I’m very excited to announce that I have been accepted as a Fellow of BCS – The Chartered Institute for IT! I came fairly late in my career to the concept of professional registration (at least in my field), and it was only really JBA’s encouragement and support that hooked me into it. However very […]
Equipment Enough chairs for every player, arranged in a wide horseshoe (more like a circle with a gap). Good for around 10 (but fewer or more are also ok) Aim The first chair to the right of the gap is the “first” chair. The last chair going round clockwise is the “last” chair. The aim […]
Really simple game this. Equipment Blindfolds (or sleep masks). Reasonably large room. How to play Split the players up into groups of 2 or 3 Assign each group an animal which makes a distinctive noise (cow, dog, cat, sheep, lion, etc) The players put on the blindfolds, and the leaders then turn them around and […]
I had my first proper scam/fraud phone call last week, and it one level it was really very impressive. My mobile rang, and the conversation went like this: Them: “Hello is that James?” Me: “Can I ask who’s calling?” Them: “This is Starling Bank fraud department – we’ve noticed some unusual activity on your card […]
My blogging has been ad hoc for a while now – mainly because I’ve being doing other things with my time, but also because a lot of the things I would have written about need careful curation before posting, the internet and the church being what they are. But one thing I have done, but […]
As previously mentioned I finished 2024’s Advent of Code. But I wasn’t sure that I really understood the solution to Day 21, so the purpose of this post is explain it to myself! Fair warning: This is a long and technical post! Day 21 Day 21 was a beautiful problem, but an absolute stinker in […]
Well, for the second time in my life, I “50 starred” last year’s Advent of Code. By the way, if you’re anyway connected with computing, and haven’t seen Eric Wastl’s keynote presentation Advent of Code, behind the scenes I highly recommended it. Anyway, it was mainly plain sailing this year, except for 2 stinkers which […]
Fair to say that, based on the last week or so, neither my son nor I are going to make our millions on crypto. ETH is down 10% DOGE is down 13% SUI is down 8% What is quite interesting is just how unstable the currency is, which I kind of already knew. A few […]
Two or three years ago I switched my current account over to Starling Bank, and it has revolutionised the way I manage my money. What initially drew me to Starling was the the ethical policies, 0% fees overseas usage (ATMs and paying by card), and – yes – because of the shiny fintech challenger bank […]
I made a few tweaks to my website over the weekend – chief one being to decrease the static page refresh time and update packages, but ran into all sorts of problems trying to build the Docker image. Error: Could not load the “sharp” module using the linuxmusl-arm runtime Possible solutions: – Manually install libvips […]