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Grass Storm - 2012 Back in 2012 we stayed in a cottage down near Ringstead on the South coast of England. The walk from the cottage to the beach took us along the edge of a working farm. One afternoon I turned and looked back, the fields were a cloud of dust kicked up by a tractor raking dried grass. The hay fever sufferer in me winces at the sight of this image but I have no memory of hay fever being an issue on that trip.
We couldn’t have asked for a better start to the half term week. We spent the weekend camping with friends just outside London. I’m a lightweight camper, and I’m incredibly stubborn in insisting that we have to be able to carry everything we bring, no car. Packing was fun. Oscar and I have been camping several times before but this was the first time we went as a family. It was really nice to see both Ethan and Alicia embrace the experience.
I aim to improve my Chinese reading through regular practice. This video represents a point on that journey. Text: Friend’s Tea - Chapter 3 (山，在身后了) Source: Du Chinese Level: Elementary
The Band, Bristol - 2003 Today’s throwback Thursday takes me back to life in my second year at Bristol, we’d moved out of student halls into a shared flat. We used to use the roof in lieu of a garden. My housemate Pedro and his friend Julius were starting a band and in need of a cover photo for their first album. As the proud owner of a digital camera, I took this photo for them.
I’ve been asked to talk about AI more often than I’d like. I usually like to speak from a place of personal experience. Being able to relate a challenge to my own experience in a similar context is one of the things that I feel I do really well. But AI is too new, the restrictions on use of AI in a work context are a barrier, and personal reactions to AI are often raw and often impassioned. I’m AI curious but not AI experienced. I don’t think this craze has been around long enough for the real…
A friend recently asked me about photography. “When you go out with your camera… has there ever been a moment that stayed with you more than the photograph itself? Something you saw or felt that couldn’t really be captured, but remained with you anyway?” Thinking about this question got me wondering about what it is that I enjoy about photography. What follows is an edited version of the answer that I gave.
The Drakensberg Mountains, South Africa - 2000 Back in 2000 I took a trip to South Africa with some school friends. We carried everything we needed on our backs and left technology behind. No watches, no music, no phones. I took a film camera with me. I remember how it took several days for us to forget all sense of artificial rhythm and embrace the world around us. We moved by daylight, rested during the midday heat, camped when the ground allowed, and washed when we came across water.
a mark made on film, a moment in time, unique We’ve spent a lot of time trying to perfect the art of replication. We capture and reproduce ever increasing bitrates, colour depth, frame rates. We grade our colours and match them to paper in an effort to faithfully reproduce an original.
I used to travel every week for work. It was never a struggle to pack, there was always a bag read; enough clothes, a laptop, a book, and a myriad of charging cables. Monday morning would arrive and I’d grab the bag and leave for the station. This week was the opposite. I was in Edinburgh for a couple of days and had no idea what to pack. I left home, only to realise I’d left my card behind.
I aim to improve my Chinese reading through regular practice. This video represents a point on that journey. Text: Friend’s Tea - Chapter 2 (他们是谁) Source: Du Chinese Level: Elementary
2026 W19 Most countries have the 1st May as a national holiday. For some reason we push the holiday to the first Monday of the month. We kicked off the short week by going to see Oscar perform at the Seeds of Change concert in County Hall in London. It was an absolute delight to watch him perform and we were really lucky to have the extended family join us for the event.
I aim to improve my Chinese reading through regular practice. This video represents a point on that journey. Text: Friend’s Tea - Chapter 1 (小绿的家) Source: Du Chinese Level: Elementary
I celebrated my birthday this week. My birthday itself was Zoom heavy but we did get to enjoy a meal together as a family. Overall the week has been gloriously sunny, not too hot and that’s made it really hard not to be generally positive. Now that we’ve started to spend more time in the garden it is painfully obvious that our lawn needs a lot of work. The ground is harsh, weeds are starting to dominate and bald patches are starting to emerge. Tips for lawn care (including improving the soil)…
In a bit of a change this week, I ended up travelling into town three times. A combination of work and social events brought back memories of the daily commute, life in the city. If I’m honest, I do occasionally miss it. As I left Bank station on Thursday evening there was an audible din from the surrounding pubs as people flocked to the streets to enjoy the last few hours of sunshine.
Nanjing & Yangzhou This was my first trip to Nanjing and Yangzhou. My wife was working in Nanjing for a couple of days and we thought it would be a good chance to visit somewhere new. The bulk of my photos this trip focus on the boys and attempt to capture how their relationship is developing and how they experience China. Presented here are a few photos where I turned the camera away from the family and tried to tell the story of my own experience.
