I am a software programmer working at RealVNC with many interests including singing, and am a Christian. Many of my friends remember me as a Part III mathematician at Peterhouse. Find out more or contact me!
It took a while, but a couple of days ago Google+ was finally rolled out for my Google account. As a valued customer, it’s nice that it took them only three months extra to release the service to me, but I don’t expect to use it much anyway.
Hurrah! Just did my first lift: 60 kg power clean (65 kg bodyweight). Finally, after 45 days, received my (barbell) bar, and the delivery saga is over. I’m somewhat afraid of piling on the weight right at the start before I put in the time on technique work, but I’m somewhat pleased that right off the bat I could post some lifts that feel comfortable, and deadlift everything I bought. It’ll be a while before I can pile it on, but I’m looking forward to getting fitter with my new toy.
At some point though, I would quite like to take up actual sport. I plan to spend a few months concentrating on just fitness first, and then have a go at something new. You see, there’s a long list of things I want to learn to do sometime in my life, but before I go off and join a club, I feel I’d better put in some work gaining some of the prerequisites for each sport before turning up as a gormless time-waster. Can you imagine me arriving now for some gymnastics? “Well, we can’t exactly put you doing handstands with the little kiddies. Why don’t you show us where you’re at with a few somersaults and a vault or two? Oh, you can’t flip, jump, vault, muscle-up or even do any handstand skills? Remind me why you’re here. Go home and gain some basic fitness and kinaesthetic awareness to show you have at least some interest in training here.” In short, I’m too embarrassed to start something without giving it a go on my own first, to find whether I like it and make sure I have some of the preliminary physical requirements dialed in.
On the list of things to choose from, in rough order of priority, to be well-rounded I reckon I need at some point to tackle these: weightlifting (olympic of course, zero interest in powerlifting); hurdling, the jumps, and the sprints; the throws; gymnastics; rowing; swimming; cycling; tennis; fencing; rugby. At some point this year I’d like to pick one and give it a decent bash.
Great little game! I got 86/100. http://type.method.ac
Another good issue. I enjoyed the first article.
So much stuff here! Great resource, one entry of which was used today. Read and learn, unless you’re already leeter than I am.
All’s Well tonight. An entirely new discovery to me, with an astonishing number of “quotable quotes” and flowing couplets. As to whether it says anything, that’s another story.
What a wonderful evening! Much Ado is still one of my favorites by a long way, and the one in my BBC complete Shakespeare is thankfully excellent. Spent the last half hour cracking puns to myself in period English. Pure theatrical plot, but with some real fun and humanity.
POSIX shell: the only programming language where true is 0 and false is 1? I’ve always loved that, because somehow it just makes perfect sense.
Unsurprisingly, I have an antipathy for so much of Martin Amis’, but this was a very good interview I spotted in John Hudson’s Telegraph. I’ve pretty much finished my year of modern novels now, and am much closer to appreciating and sympathising with the thought and vividness of life in the impression and grasp of it that these novelists explore. So, without agreeing with any more of it, I’m much further now than I was from the uncultured evangelical, disinterested and not willing to waste time and effort getting inside these attitudes that seem so unsatisfactory. He’s got a profound articulation of some very real things, and I need to keep making space for literature old and new if I want to understand how different groups and times engage with the world. If only I could understand what was true deeply enough to ever write myself…
Saw András today outside the Senate House. He seemed interested in the idea of giving me a bit of supervision work. Score! One down. Remaining occupations I aspire to this year: train to level where I can join a choir; enlist in TA.
Hurray! Just broke the build for the last time, ever (this week). Highlights of the last few days include gcc 2.9 (installed with RedHat 7.3 from 2002 on one of our build machines for “legacy” customers). Needless to say, don’t expect to get C++03 from it, not even covariant returns.
On Wednesday, I spent a day fixing the Solaris build I broke when updating a sed script. It took me a two cycles of tweaking the script, committing, and getting a build failure email a few hours later before shelling into the machine and going through it character by character to weed out each error message. The script was a single line long, and let’s just put it this way: Sun sed and GNU sed are both idiosyncratic, and you aren’t going to work it from reading out the mans.
The lowest moment of the week at work was hosing the hosted group’s builds today. We have an interesting script as part of the build process which strips out certain components from the different platforms’ build procedures if, say, we don’t want to include a certain feature. No problem for the compiler or linker, but the package builders are a bit more brittle. I managed to create a few problems. On the plus side, our source build for two OEM customers now completes again for the first time since March when they last sync'ed with us.
Funnily enough, I did also do some code this week. Good times.
Genuinely, suddenly, excited at the thought of voting for Brian Blessed. Do it! Now. Plan a lovely Saturday visit to Cambridge and vote.
Night-time study and writing are the root of at least one sort of evil: how else to carry the sins of one day into the next?
An excellent article outlining the strengths of coaching for professionals. Via Crossfit.com, of course.