is nearly always on. Indeed, it is a blessing when I get the chance to turn it off. My favourite sound is therefore the Windows XP shutdown sound. When I hear this sound, the constant agonising over whether the model will work or not is lifted from me. This sound lets me know that I have nothing to worry about… lets me know that I can think about something else for a while.

What made me decide to start a blog?

Last week, I said that every Wednesday I would be writing about a particular topic chosen by someone else. I also set up a poll to decide who would choose the topic. I can now reveal that the winner is …

… drum roll …

“… any one of the seven daily topics featured in The Daily Post the previous week.”

So, here is the topic I have chosen this week:

What made you decide to start a blog? If you’ve blogged about this before, go back and read it. Is that still the reason? What’s changed?

Well, I guess I first started this blog nearly a year ago to keep a record of and share the interesting little things I come across in life. I think that is largely still the case now. Things that I like to share include songs, puzzles, board games and my own thoughts. Essentially, I believe that if i am interested in something, there must be other people out there that are interested in them too. Perhaps this is somewhat self-indulgent of me, but I am quite passionate about some of the things I post about on here and I really enjoy it when I can make others feel the same way.

To answer the question of why I started this post-a-day challenge, I can honestly say it was just a whim. I read about the challenge about 15 minutes before midnight on the 1st January and thought “why not?”. Sometimes it is good not to think about things too much. People who know me will know that if I think about things, I think about them for a long time. Indeed, I have been looking for a laptop to replace my nearly 8-year-old computer for over 2 years now! So yes, a whim. I am quite proud that I have managed to get this far, quite surprised how naturally posting every day has come and quite intrigued as to how long it will last.

Three things

I have found in the past, that finding the right questions to ask is often as important as the answers that follow them. With this in mind, I enjoy trying to find the questions that help to define people. My latest effort is this:

“If you could change three things about yourself, either things you like into things you don’t like or vice-versa, what would they be?”

Here is my answer:

• I would choose to like tomatoes – I have never really enjoyed them, but they seem to be present in every sandwich that I buy.
• I would choose to like learning languages – I have always been poor at learning languages, mostly because I hate learning languages! Oh but what a useful skill…
• I would choose to dislike Chinese culture – It has long been a bit of an obsession of mine to visit China and Taiwan. Why are they so far away?

Please post your three things in a comment.