A friend asked me to give some advice to a second year chemical engineering student they had met at a networking event. What follows is a slightly edited version of the email I sent them.
Hi (name removed),
Your email address was passed on to me by (name removed) who …
Last night I donated blood. This was the first time in over a year.
This morning I did my usual circuits session in the gym. Just after the halfway point, I started to get a little dizzy. Then my vision started to go.
I can confidently say that I found …
Today I discovered an unexpected practical benefit from playing computer games as a child.
In many platform games, you had to get to a location that was being guarded by a bad guy. In some games it was not possible to kill or remove the bad guy, therefore the only …
I would like to thank Simon Drew, for producing The Practical Stoic Podcast. Simon has been producing three episodes a week and has over 200 episodes now. He makes a very clear and patient presentation of many aspects of modern stoicism including lots of advice.
If you are curious about …
As part of a budget deal, the Green party have persuaded the SNP to allow councils to introduce a workplace parking levy (WPL) that will charge employers for every parking space they provide for employees. Employers can then decide to either pay the levy themselves or to pass on the …
I was discussing Todo lists with my wife and we both have the same problem that we often put off a couple of tasks and have to copy them over onto the next list quite frequently. When looking at the type of tasks, we noticed a difference.
For the last few years I have been keeping my passwords within a password manager called passman. Development of passman has been limited recently and for a while it was blocking me upgrading my nextcloud instance.
As a result I am now begining to worry that passman may not be …
I spent the majority of today finishing up the user interface for a simple app I am building. I have probably spent two days in total building the UI, though the program doesn't actually do anything with the information yet.
I still have to do the 'hard' engineering bit with …
There is a phrase:
Only a bad workman blames his tools
What is less known is the second part:
Because a good workman has the correct tools to start with.
As part of my website rebranding, I decided to get some new business cards.
Previously I have used vista print but this time they just annoyed me with hidden shipping charges and lots of "offers" that meant that I couldn't tell if I was genuinely getting their best deal.
They …
Yesterday I mentioned one of my personal algorithms of life. To be honest, I had never considered it as such until I was writing about it but that is what it is.
And it isn't the only one. Thinking about it now, the there are lots of these algorithms I …
When driving to somewhere I don't know particularly well, I have a personal algorithm that helps me get to where I want to go, usually picking the best route. I usually try to know the route in general and when driving I have the car's built in satnav set up …
Someone has been in contact with me regarding the name of my series of talks: Disastrous Dinners. They have suggested that it may be insensitive and asked if another name might be more suitable. I understand the concern and I had discussed it with a few fellow iChemE members prior …
When reading a computer security focused blog, I came across a security checklist.
I spend a good while reviewing the recomendations in it and upgrading my security in certan places. While I wouldn't recomend all the actions (and haven't done them all myself), it is certanaly worth considering them all …
For years I have heard the phrase “computers only do what you tell them to do”. This is usually after someone complains that the computer did something silly and is intended to shift the blame back to the user for asking the wrong question.
While it is true that in …
To weeks tomorrow I attended my first lunchtime yoga session. The sessions were have been hosted at work during Tuesdays and Thursdays for a few years now but I only considered joining in at the end of last year1. I decided to join in mostly because after doing the …
Last week we rearranged the bedrooms in our house.
As I explained the changes to a friend, I mentioned that we no longer has a guest room and if anyone did want to stay, they would have to use the futon in the living room. I then remembered that this …
A birthday party
Running and shouting all day
Lots of fun and play
We are in the process of designing and building a new control room at the refinery. This will replace the building built in the 70s and the control system that has an user interface that doesn't look particularly different from the photographs of when it opened.
This is obviously a …
When looking up some information in the [ wiki, I came across their page on their MQTT server1 and the rules at the top of the page caught my eye:
- Do not use the MQTT network for evil.
- Do not annoy other lab users (especially with sound or lighting).
- Do …
Just a quick review of tonight's meeting. It went brilliantly.
We had 20 people for the talk and 14 stayed for dinner. I am really happy with the attendance and the atmosphere was great. Lots of socialising and discussing the talk itself, engineering in general and many other topics.
It …
I am spending some time this evening preparing for the first Disastrous Dinners talk that will be given tomorrow night. I believe that about 10 to 15 people have signed up. Not a massive number of people but hopefully a good number to encourage discussion and socialising after the talk …
Last week I wrote a post describing my job using simple words. While this was a fun exercise, it became obvious that writing using simple words and writing simply are very different things.
In this case, a "simple word" was defined as one of the top 1000 most commonly used …
Today has been a tiring but productive day of rearranging the bedrooms in our house. Both boys seem to be excited about their new room and I am also looking forward to the new arrangement.
