My computer is currently having serious cooling issues as the CPU fan is not attaching securely to the motherboard causing the CPU to overheat and the power to automatically cut out. This is my CPU fan:

Now the issue is that it attaches to the motherboard using four pins but two of these have been broken, goodness knows how, and as they are both on one side it means that side of the fan is lose and unless pushed down the heatsink does not make proper contact with the CPU. This is what a complete pin should look like:

And this is what a broken pin looks like:

So my problem is that I have a working fan and heatsink I just need to devise a way to fix the pins or otherwise attach the heatsink. I stand up my case so putting something heavy on top if it won’t work and would not be an ideal solution even if it did. Do help, please.

I am a very, very bad person. I haven’t really made a blog post since I set this site up. I hope to remedy that.

Over the last three weeks I have been doing work experience at the maths department at Cambridge, more specifically I have been working with a project that teaches remotely using videoconferencing called Motivate. It’s a really great idea and although you wonder at first whether the technology will work they’ve actually been doing it since 1999 so it works really well. What they do is get an academic in from a university to give a workshop/talk of varying lengths, some are just a morning whereas some are spread out in sessions over a year, to multiple schools, from across the country and across the world, who then give feedback, do projects or just ask questions. It’s really good and I found a lot of the talks really interesting even though they really varied in target audience. One of the coolest ones was a project that had been running for a year in which researchers at the university were working with secondary school children to collect data on the mixing patterns of children at primary school to simulate how disease would spread. It was a brand new study that had never been done before and had some really fascinating results such as suggesting that for the older years it isn’t unusual for children to mix more with others of their own gender than of their own age. It was lots of fun and it would certainly be amazing job but who knows how soon it will be till I’m back in Cambridge :-p.

In the last three and a bit weeks it hasn’t been entirely working at Cambridge. During the second week from Monday to Thursday I did a headstart course on Systems Engineering at Loughborough University. First of all, before I even start talking about the course, the campus at Loughborough is amazing, it’s the largest single campus in Europe and has the biggest Student Union in the UK. It does have quite a lot of old (as in not that nice rather than fancy archaic) buildings but there’s loads of development going at the moment with lots of building happening over the summer. Now onto the course, I had no idea what Systems Engineering was before I got on this course, all I knew is that it had some sort of electronic aspect to it. It works out that Systems Engineering is all of the other Engineering disciplines (Electronic Engineering, Aerodynamics, Structural Engineering, etc.) rolled into one and it is more about coordinating systems and making them work as a whole and in that way a system can be anything from a supermarket to a mobile. The course has residence in the Electrical engineering department as a lot of systems work has developed historically from past knowledge about purely electrical systems. What the headstart course involved was a big project and then various talks and activities to supplement that. There were around 30 boys on the course and we split into 5 groups of 6 for the project. A great thing we did was a team building evening on the first night and although normally I would sneer at these things it was organised by a company from outside the university and was really well done with a good balance between the mental and physical aspects. The project was to design an air defence system for a country which was at threat from hostile neighbours (imagine the country being a bit like Israel just not with quite as many enemies). Now that was a massive task as we had to design the aircraft down to the airframe and electronics as well as the airbases and everything else, we then had to make a report and give a presentation at the end with it being judged 50/50. The problem with such a massive task is that it’s too much for one person to handle and so we decided from the very beginning to delegate with task such as accounting, electronics, airbases, etc. being split between people and to hold it all together I was unanimously chosen as coordinator (I did put myself forward) although my main task was avionics (the electronics in the plane). It was quite a tight time limit to do it in the two main days we had (the first day was mainly occupied with arriving, getting to know each other and the last day was occupied with the presentations and then we left at lunch) but we managed to finish our report just in time on the Wednesday evening, although I later realised we’d missed out a couple important figures about our planes specifications. Fortunately everything was ship-shape in time for the presentation on Thursday and we managed to do a really hard sell. When it came down to the winner being announced we suspected it to be the clever team (I know this sounds really silly as the teams were picked at random but there was a clever team) but we managed to scoop a win I think because of our, if I might say so myself, fantastic organisation and reasonable price (we factored in a profit of 30%ish compared to other teams’ 5% but still managed to stay well under-budget, to be precise a quarter of the countries annual defence budget). I have to say I’ve gone on slightly but it is the first time in ages I’ve won something and everything’s gone well so I am really happy and slightly less disappointed in myself. I also one a cup for best magician on the course but that was due to my frankly dreadful magic tricks I performed with a magic set left in the common room we used, I think the worst trick was one which relied on a magnet hidden in one of the cards.

Overall, as you might have worked out, I’ve had a really enjoyable holiday so far and it’s nice to see that the real world isn’t nearly as depressing as school.

P.S. Feel free to comment on how arrogant I sounded or any horrendous spelling mistakes

Watch my webcast:
Retry (Jun 18 22:55 CET)

I got bored after Stats 1 today so I recorded this song on GarageBand as I’d never actually done anything like that before. Very easy. It’s not that good but it’s worth a listen all the way through as it gets better later on.

[audio http://www.archive.org/download/BeingAlive/BeingAlive.mp3]

Here are some tips for tomorrow’s Physics Practical Exam from my Physics teacher:

• Always take repeats and averages
• Use correct heading and units on the table
• Always leave a spare column on the table just in case
• Use the same significant figures for you answers as you did for the data used to calculate them
• Give time to 2 d.p. if possible even if error is greater
• Add errors rather than fiddling and trying to multiply, its too complicated and you don’t have to
• When measuring the gradient use at least half of your line of best fit
• Make sure you cannot double either of the scales on your axis
• Set it out as clearly as possible to make it easy for the examiner
• When it comes to the question asking whether it is proportional the answer doesn’t matter so long as its consistent with the data
• Points for evaluation:
  • 2 points of data are not enough
  • do repeats
  • put white card behind experiment
  • dye any liquid
  • close windows
  • Use a fiducial mark
  • minimise parallax
  • Use datalogging N.B. Must say sensors (e.g. Light gate)
  • Plot a graph

I am so overdue on this blog. I’ve just been spamming all of you with my del.icio.us links which  may be interesting but hardly makes up a blog. The normal excuse to use would be that I’ve got A Levels going on but seeing as I’m not really doing revision most of the time that hardly seems an excuse. This might actually be my first ever blog post using the new Wordpress.com interface and I have to admit that its quite nice. Ever since I joined wordpress I’ve been a strong advocate for it and would really recommend it to people over Blogger. If you already have a blog with Blogger it has a handy import feature so you can copy all your past posts over to wordpress which is very useful.

On the subject of exams I have already started exams with my Computing CPT3 exam yesterday but I’m not on study leave until Thursday. The exam I’m most worried about is my Music exam on not this Thursday but next Thursday. I’ve always been slightly unsure about my decision to choose Music as all my subjects I’m quite confident that I’ll get an A but Music is not a subject I’m naturally good at. I’m surprised that at the time when I was choosing my second choice was Geography as at the moment if I hadn’t done music I would have chosen Chemistry. As it is Music has been good fun but I’m going to have to a lot of work to know my pieces inside out and be able to write down lots of quotes.

Recently I have also been indulging my interest in Wikipedia by doing a lot more editing and also doing some anti-vandal work. One great tool I’ve had for this is Huggle which monitors the recent changes feed and orders edits by how suspicious they are. The one thing I’m getting better at is doing good references which is really important for the integrity of Wikipedia.

If you do want more regular updates from me then I’d recommend my Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/dolphonia . Today I tried out StrawPoll on my Twitter which allows me to post a poll that people can reply to on Twitter, unfortunately no one has replied yet :-(.

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