A Fitness Story

During most of university I was in pretty crap shape, but in the second year of my PhD my physical condition got particularly lousy. I caught a bus every morning which left from directly outside my flat and took me directly to the university. I did pretty much no exercise and ate an awful lot of takeaway. A few of my friends remarked that I’d ga... Read more
01 Apr 2013 / 3 minute read / geek, gym-rat

Categories and Goals

It’s good to have goals. Even if you fail to meet them. Sometimes especially when you fail to meet them. It’s quite widely publicised that at Google we’re expected to score 0.7 (on a scale where 0 is a complete failure and 1 means all targets were met) when assessing our OKRs (objectives and key results). Generally this is good. It means you’re ... Read more
25 Mar 2013 / 3 minute read / blogger, 3 more

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

So a couple of things about this website have changed. Perhaps you’ve noticed. Firstly, I changed the background. Much as I love that dark linen image I was using, it’s really obviously “the apple background”, which carries connotations I didn’t really want to project. The first place I saw it was on an apple device, granted, but I wasn’t using... Read more
22 Mar 2013 / 1 minute read / blogger

I Disagree with Film Critic Hulk

While Film Critic Hulk’s argument generally seems quite well reasoned, I find it a little difficult to stomach someone attempting to lecture me on the theory behind the form of anything in ALL CAPS, and at such length. Also, he makes the unforgivable (in my opinion) mistake of representing his opinion as fact. He states the film falls flat, not ... Read more
17 Mar 2013 / 1 minute read / cinephile

Wandering Around London

Apologies, once again, for the radio silence. Over the past couple of months there have been some complications in my private life, and a remarkable amount of my attention has been taken up with figuring out where exactly I’m going to be living after my current lease runs out (more on that later, perhaps). Be that as it may, after almost a year... Read more
17 May 2012 / 4 minute read / blogger, globe-trotter

Now We're Blogging with Photos!

Fair warning: this is going to be a bit of a programming heavy blog post. It’s also going to be quite Mac specific. One of the things I wanted to change about the format of this blog was to make it more visual, specifically with pictures. This first part of this was to add pictures to the front page. There were a couple of options for doing so.... Read more
14 Apr 2012 / 6 minute read / blogger, hacker

Origin Story, Raspberry Pi, and the ZX Spectrum

One of the fun things about working for Google is that from time to time interesting people come into the office to give talks. We had Richard Dawkins a few weeks ago, who gave an interesting if… uncompromising talk. Yesterday we had one of the founders of the Raspberry Pi foundation. For those of you who aren’t aware, the Raspberry Pi is an ext... Read more
27 Mar 2012 / 6 minute read / hacker

New (ish) Year, New (ish) Blog

2011 was an interesting year for me. A lot changed. I turned 30. After 10 years of residency I moved away from Edinburgh, a city I love dearly, and took a job in London. With Google. As a result, I no longer work with Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for a living. Instead I build web services. Quite the change, I’m sure you’ll agree. In the early ... Read more
17 Mar 2012 / 4 minute read / blogger, 3 more

Procedural Landscape Generation:

Simplifying the Landscape

At the end of the last post I wrote about the actual implementation of my Clockwork Aphid project, I said the next step was going to be display simplification. At that point I’d generated a few landscapes which were just starting barely starting to test the limits of my computer, though they were nothing like the size or complexity I had in mind... Read more
01 Dec 2011 / 5 minute read / hacker

Mercury Rising

Monday the 5th of September was Freddie Mercury day. The day he would have turned 65, had he lived. This makes me feel a little old, but that’s not the point. The day’s Google doodle (pointed out to me with furious glee by one of my coworkers) led me to YouTube and numerous videos of Queen performing live. As I often do, I’d forgotten just how g... Read more
20 Sep 2011 / 4 minute read / audiophile, cinephile