mdh

Really liked both of these sites. Some great photos on there.

https://ho.dges.online

I use it as a digital scrapbook of pictures, projects etc rather than a blog.

I clicked on a random sample of the links posted here and really enjoyed seeing the diversity of things people post about and the variety of designs the sites have.

Working on restoring my late father-in-law's Lambretta scooter that he bought new in 1958 and rode all over Europe with my MIL before storing it away in a garage in the mid-60s. Frame and bodywork are solid and it's mechanically sound, but is very tired looking. Have disassembled it and am now stripping the faded and chipped paintwork off of everything ahead of a full respray.

Sad news. '4 3 2 1' is one of my favourite novels with its variations on a theme of a single person's life. The same character's showing up in each thread but in totally different contexts worked particularly well.

Thank you for sharing this. I have nothing but admiration for your resolve to turn your previous experience into a superpower.

Thanks for sharing. I enjoyed (and agree with) the 'Photography In Plato's Cave' post.

Love this. The colour Seoul series is my favourite, but all of the pictures are really interesting and engaging.

https://ho.dges.online

Only pictures I made and commonplace book posts. I've tried long-form blogs in the past and just couldn't find a groove that was interesting enough (to me) to pursue. The pictures I've made however, have become a kind of notebook for things that have caught my eye or that have significance to me and mine. The commonplace posts capture things that have struck me as distilling wisdom or a useful perspective on life.

Go to an art gallery and look at the art. See what you find beautiful, see what you find boring and see what you dislike. Don’t worry about understanding its deeper meaning - just see how you react. If you find something you like, google the artist and see what words get used in relation to their art, and google those terms to find other artists that cover similar ground. Feel your way forward based on what gives you joy, and don’t worry about what other people think: your personal reaction to art is all that counts.

IMO, art may have those characteristics - good art will often obviously have >1 of those.

Art in its most basic form is anything that engages you beyond a strictly functional level.

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realise how seldom they actually do.”

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest.

I love ‘In Our Time’ - it strikes a really good balance between being academic and accessible. The range of topics is so broad too that you find yourself learning about things you didn’t even know you wanted to learn about. For example, scrolling to a random point in the podcast feed, I see than in four weeks in Dec ‘18 there were episodes on the thirty years war, ‘Sir Gawain & The Green Knight’, the poor laws and Venus.

Bragg’s book ‘The Adventure of English’ is a good survey of the evolution of the English language too.

Very cool. I like that the interface is super simple and it seems to do what it claims to do, both with objects and OCR.

It might help to have an explanation somewhere in the app to explain that documents get saved as pdfs and photos as JPEG’s. Took me a while to work it out.

Oh, and the app icon is really fun too!

But all sports are bizarre if you boil them down in this way. They all rely on arbitrary limitation of participants or equipment to prevent them descending into a total free-for-all and becoming pointless. Its the same thing as art being about constraints - its having to deliver within certain 'arbitrary' bounds that make it a challenge and make it worthwhile.

Agree with this but I would also ask the auditor to be very specific about the risk that she believes your organisation is exposed to. If its a specific concern about the suitability/support of certain tools in use in your infrastructure, you can respond to/address those. In particular, I would make sure that the risk is clear about the impact it could have if an OSS project was discontinued (as the parent refers to): its unlikely to have an immediate impact as, by definition, you have a working instance of the tool and the source code so nothing stops working. In many ways this is comparable to the sort of escrow clauses that auditors sometimes look for in commercial support arrangements and which are often deemed acceptable mitigation for commercial products. She should also be clear about likelihood. In my experience (I've been an auditor for c18 years), it can be the case that auditors think about the doomsday scenario - e.g. ALL of the OSS projects you use close down - rather than the more likely scenario that one or maybe two go dark. Again, if she can articulate the specific risk it may be possible for you to respond to real likelihood of a key tool's project stopping (which would parent's approach already covered but which can be prioritised according to risk).

If however its a more general/vague concern about OSS support then you'll have a hard time dealing with it and acceptance may be the appropriate route.

Have you tried taking control of his perception of your working day? I've had bosses in the past where the only way to manage them and their expectations was to maintain a narrative of what you were up to.

Perhaps you could schedule a weekly (daily) catch-up with your boss to explain what you're doing, any issues you've had etc. If he won't commit the time to sit down with you, email him a bulleted list of what you're doing that week/day. Don't get lost in the detail but try to highlight any particular wins (e.g. "the database server we'll need for the quotation site is up and running") and any particular roadblocks ("[web services firm] haven't sent the documentation through I requested. I've scheduled a call for Monday to try and get it sent"). If you're not making the progress you expected/hoped for, always present it in a positive light by explaining what you're doing to deal with it.

If he is always coming to you to find out what you're doing, it might be that he's doing it at the wrong time for him (when he's dealt with all his crises and is tired/stressed) or for you (when you're having a short HN-break in which case you appear to be 'always' slacking).

Its a noble sentiment but i think it does risk creeping out the people the who did download it which would rather defeat the object of the exercise.

Why not include a "Thanks to everyone who downloaded v1.0" message in the About screen in the next update of the app or the app info screen on the Market?

This is assuming that once it's all about glass there isn't anywhere to go...

