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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New Year! New Me! I'm crap at sticking to my multiple resolutions. I think I did okay on last year's resolutions. So this year, I'm just making a single one. At the start of the Gregorian calendar 2021, I'll begin an MSc Digital and Technology Specialist. My resolution is to get my coursework in on time. That's it. It has been so long since I formally studied anything that I'm a little nervous …
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