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Day 200 of the 101 Goals in 1001 days

tom — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 19:13:21 +0000

Well, as per my meta-goal 101 – Do 100 day updates, here is the Day 200 update.

Not much movement really….

The Good:-
66 – Via Ferrata in Italy
I go on Friday, cant wait.

82 – Visit Egypt
I go in October for 2 weeks, 1 week cruise – 1 week sun and as much archaeology as I can get!

94 – Go to Edinburgh festival
Will fly over for a weekend in Aug, let me know if you are interested in joining

28 – Drive Offroad
Going back to Dubai in December when it cools off, will be driving a mates Hummer in the desert.

75 – Watch SICP, do exercises from book
Did half when visiting Germany from Den Haag a few weeks ago, mind bending but wonderful stuff.

72 – Read “Winning Ways”
Inspired by Martin Gardners death, I did half of the first book when I had some downtime in Manchester. First bit of new Maths in ages and it felt great. See Games of No Chance for more fun.

8 – Read all the VSIs
Read Vikings, Human Prehistory, Memory, Archaeology, Evolution, maybe more – i need to get tactical and create a master list.

13 – Release 303 books on bookcrossing.com
Tasked my long suffering mother with labeling them all, need to teach her how to register them then release them. Still need to sort out the Crossing Zone in Liverpool too.

48 – Create a backblaze storage pod
They are getting made soon, due on the 28th

The Bad:-
5 – Lose 2 stone
Got half way Jan/Feb, might have taken a step back living away again… Correctable though!

19 – Blog on average once a week
Way off, need to blog furiously to catch up.

The Almost Had:-
22 – Spend 3 months in another country
Spent two in Holland (Den Haag / The Hague) working for ING.

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I am alive

tom — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 12:48:58 +0000

Well, it has been an interesting few months, in brief:

Went to Libya to work for a big telco
Went to Oklahoma for a mates wedding then drove 2000 miles (or rather, made my girlfriend drive 2000 miles as I lost my driving licence…), visited 5 states and two national parks to see ancestral pueblo people sites
Moved to Den Haag (The Hague) for 2 months to work on INGs Next-Gen data center
About to move to Camden for the next bit of work

Not much movement on 101 goals, planned Egypt in October and Via Ferrata next week. Behind on learning goals though have done half of SICP in one mind bending train journey!

I kind of feel my life has been on hold the last 6 weeks I have been in Holland and am really looking forward to being back in the UK (though perhaps could have done with more of a break in between)

Expect more jollys to get planned before the end of the year (VMworld, Citrix Synergy, War Horse, Japan and Edinburgh all sounding fun at the moment), perhaps I’ll find time to blog about some of the cool shit at the NGDC and my US trip.

Tom

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101 Goals – 100 Day Update

tom — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 20:41:01 +0000

It’s a bit late but I have just gone through and numbered my 101 goals in 1001 days. As per meta-goal 101, here are success criteria for each.

Health
1 – Teetotalitarianism for 3 months
Don’t drink for 3 months
COMPLETED (Jan, Feb, March – cheated a bit and drank while out of the country. They are my goals though so my rules )

2 – Cheeseless for 3 month
No cheese for 3 months
COMPLETED (Jan, Feb, March)

3 – Do a marathon

4 – Do a triathlon

5 – Lose 2 stone
In progress, lost 1st during teetotalitarianism

6 – Attend martial arts classes for 3 months

Literature
7 – Write an artice for Plus new writers

8 – Read all the VSIs
A wonderful series from Oxford University Press, introductions to many different topics. There are ~200 so I need to read one every five days or so, I am a bit behind at the moment

9 – Read Godel Escher Bach
I’ve started it 3 times but never got to the end, read I am a strange loop recently and made me want to return to this intellectual tour de force and finish it..

10 – Write book reviews for each book I read
Up to date so far.

11 – Reread all Dennett books
“all” = the trilogy of Darwins Dangerous Idea, Conciousness Explained and Freedom Evolves
Just finished Freedom Evolves, reviewed DDI here.

12 – Read all PG Wodehouse
There are ~100, so need to do 1 every 10 days or so, a bit behind at the moment.

13 – Release 303 books on bookcrossing.com
Started, may also have started a crossing zone in Liverpool

14 – Read a short story for librivox

15 – Proofread for Project Guttenburg
COMPLETED

16 – Send Dan Dennett a letter
17 – Send Richard Dawkins a letter
Both among my favourite authors and really shaped my view on the world. I want to write them a letter of thanks.

18 – Read epic literature
Not decided on the exact list yet.

Personal
19 – Blog on average once a week
On track

20 – Organise a big bash for my 30th
Going to be called TomFest, should be a good buzz.

