Rules: Once you’ve been “tagged”, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be “tagged” (on Facebook). You have to “tag” the person who “tagged” you. If I “tagged” you, it’s because I want to know more about you. (I’ve only “tagged” people on Facebook).

1. I’ve been seeing my girlfriend (Lindsay) since we were both at school. She is amazing and I’m a very, very lucky man.
2. I treat life like a software problem. I’m convinced there must be some algorithm for “solving” all the world’s problems.
3. I became a Christian at 17 but wasn’t raised going to church.
4. I love dogs and hate cats. I want to train all the world’s dogs to eat the world’s cats.
5. I exfoliate and moisturise. I am/will be mocked for this but don’t care because my skin is awesome.
6. If I ever couldn’t be a software engineer any more I’d become a full-time bass player.
7. I have my nipple pierced, resulting in the nickname “Nipples” at school. Most people called me that rather than my name, including a fair few of the teachers.
8. Cycling has been my main method of transport for about 10 years so I have an strong dislike of bus drivers and people who beep their horn.
9. Deus Ex is my favourite computer game. It is incredible and and you should play it even if you don’t play games. It is a work of art.
10. I hate tea and coffee.
11. I think of myself as Scottish before British.
12. I constantly wish I had enough time to try and help everyone through all their problems.
13. I look forward to being married but fear becoming a parent too young.
14. Sometimes when I meet random people on nights out I like to convince them I have a really bizarre job. Last time was a paramedic for domestic pets.
15. I was one interview away from joining the British Army’s Infantry.
16. I have landed a plane. (In real life, not just in a computer game.)
17. I think Babylon 5 is possibly the best piece of TV or film ever made and if you disagree then you are wrong.
18. I can’t cry and haven’t done so for over three years. This slightly worries me.
19. I care very little what random new people think of me unless I’m in a situation like an interview or my good impression means a lot to my coworker/friend/girlfriend/family member.
20. I’ve known I was going to work with computers since primary school.
21. I think if you are not Scottish you shouldn’t be allowed to wear a kilt (possibly by law).
22. My music collection contains almost no female artists, probably because most of it is progressive rock.
23. One of the most endearing things someone can do to me is take the piss out of me.
24. I relish all criticism as one of my goals in life is to improve myself as much as possible in every area.
25. I generally hate romantic comedies unless they have John Cusack in them and then I irrationally love them.

As a result of this I’ve taken to sporadically reading relationship-help books and books about the differences between men and women psychologically. The most recent of these was recommended to me by a good female friend; the classic Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus.

The book basically uses the model of two species from different planets interactions to represent the stereotyped (the author admits this) but often valid problems in the interactions between men and women, focusing this book on those in romantic relationships.

I think a lot of the points that John Gray makes are fairly apt, about how men and women respond to their negative emotions (men tend to want to be by themselves, women tend to want a sympathetic ear but not to get solutions to their problems). We didn’t find this particularly revelatory; after a relationship as long as ours you tend to work these things out for yourself.

What I found interesting was that instead of challenging the fact that neither of these slightly extreme reactions should actually be challenged and improved upon (encouraging men to become more open and women to be more pragmatic when upset) John Gray instead seems to imply that you should just learn to accept that a few days a month (his rough estimate) your partner will act irrationally and selfishly and you just need to let them do that to get it out of their system.

I’m pretty glad I didn’t read this at the beginning of our relationship or I think my girlfriend and I would have developed some fairly destructive attitudes towards dealing with our differences. I think understanding these are a key element in improving a damaged relationship or knowing how to better communicate with your partner but I think blind adherence to John Gray’s advice could actually be fairly damaging for a relationship that doesn’t already have problems.

I’d probably recommend reading this book if you are having problems communicating with your partner but if you are happy and both of you are sharing your feelings and honestly and openly dealing with issues in your relationship I’d say it’s perhaps one to miss. Regardless of your camp I’d personally recommend from following his advice to the letter and perhaps strive for a great relationship all the time and moving beyond your biological impulses to try and become a better partner.

In Obama’s autobiography he quotes a friend who used to swear a lot. Obama read’s the audiobook version of his own book.

Hilarity results here.

(I’m not saying swearing is good/bad or that Obama is therefore good/bad because of this. However I’m still childish enough that this makes me giggle like an idiot…)

Apparently I’m a member of Generation Y as I was born in 1984. As I’ve been working in the last few years, especially in my time at BT, I’ve found myself having a very different attitude to my older coworkers. I’ve sometimes felt that maybe I’m just a “rebel” and need to learn to conform, but reading this blog has been a bit of a wake-up call in helping me to realise why I do some of the things I do and how I can be better motivated.

