Last year, I set myself a challenge to only read books by women. I got through 42 books - not bad for a pandemic! This year I was more relaxed - I just picked books which took my fancy. And a few that I needed to read for my MSc. Quite a few came from NetGalley which gives out Advance Reader Copies. So I got to read unpublished books for free in exchange for a review. My year starts in…
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It's my birthday! As is customary, here's my year in review. See 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2013, 2012, 2011, and 2010. Like lots of you, I guess, it kind of feels like a year of stasis and stagnation. The last year seems to have whizzed by. Most of it spent in the same house - with only occasional forays to OutsideLand. A couple of day-trips to the coast, a few doctor's appointments,…
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The one thing I know about myself is that I hate introspection. So, fair warning, this will be a mopey and self-indulgent post. As part of my MSc, I have to create and discuss my Personal Development Plan in relation to my Career and I'm… stumped! I've never known what I wanted to be when I grow up. Sure, vague dreams of being a starship pilot (unlikely) or an actor (failed) - but other than t…
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Every so often, a celebrity is castigated over their "youthful indiscretions" i.e. racist Tweets they sent when they were a teenager. I don't think I've posted anything too horrific, but I wanted to check. I searched Twitter for a variety of slurs sent from my account - and all seemed clean. But... there's a lot of stuff that's not so easy to find with a simple search. So I decided to read…
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I don't often blog about my feelings. Mostly because I find them confusing. Three weeks after our first vaccination jab, my wife and I broke our lockdown to go on a date. In the last 15 months we've left the house a few times for doctor's appointments, a couple of visits to the post office, some brief walks round the park, and that's about it. Nothing social, nothing fun. We thought it would…
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I hate everyone in Stars Hollow. They're all immature, narcissistic, power-hungry, ego-fuelled maniacs - some of whom border on psychotic. I hold them in such contempt that I would gladly abandon them all on a deserted island and let nature take its course. There isn't a single one of them who isn't a complete failure of a human being. Their collective brain power wouldn't even light an energy…
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It is Thursday, 19 Mar 1998, 11:35 and I've bunked off school. I'm about to be on TV. I don't think I've told anyone. A few months prior, I had auditioned for a TV show and got the part! A few days later - with school's permission - I started rehearsals in some weird BBC rehearsal space. At the end of the week, a car took me to the then-abandoned St Pancras hotel, where we filmed. The resulting …
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Hanging on a wall in our house is a signed picture of Derek Jacobi. It is one of our most treasured possessions. It is a drawing of him as Professor Yana from Doctor Who. SPOILER ALERT He was really The Master! Back in 2007, I happened to be working next to a memorabilia shop, when I saw both Jacobi and Tom Baker sat in there. A long queue of people stood waiting to buy autographs. I got in…
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The WordPress app for Android prompted me to add a story! This is a new and experimental feature. Sadly, it isn't very good. Here's how it works. There's a brief description and some aspirational screenshots. There's a basic image picker. Then you get some basic tools to add text on top of your image. I know I'm a cynic, but this is a little underwhelming. It just posts an image to the…
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This is a quick round-up of the blogs which "did numbers" this year - and a few which I feel were cruelly overlooked. I posted a new blog every day in 2020 - so don't be surprised if you missed a few. OK? Here we go! January Watch out; there's a scam about. People love sharing horror stories. Scammers registering date-based domain names A venture into the arcane mysteries of programming …
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Every year, I take part in NaBloPoMo the Judoon mating festival where people blog every day in November. I ended November 2019 with more blog posts than I knew what to do with, so I tried blogging every day in January. And then, well, February is only a short month, isn't it? If all has gone to plan, you're reading this at the end of 2020 and this is my 366th blog post! Fucking leap years, eh? …
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Last year, I set myself a challenge to read a new book per week. I managed to read 50 books, which I was pretty happy with. This year, I decided to only read books written by women. Here's what I learned. Obviously, COVID had a fairly negative effect on my reading rate. I went months without touching a book, and some evenings I could only get a few pages in before giving in to the need to…
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