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Archive for the ‘staying in’ Category

Inaccurate quotations

Posted in staying in, tagged , , , , , , , on 21/12/2013| Leave a Comment »

It can be hard work trying to be scrupulously honest and fair. Words can be tricky little blighters, too. Perhaps it’s better just to make things up wholesale.

In that spirit, here are some interesting quotes.
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What to do in the face of an apocalypse

Posted in staying in, tagged , , , , on 16/08/2013| Leave a Comment »

The other day I saw a rather alarming report produced by MoneyWeek magazine, entitled The End of Britain, predicting an imminent financial apocalypse. The claim was simple: over the past few decades the level of debt in the UK (private, corporate and government) had ballooned; that the only reason that this appeared sustainable was that interest rates were unusually low at the moment; and that as soon as they rose it would be curtains for Britain.
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How I got into programming

Posted in juvenilia, staying in, tagged , , , , on 28/07/2013| Leave a Comment »

The other day someone asked me how I got into programming. This was an interview question. In retrospect it’s a surprise that no-one has asked me this before. The next time I have cause to interview a programmer, I’ll be sure to ask them the same thing.

My first degree involved a certain amount of programming, but it didn’t occur to me until quite late that I might have a knack for it. Other people on the course had computers of their own, and had been programming for years. I didn’t, and hadn’t.

Well, that’s not quite true. I’d had some encounters when younger, which I can illustrate with some photos I took yesterday at the newly opened Cambridge home of the Centre for Computing History.
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Edward Snowden’s LinkedIn Profile

Posted in staying in, tagged , , on 29/06/2013| Leave a Comment »

Call me suspicious, but I’d hazard a guess that this might not be genuine.

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Upgrading Ubuntu

Posted in staying in, tagged , , , , , on 08/06/2013| Leave a Comment »

I’ve recently started doing a bit of work for a non-profit IT organization. Submitting a bug-fix turned out to involve some yak shaving that I really can’t be bothered to describe, which gave rise to this:

ubuntu_upgrade

I knew there was a reason I’d been avoiding upgrading my Ubuntu installation. (I mean, apart from the obvious one.)

For what it’s worth, I think the upper button probably said something like “Show details”, since clicking caused a text pane (also containing a large number of squares) to appear. The lower button presumably said “OK”.

Once upgraded I ran into other trouble of various kinds. Fortunately, this was a virtual machine, so I could just rollback to a previous state. Also, there’s more than one way to shave a yak.

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