Agreed. Apple has a patent on multi-touch in three dimensions already[1] so maybe the next i-device will move away from the screen and towards a more touchy-feely :-) approach.

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/about?id=FUOxAAAAEBAJ&dq=m...

horses-for-courses i suppose - i find that i quite like everything gathered into the Instapaper 'magazine' just because it tends to gather up that week's articles. Perhaps i just need the discipline of the old content being archived!(you can re-download it though)

edit: its also perhaps relevant that i don't tend to have much really long content. The DFW/Infinite Jest article from the New Yorker that was posted earlier is about the average for me (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1730153)

The instapaper workflow mentioned in the article is awesome. Instapaper will send articles daily or weekly (to suit your reading habits/desire to avoid the download charge) and the device treats it just like the magazines and newspapers you can buy through amazon's website.

I'd previously assumed that we just had lazy cleaning staff at the office. now I realise...:-)

This can apply up the chain of command as well as down: managing expectations, working within the limitations of an individual's world-view and dealing with the tantrums are all areas where in the past i've found applying the experience of dealing with a toddler to the 'management' of a boss :-)

This.

My experience with non-geeky friends is that they check facebook for messages and interact with friend/family through comments and wall-posts. Some of them get email notifications for these things but they use them as a prompt to go to facebook.com to view and respond. Email is the medium but not the message.

Oh. Yes, that would seem blindingly obvious wouldn't it? OK, I'm an idiot (in my defense, i've been awake since before 4am this morning. Be gentle with me).

Isn't technology wonderful that our biggest issue is which app we have to launch to read the best that the literary world has to offer (and Dan Brown novels :-).

(genuine question) don't the wifi/3G draw power? or is your 'weeks' assessment including normal wireless use?

Oddly, i feel must less strongly about Amazon's hold over the the platform the Kindle represents than i do about Apple and its hold over the music platform iTunes represents. Irrational? Probably. Uneconomnical? maybe (i buy far fewer books than i do albums/audiobooks). I can't fathom why but i just somehow feel like, when i've read a book, the ideas it containws stay with me and become mine whereas an album is something that perpetually stays somehow external (apologies for the airy-fairieness of that: i'm not sure how to express it but i feels like a difference thats significant for me and i'm curious whether anyone else feels the same).

"Another roof, another proof." - Paul Erdos

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

Stuff i've learned from having (two) kids:

i) Take photos. Its amazing how much your child will change and how things that are front and centre in their/your life will fade when day-day life demands attention. Take as many pictures as you can so that you can look back in a couple of years' time and remember those things (and get a good backup plan in place NOW).

ii) All children develop at their own pace. Children pick up skills only on a very rough timescale: our eldest could do jigsaws when he was a year old but couldn't jump till he was nearly two. Our friend's daughter could draw recognisable pictures staggeringly early but didn't know where to start with a jigsaw puzzle. Now they're 3.5 and both of them can do all of those things perfectly well. Praise them for trying things not just for being good at them.

iii) try not to assume the worst. Its easy - especially with your first child - to get sucked into thinking that your child must have some uniquely awful illness or impediment to a normal life because they 'still' aren't sleeping/they have a cold that hasn't cleared up/they haven't fed well that day etc etc. Whilst these things can happen, and you should obviously watch out for signs of serious problems, chances are nothing sinister is behind it. Accept that this is a phase and that in a few days or weeks it will have passed and you'll get through the rough times much easier.

iv) share the sleepless nights the lack of sleep is tough. Try and agree a rota with your partner as to who will be 'point-man/woman' each night and let the other sleep (ideally in a spare room). The key word is agree - do your 'night-shifts' dilligently and don't be tempted to start comparing the difficulty of the shifts you've already done (i.e., a night where the child slept through doesn't mean your partner is on-shift the following night). These things will balance out.

My grandmother's catchphrase to all of her children and grandchildren when they're struggling with their little ones is "You're enjoying this. You really are. You just won't realise it for another 20 years".

I'd distinguish between a right and an obligation.

If you have something worthwhile to say about Mohammed and his teachings (be it for or against) and a depiction of him will help, go ahead and draw him. If however, you're doing it just because you can, then you're doing nothing to help reduce inter-religion tension and, in fact, are exhibiting some of the same sort of dogmatic insistence that everyone conform to your views that you are railing against.

(NB speculation as i am not a muslim, i know only a small number of muslims personally and obviously haven't surveyed the world's muslim population for this). The subset of muslims who will threaten to kill you over this is VERY small and the proportion of that group who would actually ever attempt to do anything about it is miniscule. However, the number of muslims who would find your gesture unfriendly or just straight offensive is quite large. Net result: you've upset a large body of people with whom you have no real quarrel and the people whom you have a real beef with have 'proof' that the non-muslim world wants to undermine Islam.

In my opinion, if the picture on your website has no context (and a link to Facebook group isn't a proper context), then you haven't really helped matters and have probably hindered them.

"that had both fatalities and survivors..."

Is this saying that they only considered crashes where at least 1 person survived and at least 1 died? If so, doesn't this change the analysis from 'given you will be in a plane crash, how can you reduce your likelihood of dying?' to 'given that you will be in a plane crash and SOMEONE will survive, how can you increase the likelihood that it is you?'

I suspect the quotes at the beginning of the article are principally about the former question (and are probably correct in that context).