13 December: The Moooooove

Snypa.co.uk successfully transferred over to new hosts - currently residing on 100 % green energy powered Tucows servers. The control and service is top notch. Got a good feeling that this hosting solution will do me very well.

Finally, the final KTP assignment was submitted, so no more homework... well of that nature anyhow. It felt odd having an actual day off on Sunday. Long may the feeling continue as we roll towards Christmas.

I intend to be setting up a Coppermine or other gallery system soon, so help showcase some of my photography work, but I'll guess thatt'll be a job for the New Year. 2012: the tenth anniversary of snypa.co.uk.

10 December: RE-Hosting - [transfer complete]

Manic does not describe it, but I thrive on pressure and change.

Snypa.co.uk is moving hosts, from Web-mania (now YorHost) to Hostpapa, due to far more features and benefits, so that I can finally sort out decent galleries for my photos and all kinds of additional content. As a result there will be a 5-7 day window of (hopefully minimal) interruption. Will update, post-shift, when snypoa.co.uk has settled into its new home.

29 August 2011: Upgrade and the Kid @ Christmas Feeling

Its been another hectic month, work is becoming a bit stale; the novelty of it all is wearing thin, but I am absolutely dedicated to the task; especially seeing what this job can deliver to me personally. The end of this month is my one year anniversary in the role, and represents one third of the project time, however I am well ahead of the curve, and expect to deliver the project well early. I would imagine a large amount of project creep or extension (even more than is already there) will be put in to pad it all out to three years. I am however excited to be at the back end of the CMI training, so now I can look at putting in training requests for topics of my choosing (e.g. PRINCE 2 is on the list).

The end of this month also marks a photographical change for me, I have sold my old Sony Alpha A300 dSLR, and am buying a Sony Alpha A580. This represents a huge leap forwards in terms of my photography: recognition that I am no longer a beginner and am now an intermediate. The end of the month is only a few days away, but I am genuinely feeling like a kid counting down the sleeps until Christmas! No doubt I will have to lock myself away from the world for a few days to unlearn the A300 layout and learn how the A580 handles.

The A580 will mark the end of the spending spree that was summer. I have bought all of those things that I put on a list to buy "when I was  in my first proper job". Time now to start saving and being more financially responsible, Pension, anyone?!

07 August 2011: Photo shoots, Photoshop, and That CMI Thing

It has been like 6 weeks or so since my last update, mostly due to a really hectic work period, with crazy amounts of homework in the form of CMI assignments. I even took a week's annual leave in order to complete it - not what holiday time is meant for, but needs must.

I had the privilege to shoot two dance events last month, Smoking Circles, and Dope & Mean, both the work of some local dance talent - Nate Gordon and Hung van Nguyen, both are members of Sheffield dance troupe "Rationale". The events were really well run, and I managed to get backstage / pit-side to grab some cool captures. I have no idea how the dancers do it - the next day it was like I'd hit the gym, replete with aches and bumps. I need to express here how much I appreciate my hearing protection right now. Most of us shutterbugs get right up close to the stage, but that's usually right in front of the PA system for elongated periods of time - and Tramlines had their sound system set to eleven for real.

Last month I also (finally) got round to upgrading my PC, so now everything is that bit faster, and Photoshop is less of a chore (for the geek in you: AMD Phenom II 1100T hex-core @ 3.3GHz, 8 GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 MHz, 120 GB Solid III Solid State disk - boot to win 7 64 bit in under 22 s, Photoshop CS5 64 bit in in 3 s). My productivity has soared as a result, and I have been working full res ever since the upgrade.

13 June 2011: From Digital to Synthetic, and Assignment Central

It never rain but it pours here in Sheffield; work has stepped up a gear (if there are any more gears to shift up?!), and there is a lot happening in terms of assignments, project deadlines and deliverables. Of course all this pales in comparison to the fact that this month there will be a new baby in the family, with my brother and his wife ready to pop at any moment. I cannot wait, Team Wahab +1.

In the less important, but still quite interesting June period, the project has reached a point where we are committing resources to synthesise  the molecules that I designed using CADD. A week of solid retro synthesis and economical route development has yielded some exciting chemistry (it does exist, I tell you), which I will be working on over the next 3-6 months (or longer, if nothing works). All things considered, I am looking forward to getting stuck into something that I can see the end of - and there is significant personal interest (and pride of work) in the endeavour, I'm just itching for supplier's to hurry up with materials. Impatience will be the death of me.

