August 5th, 2012 - 0 comments
It’s been an exciting few months for me.
I’ve spent the last 5 weeks out of 7 on non-UK soil. That’s for another time though. This post is dedicated to running, more specifically the British 10k. As you may know I hurt myself pretty badly when running the London Marathon. After spending plenty of time getting fat and sitting on my bottom, I started to get back out there running.
And boy was it hard.
Continue reading “Great British 10k 2012” »
Add a commentApril 26th, 2012 - 2 comments
As many of you know, I participated in the London Marathon this year (2012).
I’ve spent the last few months training hard, getting some pretty quick times in the process. When the day arrived I was excited to potentially get a good time. Things started okay, I was a little slower than planned but managed the first 10k in little over an hour, which would give me a finish time of 4 hours 20 minutes.
Perfect.
Continue reading “Reflections on the London 2012 Marathon” »
2 commentsApril 13th, 2012 - 0 comments
I don’t work for Spotify, I promise.
I’m just a fan of their service. Despite the troubles I’ve been having with their iOS app (I hope a fix is coming soon, I’ve helped blackbox diagnose the problem as much as I can!). I’ve been a premium user for some years now, making my rather large iTunes library somewhat redundant. I know it wasn’t a popular decision to tightly bind Spotify with Facebook, but some rather interesting outcomes have arisen from this.
I discovered a new one today; “Listen with…”.
I noticed my friend Suzanne was listening to a song I like, and in times past, I could start playing that same song on my local system by pressing the song title. However, this seems have changed to “Listen with Suzanne”. One press of the button and I was suddenly 1:01 into James Vincent McMorrow’s ‘If I Had a Boat’. I was now subscribed to whatever Suzanne is listening to, in real time; she had essentially become my personal DJ. As I mentioned before, not everybody likes to make their music social, and that’s fair enough. Myself, I love to share and discover music my friends listen to and think this is a fantastic little feature, that was until she started listening to One Direction…
Add a commentApril 12th, 2012 - 0 comments
Today, Spotify announced their emergence into the browser based streaming.
Sort of.
It requires the user to have the spotify client open on their machine but it works seamlessly. It allows the user to listen to music, while keeping them on the same page. I can envisage some very interesting uses for this over the coming months.
With that in mind, I give you my top 20 songs, EVER. Presented to you using the lovely new Spotify Play. I would love to see your top xx songs ever too.
April 10th, 2012 - 2 comments
In March, I was lucky enough to be able to travel to Sardinia with a few of my closest friends. It was off-season and we managed to find a 6 person apartment that cost us each €2 a day. Sardinia is a large island just off the coast of Italy; the town we stayed in, Alghero, is an old fortification town.
When I say we were on the sea front, I mean it in a very literal sense. This is the view from the kitchen:
Continue reading “You know you’re getting old when…” »
2 commentsMarch 13th, 2012 - 1 comment
Wow.
It’s been nearly TWO months since I last blogged. That sucks. I’ve been mega busy with my PhD and life in general. However, I do have some good news to share:
I’m published! I’ve had my first ever academic paper accepted into the 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence conference. Major props must go to my colleague, Aysenur, who definitely deserves the majority of the credit (being lead author and all).
I’m also named author on another paper submitted to the 2012 IEEE Intelligent Environments Conference, which I’m hopeful in being accepted. And just to top it off, I’m finishing up another paper to be submitted to the Workshop on Large Scale Intelligent Environments as well! If I can gain 3 publications within the first 9 months of my PhD, well, then that’s awesome!
I’ve also been busy training for the London marathon (whats that? You haven’t donated yet? Don’t worry, the link is here). I’ve been training hard for this event and for my general badminton/squash playing. This has resulted in a grade 1 tear of my left quadricep. This obviously is a blow but never fear, I will be running the marathon, even if I have to do it House style, pimp-cane and all.
Speaking of badminton, I’ve finally won an internal tournament! First in the mixed and second in the mens. Sorted.
January 20th, 2012 - 0 comments
I’ve spent most of today moping.
For reasons that I definitely shouldn’t be moping about. I got my feedback from my board review and it was all positive feedback which is fantastic! However, this is what had me at ends:
I know, I know, it shouldn’t have made me think bad but all I can see is “why wasn’t I excellent?”, “Why isn’t it very probable that I’ll complete my PhD on time?”. This just means I’ve got to really get my head down and work my arse off over the next few months to make sure I get those boxes ticked!
Add a commentJanuary 16th, 2012 - 2 comments
I am 22 and studying for a PhD.
Yet, the prospect of building a blanket fort still is an amazing thing to do on a day off! It was a pretty simple endevour. Got some hooks, string and blankets from Tesco, tied it all together with some washing line pegs and BOOM. I have my very own blanket fort ala Community (if you don’t watch that show, I would thoroughly recommend it).
More photos after the break…
Continue reading “Day 20 – The Blanket Fort” »
2 commentsJanuary 15th, 2012 - 2 comments
Hello if you’re coming from The Burning House.
I had my picture (from Day 2) posted in The Burning House! If you’re not aware of this website, it describes itself as:
If your house was burning, what would you take with you? It’s a conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental. What you would take reflects your interests, background and priorities. Think of it as an interview condensed into one question.
Now there are some awesome photos which portray what that person really is about…but I find a somewhat unfeasible list of items to grab if your house is burning down. I tried to keep it somewhat realistic, while telling others about myself. I kept it minimal, which is how I want to live my life; cut out the unnecessary excess that one has come to tolerate and simply focus on the better parts of life. It’s not to say I’m going to start living in a forest but most people can afford to lose some excess whether metaphorically or physically (and I could probably do with losing some of both!).
2 commentsJanuary 12th, 2012 - 0 comments
I am one happy man right now.
I had my first Skype meeting with my external supervisor at King Abdulaziz University on Tuesday (10th) and then my first ever supervisory board review the next day.
I’m not going to lie, on the Monday I was a nervous wreck (on the inside… mostly). My meeting with Abdullah went absolutely fine; he was happy with the work I’ve done so far, offered some good advice for my board and we parted ways. I got kind of lucky in that the connection wasn’t very good so we had a text chat instead. This allowed me those few moments extra to really consider my responses.
Along came my board review, I locked myself in my office from 10am til 2pm to really practice my presentation, prepare answers to questions and so forth. Again, I got lucky in that we ended up conducting the board review in my supervisor’s office. This meant a slightly more informal setting, but at the same WAY more intimidating as they were only a few feet away from me. I was nervy to begin with, but I did eventually settle in and say what I had to say. I did have a few curve ball questions thrown at me; I had approached my research with a developers mindset and that was evident in the work I’ve done so far. My research also has a big theoretical side to it (in the form of formal methods). When pressed on this, I was quite honest and simply said “I’ve come from a developers background, and I had planned on spending the next quarter bringing myself up to speed with the formal methods”. All in all, they seemed happy with my progress and the direction I’m heading in.
I had a post meeting with James (my co-supervisor) and we planned out the next 3 months or so and I tell you what, I’m so excited to get stuck in. If all goes to plan (i.e. my papers get accepted) then I’ll have 3 publications in the first six months of my PhD. Now if that isn’t a bloody strong start, I don’t know what is.
I also joined a new photography website: 500px. I quite like it there, everyone is so nice! I posted some of my better pictures from my flickr and they got quite a bit of attention. I even had one photo pop up on the “upcoming” page, which was pretty awesome! It’s definitely one of my favourite photos. It’s of my friend Jenny at the beach. While the others were sunbathing, we went underneath the pier to look for crabs and other wildlife; naturally I took my camera and took this photo (not posed for) while Jenny was searching.