21 – Read GTD
Need to get organised at some point, maybe this will help

22 – Spend 3 months in another country

23 – Organise all my DVDs

Jolly
24 – Swim with sharks

25 – Paraglide

26 – Scuba

27 – Skydive

28 – Drive Offroad

29 – Do a banger rally
Something like this

30 – Have a track day

31 – Hire the whole of Salvos Salumeria for an evening

32 – Bungee Jump

33 – Safari

34 – Vinyard tour

35 – Visit 5 Michelin 3* restaurants

36 – See Northern Lights

37 – Visit porto

38 – Take dad to an opera

39 – Take Mum, Dad and Carrie to the Welsh Mountain Zoo

40 – Do 1000 things in London
This may get dropped but I want to program all the items in the 1000 things to do in London book into a scheduling program and try and do them in as little time as possible (will need a fair bit of cash but I recon it would be a great adventure). Ill publish the itinery online and my location in realtime and give myself over to the route finding algorithm for as long as it takes.

41 – Do a standup comedy course

42 – Visit Japan

Work
43 – Get CCEE

44 – Get CCNP

45 – Get MCITP – Enterprise Admin

46 – Get VCDX

47 – Say to a recruiter “I dont work MonthName” and turn down work
Nearly did this in March but did a week in Dubai.

48 – Create a Backblaze storage pod
Work progressing nicely at UKblazers

49 – Work only 100 days in a year
Ambitious but worth a try, fits well with the goal of staying in another country for 3 months.

50 – Move 10 people to FreeAgent
My accountancy software, really good. Got 3 people on their at the moment.

51 – Investigate Visa situation for Australia
52 – Investigate Visa situation for US
Would be nice to work in Aus or the US, need to see what the situation is like for contractors from the UK.

Crafty
53 – Make Jam
COMPLETED (well I did Lemon Curd)

54 – Grow mushrooms

55 – Paint a water colour

56 – Make beer

57 – Make wine

58 – Cook a 4 course meal for 20 friends

59 – Do a photography course

Outdoors
60 – Hike on average once a month
Behind as I twisted my ankle in the Czech Republic, have trips planned for may, june, july

61 – Do a UK long distance path

62 – Do a big hike in Europe

63 – Attend Nehru Institute of Mountaineering
This is the course I had to retreat from last year as I was not fit enough.

64 – Climb a continental highest mountain
Prob means Aconcagua or Kilimanjaro

65 – Volunteer for the Mountain Bothies Association
Great society maintaining free shelters in Scotland

66 – Via Ferratain Italy
Went last year but want to go again.

67 – Do another alpine 4000m peak
Did Allalinhorn a few years ago. I think I have it in me to do another.

Learning
68 – Complete Pimsleur Spanish
Was going to put “Learn Spanish” but wanted it to be less vague. There are 90 parts and I’m at 15 now.

69 – Learn to dance
Hehe. Not sure what style I’m going to attempt to learn, fairly sure I’ll never be great at it but it might be fun to try.

70 – Learn to play golf

71 – Learn 10 magic tricks

72 – Read “Winning Ways”
A wonderful book on Game Theory in 4 volumes.

Programming
73 – Make a Dots and Boxes program
A university friend made a program to play the game and won a computer Olympiad with it, I’d like to get something together myself

74 – Read AI: A Modern Approach
3rd Edition of the leading AI text.

75 – Watch SICP, do exercises from book
Famous course, until very recently MITs into to programming, uses the scheme dialect of LISP

76 – Do on average 1 Project Euler problem per week
I am behind with this but should be able to catch up.

77 – Complete “Real World Haskell”

78 – Learn to use Emacs

Charity
79 – Raise £5005 for charity

80 – Talk about Free Software at a school

Culture
81 – Watch all TTC Art history DVDs
11 of them, easily done.

82 – Visit Egypt

83 – Revisit Louvre

84 – Revisit Met Museum in New York

85 – Visit Pergamon Museum in Berlin
I am really excited about the Ishtar Gate

86 – Give Carrie a British Museum Tour
COMPLETED

87 – Go on wine tasting course

88 – Go to the theatre on average once a month
Well and truely on track, watching 2 things this week alone.

89 – See a whole run at the theatre by the lake

90 – See all world heritage sites in the UK
There are 28, so about 1 per month.

91 – Memorise 10 poems
Ive not selected the 10 yet but will probably include:
* On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer
* Jabberwocky
* She Walks in Beauty
* Inclusiveness
* Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
* If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso
* The Raven
* The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

92 – Read “The Ode Less Travelled“, do the exercises (but not share them!)
A fun intro to poetry that does not hide the jargon, I blogged about it a while a go but got distracted and never finished the book or did the exercises. I promise not to share any of the poems I write!

93 – Go to Melbourne Comedy Festival

94 – Go to Edinburgh festival

Wealth
95 – Pay off all credit cards
On track to be debt free at day 1001

96 – Let loans run course and dont get any more
Done

Metagoals
97 – Be 1/3 through in 2010
A bit behind.

98 – Have done 2/3 by day 666

99 – Have a completion party

100 – Set success criteria / progression metrics for each goal
COMPLETED

101 – Do 100 day updates
This is the first!

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Making Lemon Curd

tom — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 16:09:27 +0000

I was just over at a good friends in Leeds and mentioned my 101 goals and needing to tick some off and if he could help me make some jam sometime.

We got straight down to making lemon curd (not a jam, but my goals – my rules) and it was seriously yummer, recipe below.