30 May 2011: Final Residential, dADMET, and the Component Dichotomy

Another manic month and I just got back from the final KTP residential training session. No doubt I will miss the atmosphere and the learning opportunities that the KTP training offered, however I have made some useful contacts and even more useful friends - They will dropping by Sheffield later this year for "Module 4.5".

Before I disappeared to Edinburgh, I had spent some time developing and optimising a digital ADMET system using various software which have been applied to the company's and the academic group's compound libraries. Results prompted a flurry of interest from the University, as people want to see where to invest time and resources in their development pipeline (and where to retire candidates). My company, as ever, failed to see the value in this, and don't really appreciated how lucrative such a service would be, still, each to their own, and I am pretty sure there is ample scope to spin a consultancy company/service out of this when I am done here in Sheffield- time will tell on that front.

Its time to upgrade my PC (the first entire rehaul since nearly a decade ago, however the computer has been scalped and topped up over the years). Its time to get saving I think, but the camera vs. PC dilemma is always looming...

21 April 2011: Photo's, photo's, photo's, Break

Such a manic month, and now finally I get a week off over Easter. I have shot no less than 1200 images since the last update, and spent about fifty hours in image processing, however I have been to some cool events, and met a motley crew of dancers up here in Sheffield. Its getting to a bite-point at work, whereby I am having to step out of my comfort zone in terms of JS, PHP and PilotScript, luckily I have some excellent assets over in informatics who have been really helpful. At 8 months, I am thinking conservatively that I can complete all of the non-synthetic side of the three year project within one year. - Can I take the left over project time off and get paid...?

In other news, I will be designing and uploading a photo gallery at snypa.co.uk for some of my photographic work, and am off to Moo to get my new cards printed. Watch this space.

Oh, and Happy Easter for Sunday.

 05 Mar 2011: Residentials, Deliverables and the Analytics month end

It has been a manic February: conferences, presentations and a residential training week to deal with. The conference (an SCI event) was an excellent day out, and another is in the back end of March, so I am all psyched to be going to that one too. The end of February marks the end of a deliverables phase in my project (6 months in), and although we are ahead of time, certain identified deliverables are not complete, due to the ever changing demands of the company. To this end it will be a rather heads-down week, especially as I have a project management meeting next week. I just got back from a CMI Management training event up in Queensferry, next to Edinburgh. These week long residentials are all about getting involved and practical skill deployment, which suits me fine, but it takes a bit out of you, so sleeping in my own bed again resulted in a very necessary 14 h crash down.

In other news, the Google Analytics capture on my website has been running for a month now and has helped me to understand traffic at snypa.co.uk. A quick glance demonstrated that I took about 200 hits (about 170 uniques) over the month from 36 countries / territories. India was the primary source of visitors (around 25 %) as my website is linked to an Indian university chemistry course. I will be aiming my web-development to spring out of high Google ranked pages (e.g. the OSR UV pages) to encourage longer visit times and increase rank.

09 Feb 2011: MySQL and the PHP CMS

Just a quick update whilst I'm waiting for WAMP to install: I am learning some more complex PHP for a project at work, and will be using snypa.co.uk as a test bed for it (it will largely go on behind the scenes). I will be looking at introducing a PHP - MySQL interconnect, so I can manage a trial chemical database remotely.

03 Feb 2011: Updates & Analytics

I just installed Google Analytics scripts to the site header pages, so I can see more accurately who goes where, and I am impressed to see hits from Moscow to Mumbai, Berlin to Brooklyn. It appears that around 40 % of my hits are based on OSR (my previous estimate seems well off), so I will endeavour to improve the content there as much as possible over the next few weeks; hopefully the techs at my new work wont mind me nabbing some photos of the kit!

30 Jan 2011: The Re-Up

This is the first update of 2011, and in fact, the first update since I moved to Sheffield late last year. It has been a very busy period, but I am beginning to adjust work-life balance so that I get more structured free time. I have set a series of small goals for this website to be completed this year, specifically in content and deployment:

The synthesis section which grew rapidly when revising for my doctoral viva (as a way of revision) will be filled and expanded as regularly as time allows. Google analytics shows that people have been linking here from as far afield as Singapore for the data on the rarer synths.

The OSR will be completed after the synth section has been filled (but before expansion): The OSR (particularly my double beam spectrophotometer animation) accounts for over 15 % of the hits here at snypa.co.uk

I will be using a reserved section of snypa.co.uk as a test bed for several .php-MySQL mini-projects, including content management db.