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
Procedural Landscape Generation Revisiting the Language Issue Some time ago, I wrote a series [/2010/10/09/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-1-introduction] of [/2010/10/10/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-2-java] posts [/2010/10/11/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-3-c] about [/2010/10/12/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-4-objective-c] language [/2010/10/13/youre-speaking-my-language-baby-part-5-conclusion] choice for my Clockwork Aphid project. In the end I decided to start the project in Java, this being
Globe Trotter The Ol' Homestead You may or may not be aware that, though I now lived in London and previously lived in Edinburgh, I'm originally from South Yorkshire. Since I visited my parents this weekend for my father's 60th birthday[1], I though I'd take a moment to
Hacker Dogfood, Nom Nom Nom Dog food, the common noun, is reasonably self explanatory (pro tip: it's food for dogs). Dogfood the verb or dogfooding the verbal noun, though, might require a little bit of explanation. At the root of it is this: if you make dog food, you should feed it to
Cinephile Who Likes Short Shorts? I think I love almost everything about this short film. That being the case, I'll quit my chin wagging and just get on with showing it: {% include youtube.html video="4drucg1A6Xk" %} Mucho kudos to Dan Trachtenburg, Danielle Rayne, and everyone else envolved. No get back to
Bibliophile Book Related Blog Post I finally broke. I’ve been saying for some time that if the Kindle, or a similarly capable eReader, went under the £100 mark I would splash out and buy one. Until quite recently I had been quite tempted, but this condition was never satisfied. Had I seen one for
Blogger The Kaiser Chiefs Do NOT Get to Say They Called This... Well. These are certainly interesting times to be living in London. Interesting times to be living in England full stop, in fact. In particular, I definitely picked an ideal time to move to Clapham. I have a bad habit of being more or less completely oblivious to what's
Cinephile Film Related Blog Post “Given that you’ve just told us that the second one is one of the worst films you’ve ever seen,” asked Pete, “why on earth did you feel the need to go and see the third one?” It was a good question. In all fairness I do not have
Blogger The Sound of One Hand Clapping... ...would make significantly more noise than I have on this blog, as of late. There are a couple of reasons for this. The main one is that I don't actually have the internet in my new flat yet, and won't for another 9 days. Bloody Virgin
Bibliophile For Boobs, Mikael? Warning: this post contains a picture which includes boobs. Be prepared for that. If your manager is looking over your shoulder, don't click; or at least have an excuse ready. If you're offended by the sight of boobs... well... I'm sorry. But I probably
Hacker Full Nerd II: Nerd Harder It seems that people really enjoyed my post about the computer history museum [/2011/06/03/in-which-i-go-full-nerd-2]. At the time I wrote it, I was worried that it might constitute just a little bit too much nerd, so I held back on my initial impulse to put in more pictures
Hacker A Different Kind of Tourism If a person were to walk from downtown Mountain View (in so far as Mountain View has a town to be down of) to the Computer History Museum, and then kept going, they might find themselves wandering into Shoreline Business Park. This is where you would find the silicon in
