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 myself that [...]

Norah spent last night in the Children’s Ward of Cork University Hospital with Erythema multiforme. It started as a small rash under her chin on Saturday morning, and eventually spread with small spots on her body and legs. The GP said it was just probably an allergic reaction, perhaps to a bacteria or virus. Anyway, [...]

Good intentions, bad narcolepsy.

This made laugh although Hilary was not so impressed: Don’t worry about $127 a barrel oil, just one more dollar and it’ll overflow into the sign bit. -$128 oil for all!

Facebook just isn’t working for me — I think it’s designed for people with friends. If you’re happy to have all your updates, photos, conversations etc on the one site, and share that info with just your “friends” then perhaps it does work. But the fact is that I don’t want to keep all my [...]

I’m big into anything that means I don’t have to walk up and down the stairs at the moment. One of the annoying things was getting the laptop in the same place as the backup drive, which meant that I wasn’t actually making any backups. With lots of priceless baby pictures that kinda worries me. [...]

As of yesterday, I’m off the crutches and learning to walk again. I broke my other femur as a child and had to learn to walk again when I was 2, so this is my third, and hopefully final, attempt. Currently my gait is quite similar to Edgar (Vincent D’Onofrio as the bug) in Men [...]

So, I’ve been out of work for the past 3 months since the accident but recently I haven’t been entirely idle.  I’ve finished off the personal finance site I first talked about almost a year ago and I’ve also written 2 other Ruby-on-Rails websites and got them deployed.  These aren’t fancy sites but they fill [...]

I’m not a big petrolhead and really don’t care much about fast cars but I always appreciate innovation. When Daewoo first entered the U.K. market they innovated not through product design (the cars were all bad Vauxhall knock-offs) but through customer service: Salesmen were paid a flat-rate instead of commission to encourage honest advice; and [...]

A song that only a new parent could come up with: There’s klingons on the starboard bum, the starboard bum, starboard bum, there’s klingons on the starboard bum, get them off mum! Oh, and babies can have a surprisingly strong grip, particularly when they find something sensitive like chest hair to pull on