• Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers
• City of Dragons, Robin Hobb
• Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers
• Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesterton
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
• This Quantum Universe, Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw

I have a post in my backlog about a couple of books I've recently read. However, what with moving house, my folks visiting, the upcoming wedding and the usual hectic pre-release, pre-UDS panic at work, I haven't had the time to polish it into something readable.

So, in lieu of …

A few weeks ago, I lost my jacket.

It was a nice jacket. The nicest jacket I've ever owned. It fit well, it was warm, I looked good in it, it was black and the pockets would fit a paperback or a Kindle. Everything that a jacket could be to …

Following the resolutions in my last post on reading, I've finally finished two of the heavier books that I'd started: The Art of Rhetoric by Aristotle, and The Kalevala, a cycle of Finnish epic poetry. Some reflections:

At Canonical, we normally work in a distributed environment. As such, when we do get together, it's either for intense, multiple day meetings or intense, multiple day hacking sessions. Either way, there's a bunch of useful talk and progress, and this often needs to get written up.

While minutes and …

According to The Economist:

Money has three main qualities:

1. as a medium of exchange, buyers can give it to sellers to pay for goods and services; 
2. as a unit of account, it can be used to add up apples and oranges in some common value;
3. as a store of value …

For all of those readers who might be interested, and foreign friends who might be in London at the time, let it be known that Joliette & I have picked the date of our wedding. Let it be May 12th, 2012.

A couple of weekends ago, Joliette and I were on holiday in Barcelona, visiting our friends Jamu & Jenn.

While we were there, the four of us walked up to the top of Tibidabo, a mountain overlooking Barcelona. We walked to the very top where Joliette and I separated from our …

I'm not a morning person. At all. I really don't like waking up, or indeed doing anything before 11am. Sadly, not being possessed of a fortune and thus able to live life at the mellow tempo of my choosing, I have to put up with it.

I've been doing an …

It used to be that if you asked me which super-power I wanted, I would tell you, "instantaneous, effortless, accurate, error-free teleportation". Something very much like Jumper, except with fewer determined foes and better acting. After all, that would mean no more flights, no more uphill walks, no more being …

Winter is dragging on in London. There's a tree outside my window, perhaps I've told you about it before. When I first moved here a year and a half ago, its branches were bare and through the gaps between the ends I could see a dead building made of black …

There are a lot of interesting people on Twitter, and it seems like a good way to be part of a broader conversation. I quite like the short format of Facebook status update, so it figures that tweeting should come naturally.

The problem is I always slide off Twitter like …

I mentioned a while ago how it felt like I'd been living in some pretty big times. Since then, subjective time has been torn out of the shoulder socket of habit and things have been in a bit of a mess. A good mess, but a mess nevertheless. There's nothing …

We've had some big times over the last couple of weeks.

Two weeks ago, my mind was focused on grading, on the day when I would be tested to see if I would be awarded a blue belt for kick-boxing. Everything reminded me of grading, or was bad because it …

Anyone else notice how December has sneaked up on us this year? Normally it just stands there, proud, forbidding and distant, waiting for us to come to it. This time though, December has thrown off its gaudy robes, donned a black ski mask and starting running silently through bushes and …

I just got back from three hours of kick-boxing, and am pretty exhausted – "cream crackered" as they say over here.  It's the first time I've been in over a week, since I had a cold for much of last week.

Apart from the obvious physical demands, kick-boxing is quite demanding …

I've been thinking more recently about keeping the amount of work I have in progress to a minimum.  Having a small number of things on the go at once means that you actually finish those things quicker, and finishing things is great.

GTD isn't great at helping me do this …

Just came across this post that I had started a while ago and never finished. I thought it was interesting enough to share.

I ~~recently~~ watched Alain de Botton talk about a gentler, kinder success, and I recommend that you do the same.

I was surprised to hear echoes of …

I've been eligible to apply for a driving license for a little over a decade now, but I still haven't got one.  Partly it's because of an unusual schooling, partly because I've lived in walking or public transport distance of everywhere I wanted to go, partly because I just don't …