Added 2009-06-25
“Late for work. Shouting match with a motorist on the way in. So far, off to a bad start.”Thursday, 03rd June 2010
“Bike repair attempt #2: Probably successful. Probably.”Wednesday, 02nd June 2010
“Can we agree to leave the songs of Nick Drake alone, please? Don't cover them. Seriously. Jeff Buckley, too. Leave off! #newgovernmentpolicy”Wednesday, 02nd June 2010
“Sorry, I've got no idea. I didn't research more expensive alternatives before buying mine; instead, I had a play with the cameras my friends had and bought one just like it.”Tuesday, 01st June 2010
“Anyone fancy joining me for a John Cusack double bill at the PCC tonight?”Monday, 31st May 2010
“Took a quick self-portrait in the garden (with Steffi's help). Destroyed an umbrella. Sigh.”Sunday, 30th May 2010
“Bike repair attempt #1: wrong size of replacement part. Arse.”Sunday, 30th May 2010
“If you want a vision of the internet, imagine a kitten stamping on a human face – forever.”Sunday, 30th May 2010
“That's all part of the fun.”Sunday, 30th May 2010
“Sorry to hear you're disappointed, but I'm trying to learn about photography and produce some interesting images. All of my models have volunteered their time for free (in exchange for copies of the finished images); I guess the people you think are super-hot aren't lining up for this kind of thing.”Sunday, 30th May 2010
“That's not happened to me yet, but I do have a tingly feeling of POTENTIAL CITIZEN JOURNALISM whenever I realise it's in my pocket.”Sunday, 30th May 2010
“I've got one of these; I bought it a few months ago after a friend at work picked a few up. For the money, it's excellent: great video quality and OK sound quality. It's small enough that I can carry it with me everywhere. My colleague strapped his to an RC helicopter and flew it around the office; I strapped mine to my bike helmet and recorded my commute. They'll also do still pictures, but the quality is patchy¹. The battery also runs flat after about a week even if you don't use it, and there are some reports that the cameras aren't all good – that is, you take a chance when ordering it. It might not work. I'd definitely recommend getting one, though; it's a great little toy. ¹ These images are after being resized down 50%; the camera pixel-doubles when taking stills. God knows why.”Sunday, 30th May 2010
“So we got to see some cricket after all.”Saturday, 29th May 2010
“On my way to Lord's, to watch a cricket match get rained off.”Saturday, 29th May 2010
“I hate days when you lack the focus to start anything. But I hate days when you throw yourself at a problem for hours & get nowhere more.”Friday, 28th May 2010
“Today I also held a gold ingot worth over £300,000 and saw the printing plates they use to make banknotes.”Thursday, 27th May 2010
“I visited the dentist today & now own plaster casts of my teeth. What should I do with them? They're too fragile for novelty castanets.”Thursday, 27th May 2010
“It turns out I'm fucking awesome at golf: http://tinyurl.com/393rvc3”Thursday, 27th May 2010
“Oh, the tyranny of 1 train per hour.”Thursday, 27th May 2010
“I suspect that Diet Pepsi & Pepsi Max are the same fluid in different bottles. Ditto Coke Zero & Diet Coke. Can anyone disprove this?”Wednesday, 26th May 2010
“He posted a thing on his blog saying "Went up there in daylight, nothing happened." So maybe he's just lacking in something creepy to submit.”Tuesday, 18th May 2010
“There could be a few things going on here. One reason the apps may be written that way is for ease of unit testing. There's a lot of techniques that make code easy to test, such as passing in objects needed by a class rather than having the class construct them. In this example, it means you can pass another object in that implements the same interface but just returns stock responses, so your tests don't rely on a database or a network connection. You can find some more summaries on the Google Testing blog. Another thing you may see is code designed to be run on an application server, which is generally structured in a different way to applets or standalone applications. These often have a lot of "boilerplate" code on them to allow them to be monitored, communicate with each other, work as JavaBeans, and so on. Finally, it's possible that there's nothing wrong with your code, and they're just doing things differently. Large projects often have their own style guidelines and conventions, whether implicit or explicit. If your code works and you can understand it when you try to fix a bug a year from now, I wouldn't worry about it.”Friday, 14th May 2010