Lemon Curd

4 medium-sized lemons
100g (4oz) butter
1/2kg (1lb) sugar
4 beaten eggs

Scrub Lemons, grate rinds, squeeze out juice
Place juice and rind in double saucepan over low heat and slowly add sugar and butter.
Cook, stirring, until all the butter and sugar melt
Add eggs and cook, stirring, untill the curd is thick enough to coat a spoon.
Pour into small jars and seal with waxed disks or paraffin wax.
Cover and store in cupboard for one month, fridge for 3 months, freezer for 9 months.

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Cultural Adventures

tom — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 13:14:44 +0000

The last two weekends I have traveled across to London from Faversham to see friends and visit a few museums.

During the weekend of 9/10th I met up with my sister in the British Museum and showed her around (one of my 101 goals ticked off in the process). I was very pleased to finally see the flood tablets I had read about a lot (in brief – a pre-biblical flood narrative dating back to Sumeria that is part of the epic of Gilgamesh that the Genesis writers seem to have borrowed from). Also mid last year a metal-detectorist found the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, it has been named “The Staffordshire Horde” and is on display there while they catalog it.

On the Sunday we went to the National Gallery and saw The Sacred Made Real a wonderful display of Spanish polychromatic wooden sculpture. It is the best exhibit I have seen in ages and finishes this weekend, go and see it if you can. It is interesting to see sculpture in colour as we are so used to classical and neo-classical sculpture being the very austere white. Interestingly greco-roman sculpture would originally have been painted anyway so the neo-classicists were harking back to something that never really existed.

The next weekend I stayed in Richmond for a friends birthday and we popped to the V&A on saturday and well just wow. I only spent an hour there but it is amazing that London has (at least) 3 really world class museums, it is on par with the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum Of Art – really fabulous, I will return soon.

On the Sunday I went and looked at the Beatles to Bowie exhibition of 60′s photography, which was pretty good, then returned to Faversham.

All in all good fun in the greatest city in the world.

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Building A Backblaze Storage Pod

tom — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 12:41:38 +0000

[edit]I have since set up a separate site as I have found a company in the UK to fabricate the cases and will be trialing different software stacks on top, please check out UKblazers[/edit]

A while ago I saw the Backblaze storage pod and was impressed.

Like many others I thought:

I want one
Wouldn’t it work great with ZFS
The hardware sucks

Building one

I used to make and sell storage servers using Linux a while ago with media streaming software and easy setup (before all the ready-rolled ones came out) so the software side is not a major challenge. Backblaze have released a template for the cases and a list of other components and coincidentally a good friend is a Mechanical Design Engineer and can work on it for me. The cost for the cases drops precipitously if you buy in bulk and he is looking at making it able to be stored flat and easily assembled by folding edges together so I will take the plunge and buy a load, if anyone wants to get hold of some, please get in touch.

ZFS

As soon as you see so many disks in a case like that, it’s hard not to think of Sun’s Thumper and ZFS.

I’ve blogged about ZFS before and given talks on it. With so many disks to fail (either noisily or silently) data loss is inevitable (and worse – you may not even be alerted), ZFS would solve this (or at least ensure you know about it). BackBlaze use custom application logic to work around this, using TomCat and HTTPS.

It’s Not Highly Available

A chap at Sun has a critique here that is totally spot on and he makes a few great points about subtle changes to Sun’s design to accommodate vibration, noise and electromagnetic radiation. In so many ways the hardware is inadequate and does not have the uptime characteristics of a device in Suns range. That said though an individual device from Sun is not as HA as, say, an EMC SAN (with mirrored write cache, dual SPs etc) as it too relies mostly on commodity hardware. For FiveNines availability you need to decide what you are doing to protect against device failure anyway, the BackBlaze devices just fail faster – that’s your trade-off.

It wont be fast

That is largely a feature of the disks and the controllers; you could get a better motherboard, disks and faster controllers, perhaps eschew the port multipliers too, if performance is a problem. A very cool new feature of ZFS (L2ARC / Hybrid Storage Pools) allows for using SSD as a second level cache, that would help. In linux dm-cache (or here) could probably achieve something similar.

How can you make it HA?

This is really another blog (and a few weeks work hacking out the ideas), but I can think of several ways of doing what BackBlaze do in their software stack to export files (via NFS, SMB or other protocol) or block devices (ATAoE, iSCSI, NBD etc) in a robust manner.

I have ordered some of the port multipliers, got my friend working on the case and will buy the sundry bits over the next few days.

This is one of my101 goals

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101 Goals in 1001 Days

tom — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 17:01:28 +0000

I have decided on a kind of hyper-resolution for the new year, 101 goals in 1001 days.
I have a mindmap of the ones I have settled on so far and have started working on some of them already.

To follow (allowing me to tick off some of the meta-goals):

Success criteria for each
Divide them up into “Sustained Effort”, “1-off” and “Requires Break” to make sure I don’t overextend myself. I plan on taking roughly quarterly 1 or 2 week breaks to try and do these tasks. For the sustained ones I need progress metrics, am I on track to complete in the time given?

The actual 101 things!
Need to settle on the actual 101 things, most are on there but it’s still a bit fluid.

As one of my goals is to blog more, you should be hearing more from me in 2010.

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