Content tagged with "Personal"

This week (or last week)’s weeknote is a touch late since I was travelling over the weekend. On Sunday it was Mother’s Day in the UK so we visited my mum up in the midlands and then Mrs R’s mum down here in Hampshire, having a sit down meal with both. It was a bit like the bit in the Vicar of Dibley where she accidentally signs herself up for multiple christmas dinners on the same day.

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• This week I was back at work after both myself and Mrs R were off poorly most of last week. It’s actually been pretty hard going and every night after work we have been coming home, collapsing on the sofa and sleeping.
• Unfortunately we failed miserably at seeing Jon Richardson as we were just feeling too sick.
• At work I was running a tech due dilligence project with an edtech company which was really interesting and fun. Sometimes it is nice to be reminded about how other small tech companies operate and that the trials and tribulations that my co-founders and I face are often shared by others.
• I received a lovely surprised in the mail: a mug with the abstract from my PhD thesis that my supervisor Amanda sent off for when I got the news that the final version of my work had been accepted.

In January I went for a walk with my bluetooth earbuds in and when I got back I must have put them in their charging case and then put it “somewhere safe”. I spent a few days looking for them and then eventually gave up and had to buy a replacement pair.

Fast-forward to this week when my phone was showing that it was connected to my earbuds even though I knew mine were safely tucked away in their case. I tried re-seating my earbuds in their charger to make them turn off and my phone briefly connected to another set of buds - so they were off the whole time!

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Activity

• I spent a lot of this week laid up in bed feeling somewhat sorry for myself having caught a nasty flu/heavy cold followed by a secondary chest infection. I managed to see my GP and get some antibiotics for the chest infection, and I’m now starting to feel much better. I did manage to work one day this week (Friday) but I had to reschedule all my calls as I currently sound like some kind of sick parrot when I try to speak.
• While I was off I have mainly been reading, watching X-Files and playing video games:
  • I purchased and started playing Atomic Heart - I was drawn in by the world building and premise but after about 4 hours I was put off by the unlikeable protagonist and the weird sexual undertones of the whole game (actually it’s pretty overt: overtones?). It inspired me to go back and replay Bioshock.
  • I put another big dent in Dyson Sphere Project which is probably one of my favourite games of all time. It’s a factory builder like Factorio but it has beautiful graphics and a more peaceful environment (for now at least, the developers are working on adding an optional combat mode to the game to be released later this year).
  • I watched most of X-Files season 6. I miss the seasons from the early/mid nineties which made America feel big and isolated (due to a lack of mobile phones and other such technology) but it’s still entertaining. I am enjoying both the “monster of the week” and the overall mythology/arc of the series.
  • I’ve been reading and making notes about Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? which details some practical tips for dealing with anxiety from a practicing clinical psychologist. Some of the stuff I have heard before but there are some interesting gems in there that I’ve found helpful. #ImWorriedSick
• I haven’t written any new blog posts this week as I’ve been too under the weather but I have some new ideas that I’m collecting.
• Tomorrow we’re off to see comedian Jon Richardson at the local theatre. Jon reminds me a bit of me in that he’s an anxious millenial and a lot of his jokes are about exactly that. It should be a good gig.

Interesting Links

• Cleanlab whose open source product we use a lot for checking data quality at work wrote a blog post about a new offering they’ve published called ActiveLab which provides a really nice clean interface for accelerated data annotation via active learning. I might blog more about my experience of using this tool once I get my hands on it.
• A report shows that nearly 40% of software engineers want to work fully remotely. A number of trusted sources have been predicting that this will become a trend for a little while now. I share the view that Companies that put remote first will win the war for top talent.
• This week Valve shipped an update that enables ray tracing on steamdeck. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks pretty interesting. That said in order to get ray tracing to work, you apparently have to sacrifice performance in other areas so I’m not too sure if it’ll be worth it. I might give it a go for “lulz”.

Next week

• Next week I’m hoping to be back at work in full capacity, I need to prepare for a talk on using NLP to extract information from scientific papers that I’m delivering to the University of Manchester’s NLP interest group the following week.
• I’m no longer contagious so I’m hoping to get out and about a bit more.

Activity

• This week has been pretty busy as we attended a friend’s wedding up in the North West of the country. We took friday off to make a 6 hour road trip up to Tarpoley (pronounced Tar-plea or Tar-pleh with a cheshire accent) where we stayed in a cute old-timey hotel called The Swan. The wedding itself was in Peckforton Castle, a stately home built up on the Cheshire hillside in 1800s but in the style of a Gothic, medieval castle.
• Now that spring is starting to kick in and the sun is rising earlier in the morning, things are starting to feel less dark and gloomy day-to-day. I’m starting to think about and make plans for our garden this year and what food I plan to grow. I don’t have room (or time + energy) to grow enough food for us to be self-sufficient, but I hope to supplement out regular food shop with some home-grown goodies later in the year.
• I finally finished Cytonic by Brandon Sanderson. For some reason it’s taken me a little while to read even though I normally love a good brando-sando. I have his new Novel “The Lost Metal” to start reading next, set in era 2 of the Mistborn saga. I’m also making my way through Kris Nova’s Hacking Capitalism.
• I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday trying to get the contents of a Google BigQuery table out and into a MySQL database. The reason is that BigQuery’s pricing model is based on how much data your query processes as a proxy for how much compute you use. This makes it quite efficient if you do single queries with large batches of results and very inefficient if you want to lookup a value (e.g. for a given company in this table, what was their revenue last year?). Each time BigQuery reads the full table we were essentially processing 10GiB of data - and at the price of $5 TiB it would cost $5000 to extract the information we wanted for 600k companies via individual lookups. Even with indexing this kind of operation is quite expensive in bigquery - it would have cost $189 to extract the information we wanted to access by querying row-by-row. BigQuery has a CSV export function and Google’s CloudSQL (MySQL and PostgreSQL hosting) has a CSV import function so I figured - how hard can it be. As it turns out, hard. I might write a longer post about what I got up to but suffice to say after 2 full days of my time we can now repeat this process in an automated way and host the full dataset in a traditional DB for about $45/month (plus the extraction of the data from BigQuery which is fractions of a penny if we do it once a month).

Blog Posts

This week I posted about how scientific journalism is a bit like a blurry photo of science - a kind of spiritual response to Ted Chiang’s recent piece for The New Yorker which I thought was a great metaphor but which received some stick from the scientific community for being inaccurate.

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This just arrived in the mail. Its a bit surreal to be holding this in my hands.

Took Mrs R to see Troy Hawke who is Internet famous for standing outside shops and saying witty things to would be customers. The show was very funny and lively and Troy was kind enough to wait around afterwards for photos with the audience. Great evening out!

I recently finished and submitted my PhD thesis to Warwick University, ending a 7-year phase of my life in which I worked the CTO at an AI company by day and moonlighted by reading and writing scientific papers and writing experiments at night and during the weekends. I’m now just CTOing but I’m finding that when the evening comes around I am tired and lack any motivation to pursue side-projects or hobbies other than sedentary/low effort things like watching TV, playing video games and reading.

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It’s the end of week 4 of January 2023 already. I can’t believe how fast things are going - as usual. This week has definitely been the week that the January blues really hit me but at the same time, some good stuff has happened too.

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On Friday afternoon I got this email:

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Feeling a bit sorry for myself, its dark, I’m back at work and I have to make some #phd thesis corrections. Mrs R has just provided my consolation prize. She is the best.