Archive for the ‘misc’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Haven’t we aged well?

Monday, June 23rd, 2008

I’ll write a proper post about Mashed08 once I’ve caught up with work, but in the meantime I wanted to quickly share a couple of pics.

Sylvester McCoy was on stage as compere for the presentation of our hacks, and each of us who presented got to meet him briefly for a pic. This was actually the second time I’ve met him – fourteen years ago, I got to meet him with a couple of others from my school when we won an award for an environmental project at school.

There’s a nice symmetry there… meeting him aged 14 to collect a prize for a environmental project, then aged 28 to collect a prize for a project to help people reduce home electricity usage. Wonder what will happen when I’m 42? 🙂

Before (December 1994)
meeting Doctor Who

After (June 2008)
meeting Doctor Who again!

Tags:, ,
Posted in misc | 1 Comment »

A change is as good as a holiday

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

I started a new project at work this week. I can’t say too much about it publicly, but wanted to write a quick post mainly because I’m quite excited, and also to mention why I’m not gonna have time to play with many other things for the next month or so!

I’ve been seconded to one of our Services teams, so it’s a short break from my normal life of product development. It’s a secondment for a specific project – developing a messaging library for a customer that will run on their own real-time embedded operating system.

I spent most of this week trying to finish or handover my WPS work, so I’ve hardly started on the new project. But it’s already fascinating. Working in C on a customer’s proprietary platform with some extreme resource constraints (in both memory and operating system functions!) is a fun holiday from my life in development of an application written mostly in Java that runs on mainframes. And it’s definitely closer to the sort of work I want to do in my career, so the opportunity to do this as my day job for a couple of months is awesome.

Posted in misc | 2 Comments »

Ouch

Monday, May 19th, 2008

Disclaimer: This is not a medical post. I’ve not referred to anything to write it, and I only vaguely understand what I’m talking about… if you are looking for medical advice, please look elsewhere.

My twitters for the past few days have mainly been moaning about my back hurting. I injured it last week, and have been out-of-action since.

I’ve been diagnosed today, so thought I’d share the full scale of my pain and woe with the world.

I have an annular tear in my lumbar region.

I’m trying to resist the temptation to google for this (seriously – that way madness lies!) but from what I remember of the doc’s description, one of the discs between the vertebrae in my spine has torn, causing the jelly (?!) inside to leak out. The jelly is what caused the muscles around the disc to inflame and spasm – a big cause of the pain I’ve been having since last week.

(more…)

Tags:
Posted in misc | 3 Comments »

Over The Air – ideastorming

Friday, April 4th, 2008

It’s ridiculously early. And I’m awake. And on a train.

Unusually, I don’t mind too much, because I’m heading to ‘Over The Air‘ – a mobile development event in London. Yay 🙂

Looking at the schedule, there are lots of interesting talks that I want to go to. Too many… in several places there are two or three talks I want to go to at the same time. 🙁

Also on the agenda is a development competition. It’ll probably work out to somewhere between 8 and 12 hours to hack something together (depending on how many talks I go to and how much sleep I want to get!)

Between paternity leave and the joys of coming back to work after a five week break, I’ve not had time to think about what I might create.

So I’m using the train journey to come up with a few ideas – and this is as good a place as any to ideastorm.

Here we go… Bear in mind that it’s early and I’ve not had any coffee yet!

(more…)

Tags:, , , , ,
Posted in misc, tech | 9 Comments »

Faith Emily Lane

Thursday, February 28th, 2008

Faith Emily LaneWelcome to the world, Faith Emily Lane.

Yup, I am now well and truly out-numbered, and am doomed to live in a house of women.

Even my cat is a girl 🙂

Twitter was down today (typical!) so my twitter followers were spared minute-by-minute updates on the labour. Probably the best for all concerned, actually.

Faith is absolutely perfect. She weighed 8lbs (why is that always the first thing people tell you?), and all the tests so far have showed no problems.

(more…)

Tags:,
Posted in kids, misc | 13 Comments »

wiki-related fame and fortune ;-)

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I'm famous! ;-)After last year’s blurb in Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine, I’ve seen another small write-up for my Windows Mobile wiki-based note-taking program, bLADE Wiki.

c't computing magazine - coverThis time, it’s in a German computing magazine called c’t. They’ve included the app on their cover CD, and written a short paragraph describing it.

Yay – that’s quite a nice end to the week. 🙂

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in misc | 5 Comments »

matter

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

the "matter" box arrivesI signed up to matter a little while ago. It’s a service where you sign up to be sent promotional stuff.

If you look at their website or their blog, they don’t really describe themselves like that. They talk about it as a “communications channel” between consumers and advertisers, and they talk about the “brand experience”. In fact, they say pretty much everything except “we’ll give you free stuff”.

even before it's opened, she likes it :-)In the lead up to today, they’ve talked a lot about the care they’ve been taking to select interesting things that “you’ll want to keep”. Even so, my hopes weren’t very high. This is all free, so I was a little sceptical how good the stuff would be. Today, the pilot matter box arrived.

(more…)

Tags:
Posted in kids, misc | 11 Comments »

Going to visit King Tut

Monday, December 17th, 2007

O2 DomeTypical. I finally get to do something interesting that I could tweet about, and Twitter goes and falls over for the day! 😉

We went up to the O2 Dome in Greenwich to visit the Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs exhibition. It’s the first time the exhibition has been in the UK since 1972 apparently. That’s a bit before my time, but I did see some bits in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo a few years ago.

O2 DomeIt seems to be very popular (we couldn’t get tickets for a weekend – despite trying almost as soon as they went on sale) so your tickets have quite a precise entry time – a half-hour window when you are allowed in.

Once in, you get a two minute introductory video (narrated by Omar Sharif – which brought back dozens of films that I remember watching with my mum as a kid!) which sets the scene of the boy prince who became king, spent ten years trying to undo some of the radical and unpopular changes made by the king before him, before dying from an unknown cause at the age of about twenty.

(more…)

Tags:, ,
Posted in misc | 4 Comments »

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »