Blogger Getting Back on the Horse(s) Last year, around August, I fell off two horses, more or less simultaneously. Metaphorical horses, much as I would love to say that failing to straddle two galloping steeds is the reason that I ended up skipping the gym for six months. One of those horses was training, the other
Blogger Why HarveyNick? So. HarveyNick.com is the name of this website. It's also my Twitter handle, and my username or moniker on Hacker News and various other sites. Sometimes it's not available and I end up using something like "TheRealHarveyNick", or I just don't
Blogger New Blog! Well. This has taken a little while. After trying out just about all of the options I mentioned in a previous post [/2014/04/27/is-it-that-time-again/] I decided that most were still a little on the under baked side. As fun as it can be to be on the bleeding
Blogger Is it Time to Change Blogs Again? So you may have noticed that it's been a little quiet around here as of late. There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, I've been stupidly busy with work and the amount of... faff involved with adding a new post using Octopress [http://octopress.org]
Blogger Some Thoughts on Gamification If you're playing any sort of a game, the question "Am I winning?" is usually quite easy to answer. "Is my score higher than the other guy?" usually covers it (though if you're playing something like chess it might be a little
Globe Trotter Whilst Not Running in Australia (With Photos!) In throwing up a few pictures of my trip down under in that previous running related post [/2013/04/07/running-the-first-time/], I realised I hadn't really posted much else about that particular trip to the inter webs. I also realised that picking through those photos is a bit
Hacker So I made an iPhone App Various things have kept me busy and away from this blog just recently. I've done a bit of traveling (both for business and pleasure), I've discovered Netflix (and Crunchyroll), and, somewhat more productively, I followed through on what started off as my "20% time"
That Ad So. There has been a small(ish) ad off to the right hand side of this blog for a couple of months now. It is as small as AdSense [https://www.google.com/adsense] will let me make it, though ideally I'd prefer if it had a size
Gym Rat Further Watching and Reading This was supposed to go at the end of my last post, but it was running a little long. Basically, here is collection of writings about fitness from around the internet which I've found either useful, thought provoking, or fun. Warning: the blog post features two pictures of
Gym Rat Barbell Training Follow Up So: after writing that giant post about the three main beginners programs I read up on while trying to figure out the best way to get myself into some sort of (non round) shape, I thought I'd switch to a topic on which I can confidently talk with
Geek A (Very) Rough Guide to Beginners' Barbell Training Programs As I promised in my last post [/2013/05/06/do-you-even-lift], I'd now like to talk a bit about the different weight lifting programs I ended up researching. I spent a fairly silly amount of time here, so I'm hoping that you find it useful. I&
Geek Do You Even Lift, Bro? After I arrived in London I decided to take a second stab at Couch to 5k, having abandoned it the first time around [/2013/04/07/running-the-first-time]. The problem now was finding a time and place. At first I tried running in the evenings around Wandsworth Common, conveniently close to
Bibliophile The Wheel Weaves as the Wheel Wills On what was, all things considered, otherwise a fairly shitty day, I finished reading A Memory of Light, the final volume of The Wheel of Time [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time]. This is, if you don't know, a fourteen book epic fantasy series whose
Foodie Perilously Close to Perfection A friend told me about a restaurant he'd visited on a trip to New York. There was essentially no menu. You walked in, you are seated, and you are asked a single question: > How would you like your steak cooked? Then they bring you an utterly fantastic
Geek Running, The First Time When I decided to drag myself back on to the fitness wagon, it seemed to me that running was the answer. Getting myself to an actual gym clearly wasn't working, but I lived a short walk from a large and beautiful park (oh The Meadows, how I miss
Geek A Fitness Story During most of university I was in pretty crap shape, but in the second year of my PhD my physical condition got particularly lousy. I caught a bus every morning which left from directly outside my flat and took me directly to the university. I did pretty much no exercise
Blogger Categories and Goals It's good to have goals. Even if you fail to meet them. Sometimes especially when you fail to meet them. It's quite widely publicised that at Google we're expected to score 0.7 (on a scale where 0 is a complete failure and 1
Blogger Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes So a couple of things about this website have changed. Perhaps you've noticed. Firstly, I changed the background. Much as I love that dark linen image I was using, it's really obviously "the apple background", which carries connotations I didn't really want
Cinephile I Disagree with Film Critic Hulk While Film Critic Hulk's argument [http://badassdigest.com/2013/01/09/film-crit-hulk-smash-hulk-vs.-tom-hooper-and-art-of-cinematic-affectation/] generally seems quite well reasoned, I find it a little difficult to stomach someone attempting to lecture me on the theory behind the form of anything in ALL CAPS, and at such length. Also, he
Blogger Wandering Around London Apologies, once again, for the radio silence. Over the past couple of months there have been some complications in my private life, and a remarkable amount of my attention has been taken up with figuring out where exactly I'm going to be living after my current lease runs
Blogger Now We're Blogging with Photos! Fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a programming heavy blog post. It's also going to be quite Mac specific. One of the things I wanted to change about the format of this blog was to make it more visual, specifically with pictures. This first
Hacker Origin Story, Raspberry Pi, and the ZX Spectrum One of the fun things about working for Google is that from time to time interesting people come into the office to give talks. We had Richard Dawkins a few weeks ago, who gave an interesting if… uncompromising talk. Yesterday we had one of the founders of the Raspberry Pi
Blogger New (ish) Year, New (ish) Blog 2011 was an interesting year for me. A lot changed. I turned 30. After 10 years of residency I moved away from Edinburgh, a city I love dearly, and took a job in London. With Google [/blog/tags/google]. As a result, I no longer work with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
Procedural Landscape Generation Simplifying the Landscape At the end of the last post [/2010/10/22/now-in-eye-popping-3d] I wrote about the actual implementation of my Clockwork Aphid project, I said the next step was going to be display simplification. At that point I'd generated a few landscapes which were just starting barely starting to
Audiophile Mercury Rising Monday the 5th of September was Freddie Mercury day. The day he would have turned 65, had he lived. This makes me feel a little old, but that's not the point. The day's Google doodle [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KX2BQM0D01M] (pointed out to me
