Blogging about board games since 2001

My very first entry on nimrods was posted on Thursday, April 19, 2001. Two posts actually – the first was a session report on a weekend-long play of Krieg! with my wargaming buddies Dave and Nick. We actually played it twice; I guess I had more stamina back then! The second post expressed worry that my games collection was overflowing the available shelf space, and shared a list of candidates for disposal. Some things never change – I recently posted a very similar entry on Instagram!

Nimrods was actually a very early entry into the board game blogging field. In fact I don't actually know of an earlier one. Mikko Saari started his excellent GameBlog in August 2002. Chris Farrell started blogging around that time, I'm not sure exactly when. So it's possible I was the first! However, unlike Mikko and Chris there has been a lengthy hiatus in my blogging career. My posting frequency slowed down a lot from 2007 onwards, and completely dried up by 2011. When I started blogging it was partly as a distraction from the boredom I was feeling with my career. However, in 2007 I made a new start, with a masters degree in neuroscience at King's College London followed by a PhD at University College London and a post-doc at Oxford. Neuroscience was pretty well all-consuming, and didn't leave much space for blogging. But I retired last year, and so have a little more free time and energy. So perhaps nimrods will come back to life. Let's see.

More Apple dilemmas

My iPod (2006 30Gb Classic) has packed up - or at least the right channel of the jack socket has. The nice people at the Apple temple store said they could fix it for £108. Where "fix" actually means replacing it with a brand new one. Seems like a pretty good deal to me.

My iPod feels like an old friend. It goes everywhere with me. There's something very appealing about the idea of carrying at least 60% of my CD collection around in my pocket.

But do I really need one? When it comes down to it, 90% of my listening is podcasts: Guardian Film Weekly or 2 Half Squads (note the wargaming reference there). I could probably live without that. Time on my commute is better spent reading neuroscience papers really.

And I've just shelled out (after much agonizing) on a MacBook Pro. Maybe it's time to cut back on the blatant consumerism for a while?

Dammit! I missed Jorge Cham of PhD comics fame giving a lecture at UCL yesterday. I knew it was happening soon, but I suppose I kept procrastinating about finding the details.....

What does it mean to be a scientist?

So I went over to the Finnerty lab yesterday afternoon, and spent the whole afternoon toiling away - fixing, fetching ice, resectioning, making up solutions, calculating different dilutions of antibody, incubating in blocking solution, pipetting out the antibody solutions.

At 9pm, tired but contented, I carried my precious culture tray down the corridor to the storeroom where sits the big fridge, in which my slices were to spend the next two days rocking back and forth in their little plastic wells. The storeroom door has a heavy spring. My mind was relaxed and thinking about going home. The door sprang back heavily and knocked the tray out of my hands.....

.....which somersaulted through the air in slow motion and crashed to the ground.

Upside down.

I took it back to the lab to salvage but everything was completely trashed - so my whole day was wasted.

I guess this is what it means to be a scientist.

This and that

I'm still looking for PhD studentships or research jobs. In the meantime I'm putting together a design for an experiment I'm hoping to do in Gez Finnerty's lab on a part-time volunteer basis. It's an immunohistochemistry project looking at molecular mechanisms of plasticity in the barrel cortex.

But before that gets going, Sue and I are setting out on the Offa's Dyke long-distance path, starting from Prestatyn on Monday morning, and finishing at Chepstow two and a half weeks later.

But first there's a reunion dinner at my old school (Manchester Grammar) on Saturday. Quite looking forward to it - I just hope there's not too much boasting about careers/cars/houses at the table (as I have none of these things at the moment!)

I've just finished a cracking PBEM game of Amun Re against Tim and Don - I think it's my first win ever at this game!

Meanwhile my idiot son Gavin is having his wrist rebuilt this morning after a cycling accident yesterday. At least he didn't land on his head I suppose, and his bike is a write-off too, so I'm hoping he might use the bus in future.

The Melvyn Bragg show covered "Neuroscience" yesterday. Big subject for 40 minutes! A bit like doing a show on "History" for example. They concentrated on functional imaging and consciousness. Hardly anything about pharmacology, molecular biology, genetics, disease etc. Still, good to hear "my" subject being covered on my favourite radio show.

The End

Today I finally came to the end of my year of living dangerously. This is the last day of my Neuroscience MSc, and I've just picked up my result from the notice pinned outside the course supervisor's office. This afternoon I travelled over to the Institute with my heart in my mouth, dosing myself with coffee and chocolate at St Pancreas to fortify myself for the shock. It was a Distinction! So I'm pretty happy with that, although I have an innate tendency to think I could always have done better, but in this case, well, I really couldn't. So I'm shocked, as expected - I think any result, distinction, merit, pass or fail, would have shocked me - but a warm glow of happiness is slowly filtering into my consciousness as well.

If only I could do this well at online Euphrat & Tigris....

Help me decide what to do next.....

As regular readers will know, I am coming to the end of a Masters course in Neuroscience at King's College London. And I just can't decide what to do next. Shall I try to stay on in the lab as a PhD student, working hard for long hours, perennially short of money, with an uncertain future at the end of it as a 50-something competing with 20-somethings for my first post-doc position? On the other hand, I would be working on one of two questions in science that really matter - how did the universe begin? and how does the brain work? - all the rest being trivia according to my supervisor Gerald Finnerty. Or shall I try to get a job in bioinformatics? As our knowledge of genetics mushrooms this is a booming field, and one where I might be able to use my 30-years of IT experience. But it could be quite difficult to get that vital first job. Or shall I go back to Egypt? Back to the commercial world of IT - giving up the dream of working in science, but at least earning a decent wage and building up some kind of pension fund so that Sue and I have a chance of retiring some day.

I've put up a poll - please vote, and post a comment as well. Help me to think this through.

Two done, two to go

This morning's exam must have degraded all the structural proteins (like GFAP, actin, tubulin etc) in my brain. It feels like there's just mush in there this afternoon.

Judgement Day

I've been revising since mid-January. That's two and a half months. I think that's the longest I've ever revised for anything, including my finals at Oxford. At last, it's nearly over. I had a relaxing day with Sue yesterday, pottering around Highgate, reading the papers and cooking a nice meal back home. Today it's one last look through my mindmaps for module 1 (yes, I have made a mindmap for *every* lecture in the course)then an early night and the first exam tomorrow.....