Jamie’s Weblog

I discovered Sugru just before Christmas and immediately jumped on the preorder queue hoping to nab a great present. As it turned out, lots of people did the same thing and they needed to ramp up production, so it was only recently that I finally received my pack.
Sugru is awesomeness disguised as plasticine/playdoe/Mála/exercise putty. It’s [...]

I can’t impress on you enough how much this resonates with me. Gabrielle can put it better than I can… but even then I don’t think you’re truly going to understand.

I was putting Norah to bed this evening and she was giggling away at me as we played. And then I realised something… that little baby giggle is what life is all about. I could be free-and-single with no responsibilities or in a dual-income-no-kids situation with money to spare but that giggle gives me more [...]

Along with thousands of other photographers across the globe, I participated in the Worldwide Photowalk by joining the Cork photowalk organised by Donncha O Caoimh. I’ve never participated in one of these walks and street/city photography is way outside my usual subject matter of landscapes, coastline and wildlife.
First stop was Cork’s English Market which was [...]

Grapefruit and hayfever sounds like a pretty random combination, right? Well, I’ve noticed over the past 3 days that I get immediate relief from my watering eyes after drinking a couple of sips of pink grapefruit juice. Intrigued by this, I went searching Google and was rather surprised to find that grapefruit juice can kill [...]

Disclaimer: I’m not your doctor, I’m not a surgeon and I’m not a dietician. I’m just a guy with some gallstone experience.
I have gallstones, as did my wife, and there’s a 1 in 5 chance that you will suffer from them during your lifetime. Basically, these little deposits can be a small as a grain [...]

Energizer are the default rechargeable batteries that you’ll find in any shops — but they’re crap. They need charging before you can use them and you can’t just leave them charged up on the shelf ready for use because they’ll lose their charge so quickly. Inevitably, when the TV remote or children’s toy runs out [...]

There’s a fantastic thread on the JoS discussion board in which the original poster was considering leaving a career in programming for some other field. This spawned lots of comments (including from Joel himself) that touched on everything that it means to be a programmer (or not), working in corporate IT, and so on.
This got [...]

I prefer not to get my philosophical advice from popular culture but this quote struck me as fairly apt:
“Never tell a Ranger there’s something he can’t do – it’ll only make him do it bigger, better and with an ongoing sense of interest” — The Unit
At the moment I’m fairly intent on doing anything someone [...]

This post might be written in a tone that gives you the impression that this is advice about your PhD. It’s not. It’s overly pessimistic and specific to my situation.
These are (largely unedited) notes I collected between 2003-2006 when I was working on my PhD in Computer Science. I eventually admitted to [...]