Beautiful People Will Ruin Your Life, The Wombats 🎧 Joy Next Door, The Maine 🎧 If That Makes Sense, Spacey Jane 🎧 Transatlanticism, Death Cab for Cutie 🎧 Bittersweet 16, Mckenna Grace 🎧 Plans, Death Cab for Cutie 🎧
I’m really glad I had the camera on me this week. It was a difficult week. Oscar was off school, Alicia was in Bologna for a few days. Difficult news at work meant that things all felt a bit much. Sleep suffered. I’m glad I had the camera because, looking back over the week, it was filled with happy moments. Oscar and I have really enjoyed playing Monopoly Deal over coffee before starting the day. Ethan got to celebrate his birthday all over again, this time in the UK. We were all glad to have…
After a recent incident involving a missing delivery, Amazon sent me an email asking for help in following up with the courier company. I replied only to receive the following response moments later. We received your email to Amazon Customer Service. For security reasons, we can only process emails from addresses that meet certain email security standards. This helps protect all our customers. Here’s how you can reach us immediately:
My wife recorded several hours of audio during the Bologna Book Fair this week. We’d agreed that she’d send me the audio each evening and I’d run it through local transcription to give her an editable text version of the conversations. When she tried to send me the files, she was presented with the following error. too-large.png 附件太长 你要从此附件中选择一个较短的剪辑来 发送吗？ Attachment too long Would you like to select a shorter clip from this attachment to send?
Jet-lag is bad enough but jet-lag with children is a nightmare. Poor Ethan has been so confused over the last couple of days. He ignored a suggestion to sleep as it wasn’t dark outside, then we found him fast asleep on the sofa still in his shoes and jacket. I carried him up to bed and just left him to sleep. Around 4am this morning he got up and, realising he was dressed already, put his pyjamas on and tried to put himself to bed. As Alicia left for an early flight, he said she couldn’t go o...
Over on her Substack my friend Alicia writes about the quiet, often overlooked parts of being human. Her recent article Why You Can’t Change Anyone resonates with my own experiences supporting people in their tech careers. I’ve always felt uncomfortable at the thought of advising others. Throughout my 13 years in consulting, the idea of offering advice from a position of ignorance always felt odd. I do agree that an outside perspective can be useful but all too often there is an expectation t...
This week has been a delight. We arrived back in Beijing after a weeks travelling and enjoyed our first rest day. We took the boys to the local park, the universal appeal of swings and slides keeping them entertained for far longer than expected. Ethan took great pleasure in trying to use the outdoor exercise equipment. Last Monday we took the train to Nanjing. Alicia was speaking at an event on Tuesday and we came along for the trip. This meant I had the boys to myself for Tuesday. I gave th...
This has been a whirlwind of a week. Monday morning, I was frantically bouncing between Zoom calls, trying to figure out what I could get done in a few days. I had to work this week. By Sunday I was in Beijing with the family preparing for a trip to Nanjing and Yangzhou. Somewhere in the middle of that, we secured tickets to EMF Camp in July, Oscar sat his piano exam, and finished school for the Easter break. Oh, and I finished the Kew 10km race hours before heading to the airport.
It started innocently enough. “I’ve ordered us a couple of converters from English to Chinese. They will arrive by the time we land in Beijing.” We are heading away and we couldn’t find our international plug converters. Both of us have packed them away somewhere that seemed sensible at the time but long since forgotten. Too late to pick something up before we left, Alicia ordered a couple to be delivered on arrival in Beijing.
I feel I’ve always known that things on the internet will get discovered eventually. Many years ago, I took my first foray into self-hosting. A discarded Windows PC became a Linux host, the Linux machine became a local network server allowing multiple machines to be online at once. And with the dedicated phone line, it kept the connection alive even while we slept. As my curiosity grew, I began hosting all the things; a simple website, a photo gallery, an email server, a shared calendar, and ...
Work has been motivationally challenging this week. With my ability to effect change largely dependent on my powers of persuasion or inspiration, I’m sometimes forced to accept that some weeks priorities do not align. To keep myself useful, and sane, I’ve been trying to help others where possible; demos, environments, debugging or just acting as a sounding board. It was good to get in to the city and see colleagues in person on Wednesday. I’m not sure I needed to stay out until the early hour...
I missed the opportunity to publish a weekly recap last week. It was Thursday by the time I sat down to write, and by that point it felt like I’d missed the window. At work last week I continued the theme of meeting application developers who use our platform. The feedback we’ve been given is interesting. We’re forever being told what developers want, developers need and how developers need to be measured. It has been quite refreshing to hear from development teams directly what they see as t...
