This time last year, my lunch would involve a walk to the shop for fresh air and then eating at a desk.

Today, I went for a twenty minute walk on the beach.

I’m thinking next week I’m going to go swimming or maybe bodyboarding for 20 mins.

whenever I see a vending machine, I can’t help but think “if I’d learned to pick locks, I could have so many things for free”.

Talk about a wasted youth spend in school.

I find myself slipping more and more into extreme geekery.

This week I’ve:

1. started obsessing about getting myself a new mechanical pencil.
   Currently the front runners are a straight replacement of what I currently have or this. I’m thinking that the MUJI pencil is more practical, cheaper and I prefer it’s clean design. I’ve had my current one for around 2 years at the moment and it’s been perfect for notes and sketches
2. got really excited about a project here at work dealing with translating arbitrary input strings out into four distinct columns using a set of user defined rules. Taking a project from requirements all the way through design, feedback to implementation, testing and deployment is something I haven’t done in a while and it makes a very nice break from maintenance work.
3. performed binary to digital conversion in my head for fun…

Image from : By John Tenniel (Alice in Wonderland) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I imagine I’m not the only person who got vaguely excited that today is a purely binary date 11.01.11 (or 01.11.11 if you use a broken datetime format) or 55 in decimal. It was very satisfying to spend an idle moment converting from binary 110111 to decimal 55 (or 011111 to 31). Just reminds me of all the low level stuff I learned back in college which I will almost never use (and if I am actually using as part of my job, then something has gone very, very wrong – hardware engineers excepted).

image from zazzle.com

… or confessions of a newborn’s father.

So this is a purely personal opinion based on my experiences. Your birth experience will be different. You’ll have different priorities, make different choices all under different circumstances. We were lucky enough to have a fantastic midwife locally and chose to go for a home birth. Birthing was tough but without complications and really, it all went fantastically well. Of course this has coloured my opinions so you’ll have to take that into account when you’re reading this. …more…

So I was looking over some old sites I used to run. Thank you archive.org for keeping a record of sites which should have disappeared into the ether. Being a C.S. student means that I’ve had a webpage on and off since 1998 or so and the quality has, how will I say, varied during that time. There’s a couple of pieces which are fantastic, some which are nonsensical but most just make me cringe.

I guess that’s totally natural. What I did in my youth (I’m only 30 but it seems like a million years ago- it was only 6) seems like it was almost a different person. I did things then that I wouldn’t be able to do now, because I know better. And there’s things I can do now which I wouldn’t have been able to do then. I’m not going to beat myself up over embarrassing photos or posts which I made 6-10 years ago because it made sense at the time. I am however glad that I lived in a pre-facebook age when my online identity isn’t forever associated with me.

I also found that I used to post content up in much shorter form (usually due to having to update via telnet/ssh over a slow connection) and much less frequently. I don’t think that it was a lack of free time, but rather, when I had free time I was out socializing wheras now I’ve got a lot less free time but lots of internet access and (arguably) less to say.

Image from Flickr user pontman

So I surf.
Not very well, but like a lot of software developers I’m into geeky technical sports so I own the gear (surfboard and wetsuit) and I happen to live next to a surfing beach (it’s shit but it’s local so I get out as often as I can). Over the summer it was totally flat. Like pancake flat. Nary a ripple. The last 4 days though we’ve been on the tail end of hurricane Danielle and I’ve been out regularly.

Actually, that not completely true. I don’t live next to a surfing beach. I live next to two beaches. One of which is always busy between 10:00 and 18:00. The other is always empty. …more…