Blogger Goals for 2017 I don’t really do new years resolutions. They just don’t seem to work for me. I don’t see that there’s anything that special about January 1st. It isn’t even the first day of the year for a reasonable portion of the planet. Expecting to make
Blogger What's Changed? Well, I went quiet again, didn't I? While I've been away it feels like the world changed quite a bit. For starters, from an entirely personal perspective, I moved flats and areas of London. A transaction which completed on the 24th of June, 2016. If this
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
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
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 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
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 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
Blogger The Process and the Platform The effort required to actually publish that last post [/2011/06/03/in-which-i-go-full-nerd-2] was... considerable. Several factors contributed to this: * I have slow internet access at my hotel; * Currently, my only (full) computer is my work laptop; * This doesn't have iPhoto installed (this is mostly for reasons of
Hacker ...In Which I Go Full Nerd Jet lag is a funny thing. Right now it actually seems to be working in my favour; it's managed to knock a couple of bad habits out of me. Specifically, these happen to be the not entirely unrelated habits of going to bed too late (then making it
Hacker This Morning. You're going to have to wait a little while longer for the Computer History Museum, Silicon Valley Wandering and San Francisco based updates I had in mind, since I still haven't found a good way of adding the images I wanted to. In the meantime, I
Globe Trotter A brief update Most people can definitively trace at least one or two traits directly back to one of their parents. In my case I can definitely lay the blame for two at the feet of my father: 1. I know the rules of cricket inside out; 2. Walking right across town doesn&
Hacker Fourteen Days in the Valley I can see the mountains, but I suppose that's only to be expected. I am in Mountain View, after all. As of today, I'm in Silicon Valley for my "noogler training," something which most companies would just refer to as an induction. At Google,
Hacker s/@seebyte\.com/@google\.com/g Yes. That's right. I did it. I used a sed [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sed] expression as post title. I've been very quiet as of late, though in my defence I've been very busy for a few months. In the middle of that
Globe Trotter The Journey Home Authors note: This post was actually written on Sunday. As it turns out, writing it on the iPad was no problem at all, but actually posting it (with the picture and links) was a different matter entirely. You know, the train journey from Edinburgh to Doncaster is really quite beautiful,
Globe Trotter The right kind of holiday It has been, by my count, at least 18 months since I last had a holiday (aside from one weekend spent in Cardiff). It's getting to the point where I'm starting to feel that I really need a one. But what kind of holiday? Having stopped
Globe Trotter Sasanach Helen's comment on my previous entry put me in mind of what I've felt as the Scottish attitude towards England and the English more or less ever since I arrived here (seven years ago!). It goes something like this: > The English? Bastards! We hate '
Globe Trotter Why Bristol Depressed Me, and Other Stories... So. It's not that I feel that Bristol is an intrinsically bad or depressing place. My attitude to it was coloured by the fact that I was a little tired of travelling, tired in general and didn't entirely want to be there. Also, and this is
Hacker Ferðalangur I've been traveling around for work for the vast majority of the last month, so generally speaking I've been anything but at a loose end. Evenings were full of work or spent with the colleagues / friends I was traveling with. But now I'm back
Globe Trotter Being Yvan Petillot So. There I was, sitting across from a senior manager from Thales and two Professors, one each from Cambridge and Robert Gordon's Universities, discussing the precise definition of the term “emergent behaviour”... Wait. No. Rewind. Thanks to my current uncharacteristically basy schedule, I arrived late to the Forum
Globe Trotter Well... Here I am... ...In Iceland! I wanted to come here for a long time (this is no secret), and as the result of a highly unsubtle campaign of strategic hint dropping, here I find myself. It's not under ideal circumstances, though. I'm here for work and so I'
