My name is confusing. I don't mean that people constantly misspell it, but that no-one seems to know what I'm called. Let me explain. British parents have this weird habit of giving their children long formal names which are routinely shortened to a diminutive version. Alfred becomes Alf, Barbara becomes Babs, Christopher becomes Chris - all the way down to the Ts where Terence becomes Terry. …
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I read this brilliant blog post by Wouter Groeneveld looking at how many dead links there were on his blog. I thought I'd try something similar. What is a broken link? Every day, I look at the On This Day page of my blog and look at that day's historic posts. I click on every link to see if it is still working. If it isn't, I have a few options. If the site is working, but the content has…
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As of today, I've quit. I started working full time before going to university. I worked part-time during my studies. Graduated into a crappy job. Got a place on a prestigious grad scheme. Worked my way up through the public and private sector. Start-ups and Ministries of State. Constantly working. Not any more! Yesterday was my last day in the office. Laptop and lanyard handed back.…
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This has been a tough year - I've found it hard to get back in to reading. A few books knocked me off my stride and the lack of a commute meant less downtime for reading. Nevertheless, 46 books isn't too bad! Of note, for the first time in ages I read a couple of paper books! Like some kind of old-fashioned cave-man! Myself When Young from 1938 is astounding. If you want to understand…
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It's my birthday! Therefore it marks the end of another year of me hurtling around Earth's yellow sun. So, as is customary, here's my year in review. I'm not really sure what happened to the last year. As the philosophers once said, "the years start coming and they don't stop coming". The biggest personal item was snapping a tooth and the long journey to getting implants. I've had my head…
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If you explore this blog's archives, you'll see that I've been blogging continuously every day since the start of 2020. Before that, I was blogging every month since mid-2008. Today, I am very hungover. Although I usually write a bunch of posts a few days and weeks in advance, I find myself looking at my publishing calendar and seeing it blissfully empty. Part of the reason I blog is that I…
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I'm terrible at networking. I forget people's names minutes after meeting them, I never have business cards and lose the ones I'm given, and I can't go five minutes without burbling some nonsense. But I recognise that networking is a skill and, like any skill, it takes practice to succeed. I've always been told that success isn't always about what you know, but more about who you know. So how…
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I wrote my first public blog post on 2004-05-11. I immediately followed it up with a brief review of my BlackBerry. I kept up the blogging for a few months, then it trickled off. I preferred posting on Usenet and other primitive forms of social media. But, by 2007, I was back to blogging on my own site again, and I never really stopped. This blog fluctuates between being a diary, an excuse…
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This is a retropost. Written contemporaneously in February 2019, but published much later. My life is weird. Again. Looking out over London from the top floor. The Eye is glittering and the Palace of Westminster is glowing. Someone pours me a glass of (very expensive) champagne, as the Secretary of State laughs at my witty bon mot. Is this my life now? People of distinction and influence…
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One of the things I love about having a database-backed blog like WordPress is that's it opens up a delightful range of possibilities for displaying content. I've read and reviewed around 300 books over the last few years. So I wrote a scrap of code which goes through all my book reviews, grabs their cover and rating, and displays them in a nice grid. You can visit it at shkspr.mobi/blog/library …
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Well, that year happened! I quit my Civil Service job. Started my own consultancy. Then took on a new job working 4 days a week. Busy! I wrote a 50,000 word set of sci-fi short stories for NaNoWriMo. Contributed to lots of Open Source projects and did a few responsible disclosures - but got no bounties. Got sent some weird gadgets to review. Went to some splendid restaurants. Saw some decent…
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Rather pleasingly, I averaged one book a week this year, 52 in total. 24 by women - although that doesn't include compilations which had a mixture of genders. So fairly even handed. As per usual, I alternated between fiction and non-fiction. I find my brain gets confused otherwise. I also set my eReader to have a different font per book so they don't start bleeding in to each other. This…
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