“> 1. Trademark your idea Please learn what a trademark is, then try again. See also your third point.”Wednesday, 12th May 2010
“I think the biggest problem you'll find is getting over the boredom of writing useless code. You can try to find something you find useful, or just try to answer an interesting question and get caught up in the algorithms. Hopefully, you find problem solving enjoyable. :) So, some suggestions: * Model students, classes, and subjects. Write a method to figure out a suitable class schedule for a given student based on their interests with no class clashes. * Write a small text adventure. You'll need a dungeon made up of rooms, a player, items, and maybe monsters. This is easier if you treat it as "Explore an area" instead of "Cogent narrative/defined goals". * Write something to track something you have a lot of. Books, CDs, DVDs. Make it able to answer questions like "How many books by Kurt Vonnegut do I have?"”Sunday, 09th May 2010
“Erm, no? We don't have a two-party system. It's not like it's asking you to get > 50% of the vote. If anything, it's enforcing the 20 party system.”Friday, 07th May 2010
“Neat, thanks. I've actually visited the Outer Hebrides, so maybe I should have known that...”Friday, 07th May 2010
“I chose the BNP because I hate their xenophobic, homophobic, fascist policies and their thuggish, ignorant candidates. Or, to put it another way, because of my liberal bias. Here's the API; it's pretty straightforward. My one tip is don't try to cat any of the json. It's one giant string and it made my terminal crap itself.”Friday, 07th May 2010
“It's not that simple. You lose the deposit if you get less than 5% of the vote – it's not forfeited simply for losing. Most of the main parties won't lose much simply because they'll always get a large section of the vote even if they don't win.”Friday, 07th May 2010
“I might have a crack at that tonight.”Friday, 07th May 2010
“Not all the data's in yet! So sadly, I can't.”Friday, 07th May 2010
“An interesting fact: two Tory candidates lost their deposit. Pat McPhee in Glasgow East and Sheena Norquay in Na h-Eileanan an Iar. No, I don't know where it is, either.”Friday, 07th May 2010
“The BBC will show you the constituency-by-constituency results, but it's quite a job to click through and compare. That's why I made this in the first place – even though only 20 seats had declared, it was a real pain to count them by hand. My app's pulling the data from the Guardian's politics API, so you can get this data from the Guardian website. But again, it's tricky to find: you have to click through to each candidate's page, and check out their record there.”Friday, 07th May 2010
The The Mechanical Aquarium photoset is now available on Ethicsgirls.
Tuesday, 04th May 2010“"Thundercats Ho!"”Sunday, 02nd May 2010
“Deliverance?”Saturday, 24th April 2010
Last night, I ended up lending my ukulele to Amanda Palmer for a last-minute guest spot at a local venue. She was kind enough to give me a couple of minutes after the show so I could make a picture. Thus. I handed her the uke and she climbed onto a table and started posing.
Strobist info: One light, camera right, with an omni-bounce diffuser. Pointed up towards the ceiling, ish. It's the main light but it's close to the ambient. There's also some shutter drag in this.
“David Mamet explains how to write drama.”Shared on Facebook Monday, 19th April 2010
In Plymouth you can walk round from the Barbican up towards the Hoe and beyond, and see all of Plymouth Sound in front of you along with Mount Batten across the water. It's pretty at sunset.
Posted on Flickr :: Taken on Sunday, 11th April 2010 Sunday, 11th April 2010“The story of a pilot's survival when his SR-71 Blackbird disintegrated around him.”Shared on Facebook Thursday, 08th April 2010
“I cycle to and from work every day (apart from when I'm going out in the evening). I've been doing some 'muscle stuff' in my room (press-ups, sit-ups, biceps curls, etc), normally while listening to a TED talk or something similar. I've got a long-standing ambition to buy a pair of trainers and take up running, but not gotten round to it yet. Finally, I used to go to jitsu classes until I picked up an injury. There's a lot of jitsu clubs in London, and they're all pretty cheap – £3/lesson for UCLU is the cheapest I know, £5/lesson the most pricey (City, Hackney (I think), etc). And your first session is free, so you can try it and see if you like it.”Tuesday, 16th March 2010
“What's your fondest memory of him?”Monday, 15th March 2010
