Most internet start-ups these days don’t manage their own hardware, unless they’ve got several hundred million dollars in funding and some fairly specialist needs. Pretty much everyone is working just fine on rented virtual machines, dedicated servers, and utility-pricing-model ‘cloud’ services. This doesn’t mean that they don’t need a sysadmin, or ‘ops’ team. However, just [...]
This was originally written some time before 2003 – probably around 1999/2000, as that’s when I was a student at Strathclyde University and got stopped by the Gouranga cultists every week on my way to and from Glasgow Central train station. A discussion on Twitter reminded me of it, so I thought I’d post it [...]
A project that wasn’t on my last from earlier in the week is the idea that was going to go on inappropriatetouching.com, which I registered back in September. The idea was derived from Paul Wilson‘s idea for a web site to resolve beer debts. You know how you post to Twitter going ‘Argh, Thing X [...]
I guess like many a geek, I’ve a laundry list of half-started or only-exists-in-my-head projects. Every year I decide I’m going to work on them more, and then I don’t really. (See: last year, the year before that, and the year before THAT.) So, in keeping with tradition I’m going to come up with another [...]
This last weekend I assembled the exercise bike and actually started to use it and record data on fatfuckingbastard.com. After settling in to using it every day, today – the fifth day of using it – the thing went ‘clunk’ and stopped feeding data to the ‘trip computer’. Annoyingly it did this at four minutes [...]
If you’ve met me, you might’ve noticed that I’m a massive fat cunt. This has been the case for all of my life, and I’m mostly happy with it. It keeps me warm in winter and if I fall overboard on a boat I’ll float. What I’m so not happy about is my level of [...]
After a pleasingly brief period of unemployment (where I mostly applied for jobs online and watched The West Wing), I’ve managed to land myself a job with PickLive, who are doing cool and interesting things with live event pool betting. They’ve even announced it on their blog, which is kinda cool. I’m going to be [...]
Last year I decided to do something about being such a picky eater. What I did was drink orange juice. And it worked, I no longer dislike orange juice, and will tend to grab a bottle of it to drink with my breakfast when I’m out and about. At this year’s Ruby Conference I even [...]
I got to spend the first five months of this year working for an awesome start-up – Source Rail. The vagaries of start-up life mean that I’ve had to move on, and now I’m looking for another awesome gig. Since several people have identified me at meet-ups as ‘that swearing guy off of Twitter’, I’ve [...]
I can’t remember why we were discussing fetishes in the pub at Scottish Ruby Conference, but in an attempt to claim innocence (ha!) Ryan Stenhouse referred to the top hit on Google, which is Wikipedia’s definition: Fetishism, the attribution of religious or mystical qualities to inanimate objects That’s probably not the first definition that springs [...]
