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 some book or other 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.

Following on from the weekend of change, I've got engaged to Kate. :) We now need to organise a combined housewarming/engagement party...

My paternal grandmother died a month ago today - I may have been quieter than usual since December. The most vivid memory I have of her is helping to collect runner beans from her garden - apparently this had been going on since the World War II "dig for victory" campaign. Her funeral was in Hastings on 10th January, and she was buried in Fairlight, in the Roman Catholic area of St.

I'm now a Debian Developer. :) My thanks go to Ben Hutchings, gregor herrmann, Chris Lamb, Christoph Berg, Steve McIntyre, Brad Smith, Jonny Lamb, Chris Boyle, everyone at credativ, and everyone else who helped me with Debian over the last... almost six years? Actually, I've been a DD since the weekend, but have been too absorbed to write about it. In other news, I'm moving house today... I'm more or less packed now.

I spent the weekend in Rugby, not doing very much. I had this morning off work to travel back to Southampton, and it was surprisingly busy. This afternoon I put the transaction scope guards I'd researched on Saturday into my project at work, and then refactored bits of it. According to the project plan I'm meant to be finished soon, but I keep finding more important things to do than implement the final SQL functions.

Suddenly I am very organized - a series of tedious tasks seem to have completed themselves, and I'm teetering on the brink of productivity. But that way lies madness. Today at work we finally deployed the new django-based website. It uses the same HTML and styling as the old website, but reduces the URL duplication, which will help with optimizing for search engines. We now need to add better content, and then perhaps work on the style.