Content tagged with "Personal"

I started playing Hardspace Shipbreakers last night, it’s a really fun space sim game which is quite relaxed and not too aggressie. However, the standout feature is definitely the soundtrack which is absolutely amazing americana/bluegrass style instrumental music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxTyMVPaOXY

I’m trying out moving back to hugo and webmention stuff again. I was getting a bit frustrated with the bulk involved with wordpress.

Moody sky this morning on a walk along the seafront in Lee on the Solent.

The sunset was beautiful today as we drove up north to visit my family for the weekend.

It was lovely to head up to London today to meet up with my friend and fellow NLP nerd Daniel. We spent some time discussing some ideas we had for side projects and talked in depth about how web development has become too complex and our desire to build new software with simple stacks with html templates and limited frontend code.

We spent quite a lot of time hanging out in the National Library where there's plenty of space to study and conspire over ideas and schemes. Daniel is something of a digital nomad so it's always nice to get some in-person time when possible. Unfortunately none of our contacts at the Alan Turning Institute were available to let us in today (I mean who can blame them, it's the weekend after all).

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• This week the weather has taken a turn for the worst across the UK.
• Work has been relatively quiet and I managed to avoid going up to London all week. I did get the chance to spend some f2f time with my CEO on Thursday and do some whiteboarding about our product strategy for the next few months which was cool. I also finished a tech due dilligence project that I've been running on another software startup which is always really interesting and insightful. I love to see what other (non-competing) businesses are doing, process-wise, and see if I can learn anything.
  
• On Tuesday Mrs R and I went to see Peter Pan goes Wrong at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton. We really enjoyed the show, there was lots of silly slapstick comedy.
• I started spending a bit more time looking at substack because Doug and Laura started posting more over there, there are some other interesting things going on over there too. Amongst others, I've been following Gary Marcus who is a fellow AI specialist that is pretty scathing about the current hype, Ed Zitron who has some spicy takes on silicon valley and Garbage Day which is a bit of a random collection of online "stuff. I've noticed Substack has started to pick up a fair bit of interest and traffic recently despite some big controversies earlier in the year. Also, regardless of political connotations there's still the whole "you don't own your stuff" argument for not publishing there (or at least syndicating there from an independently owned site). I enjoyed Elizabeth Tai's recent reflections on the platform.
  
• Yesterday I published about some cool happenings in music and updated my professional landing page and my now page. I'm forever wanting to fiddle and tweak my website and I'm never quite happy with the layout and the way it's all set up. I'm intrigued by the new Wordpress ActivityPub integrations and forever interested in whether I should be separating my blog outputs based on content type (for example keeping brainsteam "personal" and posting tech/programming stuff somewhere else).
• This coming week I'm in London a couple of days and then we have some time off and a mini-break in Bournemouth towards the end of the week.
  

I really enjoyed reading Wouter's post about his top 25 albums of all time and realised that for someone who mentions music pretty prominently in my bio, I barely talk about it on my blog.

I might do a top 25 albums post at some point but for now, I am content to share a couple of music updates that excited me this week.

Firstly, on Wednesday Mike Portnoy announced that he's going to be returning to Dream Theater which is awesome. Mike Mangini who's been drumming for the band since MP left has been doing an admiral job (he was pretty well qualified, previously holding the world record for the highest number of drum beats in a minute - 1203). MP is one of the main creative voices in the band so hopefully, with his return, we might see a return to concept albums like Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Metropolis.

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This week has been much quieter than last week which I've been very grateful for as I've needed a bit of time to recharge my introvert brain at home.

On Tuesday we went to see 2:22 at Southampton Mayflower. Essentially it's a spooky ghost story where this couple move into a haunted house and haunting happens at 2:22am every morning. It also makes some poignant nods towards gentrification and since it was written by a millennial, it has an amazing nostalgic soundtrack featuring people who were big when I was a teenager (such as Massive Attack, Groove Armada and Mylo). The story is really good and I won't spoil it here.

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This week has been jam packed with traveling, meetings, events and all sorts! For an introvert like me, it's been pretty hard going pretending to be extroverted and interacting with lots of folks.

The biggest news this week was that my company won another award. A few weeks ago in September we won the CogX award for Best Fintech Company 2023. On Thursday I attended an awards ceremony with my colleague in order to accept the award for Best Emerging Tech Company (on the south coast) 2023.

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This week work has been incredibly busy again - a running theme this time of year.

On Monday we went to CostCo and spent lots of money bulk-buying things. Although I'm always horrified by the bill at the checkout, I love to come home and calculate how much I've saved versus buying the same product from my local supermarket in small quantities. This time it was about £60 which is pretty good!

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