thattommyhall.com

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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Posted by tom under 101 & Life | 1 Comment »

I have been meaning to blog for ages about a site I use called Goodreads. It is really excellent, I signed up ages ago and cant remember exactly how I found it but I think it might have been a Rails app. Anyway, it is a fairly simple idea, log what books you read (or want to), rate them and share reviews with others, I am on there as thattommyhall. What convinced me to use it was the really stellar monthly emails with interviews with authors and picks of books with a certain theme.

I have been playing with my new HTC Hero and there is a Google Android app that can scan books and add them to the (easilly overlooked) My Library section of Google Books. While the app is good, there is no feeling of community there really. Orkut does not seem to have taken off and they released Wave today but I dont know if they can really get a feeling of community in their apps. I love the stuff they put out, use gmail and docs in particular pretty much constantly but think facebook, flickr and lots of other sites somehow seem to get more of a communtity vibe, perhaps it’s even the google branding – it all looks the same.

Anyway, I have things to do today, if anyone gets an invite to Wave and wants to send me one, please do.

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It’s been ages since I blogged as I have been mad busy in work though a lot has happened recently.

I have:

• Left thebigword
• Packed up my house
• Sold/Gave away most of my possessions (keeping only books and my PC, as my friend Ben said “proves you are principally concerned with knowledge”)
• Left Leeds
• Gone to India
• Returned (earlier than planned but refreshed and excited about the future)
• Set up a limited company to go contracting
• Started plotting a move to London
• Begun making big lifestyle changes – drinking less, eating better and training for the Paris Marathon, a triathlon and a return to India for some Hardcore Mountaineering next year

All is well in TomLand, expect more posts now I’m not so sillybusy!

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Last weekend I went down to London again for a Christmas jolly with some great old uni friends, it was a lovely weekend, good wholesome fun.

On the Saturday I went to see the Wallace Collection while some girlies shopped on Kensington Highstreet (where the sales are apparently excellent but I’m not sure I could have tolerated a moment). There was an Osbert Lancaster exhibit there that was great, alongside the permanent collection which is excellent. I had never heard of him before but hes is definitely worth investigating, the blurb on the wall described him as a dandy aesthete, something I have always considered myself.

In the nighttime we watched the 1951 Scrooge with Alastair Sim in an incredible private cinema, ate nice food, got a little squiffy (port was involved you will be surprised to learn)

On the Sunday we went to see the Babylon exhibit in the British Museum and I returned to Leeds feeling tired but ace. Babylon has appeared in art of all forms, not least a few Jazz numbers.

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I was in London a few weeks ago and saw the wonderful exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts.

I have been interested in Byzantine history since a historian friend at university described how they were essentially the eastern Roman empire, called themselves Romans, spoke Greek, were Christian and survived well into the Middle Ages. As ever, wikipedia has a good introduction to the topic.

Off to London again next weekend, going to see the Babylon exhibit at the British Museum and have a lovely Christmas celebration with some good old friends.

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I went a few weeks ago to see BodyWorlds at the Museum of Science and Industry (mosi) in Manchester.

I have only just had chance to get the pics off my phone and am amazed at how well they came out.

   
All one body, look at the shared foot.

This was the highlight for me, what incredible musculature.

This is amazing, enough features remain with just the blood vessels that you could probably recognise him if you knew him in life.

 
Either a real life visible human or a macabre newtons cradle.

It was a great day out.

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Posted by tom under Life | 1 Comment »

Went here with a friend, pretty yum. 50% off makes it great value too.

http://www.felicini.co.uk/voucher/felicini_voucher.pdf

Expect an update soon on why my brute-forceing below was plain dumb rather than simply naive.

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As some of you may know I am unusually interested in filesystems. After sending John a link about HAMMER, a new FreeBSD clustered FS and joking about starting a tomFS project, his reply offered some help deciding on features it should have and marketing it.

tomfs can process a huge number of operations in parallel, just not necessarily the operations it should be processing, and it might get bored with some of them and forget about them sometimes.

tomfs stores redundant copies of anything it detects as documentaries or spoken word.

tomfs is very easy to port – a couple of bottles should do.

Cracked me up.

PS: Only perhaps 5 of my friends would get this, but I know at least 3 of them read this so no bother.

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