The biggest advantage has however been that we have found lots of things that had …
Tonight's plans were slightly upset when this happened:
As I was trying to cycle onto and around a roundabout, my chain snapped leaving me effectively standing in the middle of a busy junction. What was worse was that there was no pedestrian pavement at that …
I have read lots of things in the last week talking about how we should write simpler and not to trust things that are written in a confusing way or using long words.
I know that I can be bad at this and so I would like to try and …
My son woke the other night night crying and very unhappy. When asked if he had a bad dream, he said no, he had had a good dream.
What was the problem then?
Now he was awake, the good dream was gone.
I can understand why he was upset.
Today I have added a search option to this site. I hadn't bothered before because I has always assumed Google 1 would be able to search the site better than a built in search. However in early December, I noticed that not every post was getting indexed, so searches could …
Last night, while I was cooking dinner, my phone died on me. There was no warning, there was plenty of battery but I turned the screen off, put it in my pocket and when I tried to use it again a couple of minutes later it was completely unresponsive.
I …
Firstly, apologies for the last minute planning here. The first Disastrous Dinners Event will be on the 15th of January (a week on Tuesday). The reason for trying to get it organised in such a short period of time is to consider with the 100 year anniversary of the event …
The rest of my family are dairy free and so we usually don’t have any cheese in the house. We have been experimenting with various vegan cheeses however I have found that the texture is just not right, particularly when they have been melted. Rather than putting up with …
Today was the first day back at nursery for the boys. The last few trips to nursery we used the car. As a result it was my first time cycling the boy home in several weeks.
Perhaps it was overindulgence over the holidays. Perhaps I didn't do enough other exercise …
Today was the first work day of the new year for myself. Lucky the place was mostly quiet and everyone else was catching up on their own work.
As a result I was able to hyper focus on several jobs and I got much more work done than I had …
I am told that in America, if you are to get two days off at Christmas, it is normal to be Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. In the UK, the two public holidays are Christmas Day and Boxing Day which makes more sense to me, the day of the celebration …
To celebrate the new year, I have decided to move this site to a new domain name, www.a14m.uk.
There are a few reasons for the name change:
After posting yesterday's post, I thought further about it and though I don't need to know much more about electricity, I do know more and want to learn more. I like learning, particularly about different subjects.
My background as a chemical engineer has given me a good understanding for what …
A fellow chemical engineer had the following electrical advice.
There are two things that you need to know about electricity:
- You cannot see it.
- It can kill you.
Everything is is for the electrical engineers to worry about.
I am previously read The Power of Habit: Why we do what we do and how to change by Charles Duhigg back in October. I had a thought while reading it but didn't write it down until now.
The book discusses changing peoples eating habits and in particular, changing …
Last year I was given a traditional safety razor as a present and I have been using it for the past year. My main reason for wanting to change to using the older style of razor was the environmental aspect. I didn't like using disposable razor heads. The mix of …
There was a few news stories earlier this month about Prof David Runciman, The head of politics at Cambridge University, had proposed giving children as young as 6 the vote.
This was in response to the debate about dropping the voting age from 18 to 16, something I support, but …
As a Christmas gift to each other, we have gotten ourselves an ooni3 pizza oven.
This afternoon we fired it up and gave it a test run. This involved assembling the oven, seasoning it (giving it a half hour blast at full heat), before letting …
Watching the kids play
Excited and shouting 'yay'
On this Christmas day
And all through the CCB1
Not a control engineer was fiddling
Not even me2.
This is one of those days for working offline, in the office and wherever possible, avoiding doing anything in the control room. Sure if something breaks, fixing it is the top priority. But the …
Each year, since moving back to Scotland, we have made a bunch of snickerdoodle cookies at Christmas time and given them to family and coworkers. One of the fun parts of handing them out is seeing people's reactions. While snickerdoodles are popular in the states, they are virtually unheard of …
Maybe not metaphorically, but considering we are past the winter solstice, we can start to enjoy more daylight again.
We should probably celebrate it in some way...
One of my colleagues was having trouble earlier today with modifying a tag and asked me to help. This tag had some custom code attached to it and he wanted to add another set of custom code. Whenever he tried linking the code to the tag, he kept getting an …
Today, I was attempting to tidy the house and my older son was doing what small children tend to do. At one point I thought that the room looked worse than when I had started.
Denise walked into the room when he said:
Look mummy, we made the place nearly …
Ken Perlin wrote a blog post yesterday about transcribing speech to text:
Yet converting speech to text, even when done perfectly, inevitably loses something. Even if the text you end up with is a faithful transcription of your words, it fails to capture your tone and intonation.
I wonder whether …
I am always amused when I check my spam folder to see lots of folk offering to get my site on the front page of Google and to guarantee more business if only I let them redesign my website.
The truth is that I am probably already over Optimised. Considering …
One of the kids was ill over the weekend and needed to be kept away from nursery. So rather than completely writing the day off, I setup my laptop as a remote workstation in the dining room. The child was kept entertained by the TV and the occasional interaction from …