I’d say it’s a must-read if you are either in Generation Y yourself, or you are a manager who has staff from Generation Y working for you and want to understand how to keep them well motivated.

If you want to find out even more about this stuff, the company behind the blog Naked Generations does consultancy and have worked with some pretty big names already including the British government.

Check it out!

My employers Mendeley have made the recent wise decision of employing some excellent other software engineers, including KDE’s own Fred Emmott who is working in my team. He’s a great guy to work with but is annoyingly productive; every time I find something to do and get on with my own work it seems like five minutes before he’s fixed the bug/added the feature and is looking for more stuff to do! Any suggestions on how to make him less productive?

It was a nice surprise to view the 2.6.26 kernel changelog and find that some of the code I wrote at Wolfson Microelectronics two summers ago has finally been merged. I can now grep for myself in the kernel! Yey!

I hope to blog more regularly now, hopefully with less self-indulgent posts and more useful ones as I’ve been having some interesting battles with the mighty CMake at work that deserve sharing.

I guess I’m signing off for the evening as it is late o’clock but hopefully see some of you soon as:

There is something that open-source software seems to suck at and that is making good games. I play almost every OSS game I can get my hands on and the prettiest are graphically inferior to games from the average games of a couple of years ago, the audio is terribly mastered, the games are usually unbalanced and the stories are usually either ridiculously awful or involve Tux in some way.

Interestingly the freeware/mod scene on Windows seems to produce far better quality games than the open-source scene. I think this is because you where software fulfils a need for the user a game is a more creative act and needs a clear leader and a very undemocratic approach to aspects such as storyline and artwork. Games also tend to need to be “done” before they are released as no-one wants to play a story-driven game that just stops abrubtly.

I’m sure people are going to come onto this blog and complain that I’ve forgotten about all these great open-source games but I don’t really care. I’ve tried playing too many to find myself spending hours wishing I was playing even a poor paid-for game.

The only real exceptions I’ve found to the above rules are games which have been retroactively open-sourced such as Quake 3, Transport Tycoon, Tyrian and Star Control 2. These were all good games on release and open-sourcing them means they can be made more portable and keep being played for a long time. I highly recommend you check them out.

What if our “climate chaos” and all the weather changes we are seeing are just the fact that the rotation of the earth is at a slightly different speed so years are now the wrong length! That would explain the whole warmer winters but colder summers!

Disclaimer:
I make every effort to reduce my impact on the environment, this blog post is intended to be humour not a complex rebuttal of common scientific theory. However, I reserve the right to merciless mock the entire scientific community.

• Christianity
• Cinema
• Computer Games
• Music
• My Life
• Politics
• Random
• Software Development

The above links point to the relevant category. I highly recommend if you read this blog and only some of the above interest you that you subscribe to only the RSS feed for that particular category or categories for your sake and mine.

Virgin.net Broadband Plan One
Important link
Up to 8 Mbps
No 12 month contract
Unlimited downloads

Sounds good, eh?
Well looking at the FAQ:
What are usage allowances?
With Virgin.net Broadband Plan Three, you can transfer up to 3 GB of data per month, Plan Two allows up to 6 GB of data to be transfered per month and Plan One, a massive 20 GB

Plan One = infinite download limit
Plan One = 20GB download limit

therefore:
infinite download limit = 20GB download limit

therefore:
infinity = 20

therefore:
infinity = 1

Take that, maths!

(Also, people who make the website for Virgin.net clearly aren’t told basic English skills such as “transfered” having two Rs [transferred], but that’s another rant…)

I’d imagine most people know about adrenaline. It’s the fight or flight reflex that makes your reactions quicken and you can feel stronger and more alert. Peedrenaline does the same thing, as I discovered on the way home today.

I decided it would be a good idea to drink about 4 pints of water at work today, and not pee, and just wait till I got home. Just after I got my bike unchained, the water suddenly kicked in, and I cycled the fastest I think I ever have, and my body didn’t hurt or burn (well, except for my bladder, which seemed to be saying in a Scottish accent “Cap’n, we can’t take much more of this!”).

So basically, if you need to exert yourself physically or mentally, drink loads of water and don’t go for a pee first. It’ll make you into some bizarro Superman whose kryptonite is releasing your bladder.

Now that I’ve pioneered this scientific discovery, I predict peedrenaline junkies, who will hold as much urine in as possible, just for the rush (hopefully mental rather than liquid), although, it seems, Neil Costley has been doing this for a fair while already.