Bad photo allert! I'm affraid no-one's ever going to see a true likeness of me on here, but I can tell you a bit about myself.
Bad photo allert! I'm affraid no-one's ever going to see a true likeness of me on here, but I can tell you a bit about myself.
Name: David John Michael Robinson
D.O.B.: 25th July 1975
Height: 5'9"
Eyes: Blue
Occupation: Student
Address: 5 Goss Croft, Selly Oak, Birmingham, B29 6NN.
email: robinsdj@phymat.bham.ac.uk
Well, erm, what can I tell you? My name's David, I'm in the final year of a Physics (with Electronics) degree here in sunny Birmingham (I jest of course! well, about the sunny bit). I've just finished my finals, and now have four weeks to finish a major project before my accademic career is over forever! Then I'll leave university for good, and hopefully (gulp) get a job!!!
In Birmingham I live in a beautiful house in Selly Oak, just beyond Sainsbury's. We haven't seen the landlord in about 3 months now, and we're rather hoping he's forgotten us! You can tell it's a student house by the cultivated dandelions in the front garden, the bin bags put out once an eon, and the peeling paint. But what do you expect for 27 pounds a week?
My real home is in a village called Rainworth, near Sherwood Forest (remember Robin Hood?), in Nottinghamshire.
I've got to tell you about our project (called groups studies by the uni). There are three of us working on an eye tracking system. The idea is that instead of having a mouse to move the cursor on a computer screen, you can simply look at the screen, and the cursor will follow your eyes. Before Easter it was working very well in 1 dimension (just left/right movement), but only with a 60W lightbulb in the user's face! Now we're chancing the light source to a row of infra red diodes, which we're pulsing at a few kHz, allowing pulse sensative detection, which is cutting down the noise from other light sources. The moment of truth will come sometime next week when it's all reassambled in it's new box with the new electronics, and hopefully we have a reliable system working in 2-D. I'll keep you posted.
Enough about work! When I'm not sat at this thing catching up with rec.music.beatles (which is getting a bit predictable these days) or uk.religion.christian, I do have a life outside the computer lab.
I should have put at the top that I became a Christian last year, and, to sound rather trite, I can really recommend it! If you ever find someone desperately trying to convert you, and wonder why, I can tell you it's because they know what you're missing, and really want to share it with you. Though I'm begining to wonder if putting Jesus Loves you at the bottom of my email sig was going a bit over the top.
I used to be involved in a couple of kids playschemes run by students here, as I found I really loved kids, and worked really well with them (I think I'm a child at heart!). I don't seem to have as much free time right now, but still go along to help when I can. There's one scheme run Sunday mornings in the Guild of Students for local kids, where they get to play and paint and do sports in the summer, and usually every other week we take them out somewhere, like swimming or bowling - this week we're going to the science museum in town. Then there's another playscheme run in a Banado's centre on the other side of town, where they have excellent facilities, and we do cooking (well, O.K., so I can't cook!) and arty things as well as games and stuff with them Wednesday afternoons after school.
Anything else? You want to know more about me? I really love music, have over 300 CDs, and about 8000 records, managed to go to all but 2 of the concerts in the universities excellent Summer Festival of Music last year. I play(ed) the keyboard, and wrote loads of music when I was at home, but that kind of got left behind when I came to university. I collect anything that reproduces music, and have quite a few gramophones, and even started collecting films and projectors the other year. And no, I'm not rich and I don't live in a big house, even at home - most of these things are bought at bargain prices when I see them in bad condition, then I restore them myself, and find I have nowhere to keep them!
Right, I shall leave you to navigate your way around the web. Thanks for dropping in. If you want to mail me click here, or if you want to talk, you could try talk robinsdj@phymat.bham.ac.uk from a unix system, though it probably won't work as the phymat system is a bit prone to crashing, and the talk daemon has fits of confusion.
Finally, I officially leave university in June 1996, and I should think a couple of months after that, these pages will be gone forever. So if anyone really likes my Beatles Index, please copy it onto your own site! And if no-one does like it, then it's no loss really!
Take Care, Thank-you for reading, enjoy. David.
The Beatles Index
Written: 31st January, updated 22nd March, this update 10th May 1996.