NaNoWriMo 2016 Diary, week two

Tuesday 8th November Election day. Spent an hour in line to vote before work. Decided to drop my 2k a day rule and give myself a break. I'm slightly above the NaNoWriMo standard for day eight and I feel like I'm getting into my stride. Writing

NaNoWriMo 2016 Diary, week one

Tuesday 1st November 525 words before work, 2009 total. Introduced a couple of shady characters I didn't have planned out before I started writing. Hoping to stick to my usual rhythm of 2000 words a day. Created a Pandora station seeded with Vivaldi to use as a writing

NaNoWriMo survival guide

This will be my thirteenth time doing NaNoWriMo, looking at getting my eleventh novel finished. I have a plot, an idea, and some disasters to deploy, and even a way to include the Travelling Shovel of Death. I have a few tactics for surviving the event: Donate to NaNoWriMoIf you

Overnight Breakfast Glop

Can also be called "pudding" if "glop" sounds unappetising. This recipe uses the US tablespoon, which is a 15ml liquid measure. I put everything in a Blender Bottle to get everything mixed up, it works well. Also I don't have an electric blender. If

Now, 25th July, 2016

Thinking aboutMy lightening talk on Risk Analysis and RFC 1149 for the first Asynchrony Labs internal conference on Friday 15th July. This is the first talk I've done where I've been recorded. There was applause, I survived. Stimuli and inputPeter Drucker's article Managing Oneself

Cover band names

Every once in a while you hear a phrase and think, "That would be a good band name." These are my current favourites: 1. No Visible Cow 2. Flying with Cats 3. Angry Hatstand 4. Unexploded Balm 5. Decaf Piranha 6. Teacup Hierarchy 7. Grumpy Old Queen 8.

Now, 4th June 2016

Thinking aboutScala. I'm new on a team doing a Scala project and learning how to write code and tests. It bothers me when training for Scala spends half the time saying how dumb and awful Java is, there's no need for that. I felt a lot

Recipe: Rock Cakes

Why yes, I am pathologically incapable of following a recipe as given. I assembled this from several recipes online and tweaked it to work with US measures. I made two batches, my other substitutions are below. This is a good recipe for using up small amounts of dried fruit and

Now, 23 April 2016

Thinking aboutWays to do my job that accommodate being a practitioner as well as a manager. I slid into a part-time gig on my old team, working under the guidance of my former apprentice and that feels fantastic. It took a couple of weeks of being there to feel back

Books to re-read

I was that child in school who read the encyclopaedia, cover to cover, Aardvark to Zulu. I got six books a week from Ipswich Library every Saturday while my parents did the grocery shopping, I read my way through the children's library and branched out to adult science