Today we’d booked into an Icelandic horse riding tour. The rest of the family love horse-riding but I’m always a bit wary of anything involving living creatures (or “random behaviour simulators”, as I describe them). But Icelandic horses are different to the ones we have in the rest of Europe so I was a bit curious to try them out. Continue reading “Iceland : Day 3”
Iceland : Day 2
Today started with out first Icelandic breakfast; a mix of cheese, ham, sour dough, egg, fruit and Skyr (an Icelandic yogurt with fruit and nuts; insanely tasty). Additional fortification was available in the form of raw sugar (juice on tap for the children) and caffeine (coffee on tap for the adults).
We were good to go!
Iceland : Day 1
For my wife’s fortieth I organised a trip to see the Northern Lights; something she’d always wanted to do. I got quite a way into booking a trip to Iceland but I noticed that there was loads of things to do there the children would love so I shelved Iceland and looked elsewhere.
A few years later, we’re off! Off course, we started our trip by playing The Immigrant Song…
Avengers: Age of Ultron Review
The family and I went to see Avengers: Age of Ultron at the weekend at the London IMAX. Here’s some totally non-objective, fan-boyish thoughts. It’s spoiler-free!
Journey to the Centre of the Galaxy : Elite Dangerous
Elite:Dangerous is a great game. It’s pretty much “Here’s the entire galaxy. Here’s a spaceship. Off you go!” so you can do whatever you want.
I’d given bounty-hunting, trading and mining a go so I was keen to try exploration. And what better place to go than the super-massive black hole at the centre of our galaxy, Sagittarius A*? Widescreen pics below!
Continue reading “Journey to the Centre of the Galaxy : Elite Dangerous”
LAN Party Joy
Last weekend was LAN joy-time; my friends bring our computers to someone’s house, we hook them up to his LAN and then we spend the weekend setting each other on fire.
There’s some food, drink and socialising too but the main thing is the pyromania.
Highlights are below.
Tales from IT : Installing Servers in Style
I’ve been lucky enough to do quite a bit of travelling throughout my working life. Most of the time it wasn’t particularly glamorous (“Be an IT guy! See the inside of server rooms in exotic locations!”) but occasionally I’d get to do something particularly cool.
Like being driven to the centre of New York City in a chauffeur in an enormous stretch limousine.
Continue reading “Tales from IT : Installing Servers in Style”
Why Isn’t Everyone a Boundless Optimist?
My uncle got my my wife and I tickets to see The Scottsboro Boys in the West-End for Christmas. It was awesome; funny and affecting with a late, optimistic coda. That said generally the entire story was pretty grim (racial oppression and a brutal miscarriage of justice. But with catchy tunes!) which is even worse if you read the actual history of what happened.
But I got to thinking about how much things have improved. I’m an optimist and a believer in the steady march of progress so I got to wondering; why would anyone not be? How could someone want social/scientific/cultural progress to slow down, stop (or in the case of reactionaries) reverse?
Tales from IT : The Great Snipe Hunt for DNS
One of the first places I worked was a software development house who’d built themselves up from a small group of developers into a pretty big (2-3 thousand) outfit. Originally they had two IT departments; one (where I worked) focused on the developers and one focused on everyone else. When the company reached a decent size it was decided to merge the two as part of both unifying IT work and stopping all the squabbling between the two departments.
One of the first tasks was to bring all the company servers into a proper server room. But first, we had to find the company’s servers…
Continue reading “Tales from IT : The Great Snipe Hunt for DNS”
The Geek Lifecycle
I was thinking about how when I got into one thing as a child it often got me interested in something else. So how to did I get from Lego bricks to System Design, PowerShell and Sci-Fi?
What we need, is a flow chart! To the Bat-Publisher! (below the line).
Herring's Fishbait 