2016

There was a lot to like in 2016, and also a lot to dislike.

Likes: Hiking Scotland. Meeting new people. The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet. Writing 250K words. Arrival. London. London Calling & Dirt. Dishonored 2. Bliss n Eso. Arabic Abjad. Puffins. Gravity waves at TEDxBrum. Seeing Chris Hadfield. Victoria auf Deutsch. New swimming PBs. Knowing Birmingham, roughly. Family, all of them. Shipping code to millions. Rebel Rounders. Stranger Things. Trying things.

Dislikes: Surgery. Recovery from surgery. Trump. Cancelling Bali. Build tools. No running PBs. Brexit. Nationalism.

I don’t do resolutions. The best time to start something was yesterday. The next best time is today. I lost a kilo while lying in bed 18 hours a day. I can read the Arabic alphabet and simple words. 2017 I will travel, make more friends and learn more trivia because I already am.

Happy New Year.

September Links

Ignore August. Pretend it never happened. It was hot, a lot of stuff got shipped, and a whole backlog of links piled up once more. So here is to me emptying my Instapaper queue once more. Continue reading »

June Links

Yesterday I attended my first TEDx here in Birmingham. It was an amazing collection of topics covering everything from gravitational waves through to food start-ups in Detroit. I can wholeheartedly recommend finding your nearest one and going. What follows is a big pile of links, none of which are related to TED, but which I’ve been meaning to get out for a while. Continue reading »

May Link Dump

Yeah, I haven’t done this for a very long while. In between writing a lot of words and fixing a lot of systems, my Instapaper queue has just been growing and growing. So here’s three dozen links to stuff I’ve found interesting so far this year sans descriptions. Continue reading »

My First Buck

When I was eight, I wrote some words on an aging RM laptop using Word 97. They were terrible words and they ran together to form an even more terrible sentence. But it was the first ‘thing’ I had created with a plot, characters and a purpose and I have continued ever since; through terrible fanfics, introspective ramblings and enough robots and aliens to thoroughly exhaust the subject, I’m still putting words on digital paper. So far, five months into 2016 I’ve written a few sentences shy of 100,000 words.

And last week I received my first payment for it. Continue reading »

The SVN Server

Nowadays I take it for granted that everything is in git. Even my Uni dissertation was stored in a git repo. But this is a story of the first time I was exposed to source control, back when SVN was the top dog, and someone had a genius idea of how to set it up on a server. Continue reading »

Take A Break

It happened again. It got towards the end of the financial year and I had a large chunk of remaindered holiday to take. Last year I was in San Francisco but this year I just wanted to do nothing. Continue reading »