Margaret's Homepage

Version one of this page said something about how it was under construction and that I'd be adding things to it as I went along. Instead, after several years, I've decided to totally revamp it as the things I'm interested in having on my website have changed. Given I expect this to follow the same pattern as last time (ie sudden burst of activity then nothing for years) I'll note that it's currently June 2006.

I originally had an "About Me" section, which attempted a potted auto-biography, but these things are inevitably more difficult to write as they approach the present and tend to degenerate into lists of "and then I ..." "and then we ..." which isn't very exciting for anyone else to read. And isn't all that exciting for me either. So instead I'll run through a few biographical details just in case anyone is interested & then move on to what else you can find on this site.

I was born & brought up in Oxford, did the normal school stuff then went to Churchill College, Cambridge to do my undergraduate degree. While I was at Cambridge I met John Patterson who I'm now married to :) After we graduated John had a job in Ipswich so we moved here, and have stayed living here for 10 years now. I initially worked in a lab in Cambridge, and then did my PhD at University of East Anglia (which is the university in Norwich). The title of my thesis was "The Collagenolytic Mechanism of the Collagenases" - I'm primarily a protein biochemist, although I've done a fair amount of cell biology and molecular biology as well. Once I'd got my PhD I worked for several years at UEA, in a couple of different labs, but last year I decided to give that up and since then I've been a housewife. Which I'm really rather enjoying :)

I've had a Livejournal since early 2001, and I've used it several different ways over the last 5 or so years. But currently it is mostly there to answer the questions "But what do you do all day? Don't you get bored?". The answer is that I don't get bored, but I do lots of different things and when I get put on the spot it's hard to explain all of them coherently. A roughly day by day account of what I actually did is much easier to produce, and there is occassionally the odd more thoughtful piece.

And finally there are four other sections to this site:

• One of my favourite things is reading and there are a few reviews collected here. There are more in my Livejournal and I may copy the more formal ones to my webpage in the future.
• I also like computer games - particularly the Civilization series. A little while ago I found Realms Beyond and I've been participating in their games - my reports are collected here.
• I've been teaching myself to code in Perl, and once I'd got bored with doing the exercises in the book I started to write a Quake 3 log analyser script. We've moved on to play Quake 4 now, and initially I thought I couldn't port the project over as vanilla Quake4 doesn't produce very comprehensive logs. But since then I've discovered that the X-battle mod logs out similar server logs to the Quake 3 logs so I've been working with those. Here is the output from the most recent version of the script, run on a set of logfiles that kleeks very kindly gave me from Jolt's X-battle server.
• Every so often I have a sudden flash of creative inspiration. Often it's not worth sharing, but sometimes I rather like the result, and I've collected some of those bits and pieces here.