This post was possibly inspired by my daughter’s homework assignment to interview an old person about technology change. Guess who’s old now? Sometimes I look back at how life used to be, and remember what it was like. There are two key nostalgia points for me: before internet, and before smartphones. ...
It seems right that I should mention the pandemic on my personal blog; I doubt very much that I will say anything original or interesting, but it would seem strange to look back on my writings from 2020 and see nothing about COVID-19. I had to check this, but I have been staying at home since Monday 15th March, save for occasional walks around the park. (UK schools closed on 20th March, and we officially announced the lockdown on 23rd March, but our house started a bit early due to having a mild cough....
Life comes at you fast. Since changing jobs three months ago, I have earned several cloud-related certifications, and started an assignment as a cloud security architect with a large financial services client. Consulting is quite different to ordinary employment; a great deal of emphasis is placed on making connections, and building a personal brand. I’m enjoying the variety of work, and the opportunity to develop my skills. My focus this year is on learning; I intend to spend more time reading and writing, especially as a way to distill and clarify my ideas....
Happy New Year! Apparently I failed to write a blog entry in all of 2016, and almost all of 2015. Probably says something profound about the rise of social media, or perhaps I was just very busy. I bet my writing has suffered. I have spent the last few days tidying up and clearing out clothes, bits of paper, and wires. I think there's light at the end of the tunnel....
Kate's been reading a book by KonMari. Hence we've rehomed lots of clothes, books and DVDs to charity and various places. I am told the key is to ask, "Does this item bring me joy?" Then if it doesn't bring you enough joy, it goes. The nice thing was, it was actually exciting to reveal the gems among my bookshelves, which were previously hidden by a load of second-rate books....
I have a tendency to forget what I've been up to - so I made a list for 2014. I started the year having recently watched many 30c3 videos online - these were fantastic, and I really should get round to the ones from 31c3. January is traditionally the peak time for the recruitment industry, so at work we were kept busy dealing with all the traffic. We'd recently switched the main job search to use Solr rather than MySQL, which helped - but we did spend a lot of time during the early months of the year converting tables from MyISAM to InnoDB....
So, happy new year. :) I watched many 30c3 talks via the streams over Christmas - they were awesome. I especially enjoyed finding out (in the Tor talk) that the Internet Watch Foundation need to use Tor when checking out particularly dodgy links online, else people just serve them up pictures of kittens. Today's fail: deciding to set up OpenVPN, then realising the OpenVZ VPS I was planning to use would not support /dev/net/tun....
It's my first Father's Day! Sophie was born 2 months ago (3345g or 7lb 6oz), and I've been on a blogging hiatus for quite a bit longer than that. She's very cute. I am getting into the swing of fatherhood - lots of nappy changing. :) I took my two weeks of paternity leave, but spread the second "week" over two weeks by working just afternoons, which gave me lots of time with mummy and baby....
Another year. 2012 was busy - I got moved house twice, changed jobs, and got married. In 2013, I should become a father, fingers crossed (due mid-April). Change is a familiar friend now. I just listened to Tom Armitage speaking about coding on Radio 4 - I /think/ the podcast mp3 link will work for people outside the UK, but the iPlayer probably won't. If you can get hold of it, it's worth the 20 minutes of your time....
Today, Kate and I got married! Thank you to everyone who sent best wishes. A big wedding party will follow in the next 18 months or so (when we've saved some money!), to which many more people will be invited. This was the minimum viable subset of wedding - we got the product to market early, and both stakeholders are very satisfied. We had dinner at the Caribbean restaurant in town which is always busy - turns out there's a reason for that....