I’d love to claim that my desk isn’t always so chaotic and that much of this mess resulted from a recent shelf collapse1,
but it’s rarely much better than this.
But perhaps the most-valuable place I could reduce clutter would be… in my head!
Y’know… in here.
If you were to open up my head and look inside, what you’d see would probably look a little like my desk2: remnants of
dozens of half-finished or in-progress projects, all piled on top of one another in a chaotic muddle that’d take some kind of wacky radical mind to reverse-engineer.
Of course, some of the physical clutter in my life right now relates to the fact that we’re having our attics converted right now, and so everything that was formerly stored
in them (or otherwise would be in the way of the builders) is now stacked… well: here.
That’s not to say I’m disorganised (although I am at least some of the time!), but it does mean that I’m perhaps more-prone to distraction and context-switching than I might prefer.
Compared to times in my life that I’ve been less “clutter-brained”, I find it harder to gain and maintain focus.
“It turns out your inner peace was inside you all along, sandwiched between a murder mystery game concept and an idea for a social
network for dogs. You couldn’t find it because this half-baked idea for a content management system was on top of it.” Also, does
this image seem familiar to you?
One of the goals I’m going to be proposing to my coach this year will include an examination of how I clutter my thinking (and whether my
environmental clutter is a reflection of the same), and what I can do to get better at channelling my creativity into fewer things at once3.
But perhaps I could stand to do a little decluttering in my physical space, too.
Footnotes
1 True, but that was a while back and I haven’t found time to put it up again, so I oughta
take some responsibility.
2 This is, of course, a metaphor. If you actually open up my head you’ll see, like, brains
and gunk. Also, it will invalidate my warranty, so don’t do it.
3 Note that I said at once. I still want to keep those bajillion projects on a
go. I just want to be more organised and disciplined about compartmentalising them so my energy’s less-divided when I’m trying to focus on a single thing for a while!
One for joy, two for joy, three for joy, four for joy… basically any natural number of magpies brings me joy.
They’re smart (among the smartest corvids, who are already among the smartest birds).
They’re curious. They’re sociable. And they’re ever so pretty.
They’re common enough that you can see them pretty-much anywhere.
They steal things. They solve puzzles. They’re just awesome.
This is photo of a magpie riding a pig through the snow, which is objectively fantastic. No further explanation is required, nor given.
Also, did you know where their name comes from? It’s really cool:
In Medieval Latin, they’re called pica. It probably comes from Greek kitta, meaning “false appetite” and possibly related to the birds’ propensity for theft,
and/or from a presumed PIE1 root meaning “pointed” and referring to its beak shape.
In Old French, this became pie. They’re still called la pie in French today. Old English took this and also used pie.
By the 17th century, there came a fashion in English slang to give birds common names.
Sometimes the common name died out, such as with Old English wrenna which became wren and was extended to Jenny wren, which you’ll still hear nowadays
but mostly people just say wren.
Sometimes the original name disappeared, like with Old English ruddock2 which became
redbreast and was extended to Robin redbreast from which we get the modern name robin (although again, you’ll still sometimes hear robin
reabreast).
Magpie, though, retains both parts!3Mag in this case is short for
Margaret, a name historically associated with idle chatter4.
So we get pica > pie > Maggie pie > Mag pie > magpie! Amazing!
This magpie’s looking pretty chill. Also pretty. Also chill.
I probably have a soft spot for animals with distinct black-and-white colouration – other favourite animals might include the plains zebra, European badger, black-and-white ruffed
lemur, Malayan tapir, Holstein cattle, Atlantic puffin… – but the magpie’s the best of them. It hits the sweet spot in all those characteristics listed above, and it’s just a wonderful
year-around presence in my part of the world.
Footnotes
1 It’s somewhat confusing writing about the PIE roots of the word pie…
2Ruddock shares a root with “ruddy”, which is frankly a better description of
the colour of a robin’s breast than “red”.
3 Another example of a bird which gained a common name and retained both that and its
previous name is the jackdaw.
4 Reflective, perhaps, of the long bursts of “kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-kcha-” chattering sounds
magpies make to assert themselves. The RSPB
have a great recording if you don’t know what I’m talking about – you’ll recognise the sound when you hear it! – but they also make a load of other vocalisations in the wild and can even learn to imitate human speech!
What a curious question! For me, it’s perhaps best divided into public and private communication, for which I use very different media:
Public
I’ve written before about how this site – my blog – is the centre of my digital “ecosystem”. And while the technical details may have changed
since that post was published, the fundamentals have not: everything about my public communication revolves around this, right here.
When I vlog, the primary/first version is published here; secondary copies might appear e.g. on my YouTube
channel for visibility but the “official” version remains here
Content gets syndicated elsewhere via a variety of mechanisms, for visibility2.
This is what I’m talking about.
Private
For private communication online, I perhaps mostly use the following (in approximate order of volume):
Slack: we use Slack at Automattic; we use Slack at Three Rings; we’ve
even got a “household” instance running for The Green!3
WhatsApp: the UI‘s annoying (but improving), but its the go-to communications platform of my of my friends and
family, so it’s a big part of my online communications strategy.4
Email: Good old-fashioned email5. I prefer
to encrypt, or at least sign, my email: sure, PGP/GPG‘s not
perfect6, but it’s better than, y’know, not securing your email at
all.
Discord: I’m in a couple of Discord servers, but the only one I pay any reasonable amount of attention to is the Geohashing one.
Various videoconferencing tools including Google Meet, Zoom, and Around. Sometimes you’ve just gotta get (slightly more) face-to-face.
Signal: I feel like everybody’s on WhatsApp now, and the Signal app got annoying when it stopped being able to not only send but even receive SMS messages (which aren’t technically Internet messages, usually), but I still send/receive a few Signal messages in a typical month.
That’s a very different set of tech stacks than I use in my “public” communication!
Footnotes
1 My thinking is, at least in part: I’ve seen platforms come and go, and my blog’s
outlived them. I’ve seen platforms change their policies or technology in ways that undermine the content I put on them, but the stuff on my blog remains under my control and I can
“fix” it if I wish. Owning your data is awesome, although I perhaps do it to a
more-extreme extent than many.
2 I’ve used to joke that I syndicate content to e.g. Facebook to support readers who
haven’t learned yet to use a feed reader. I used to, and I still do, too.
3 A great thing about having a “personal” Slack installation is that you can hook up your
own integrations and bots to e.g. remind you to bring the milk in.
4 I’ve been experimenting with Texts to centralise
several of my other platforms; I’m not convinced by it yet, but I love the thinking! Long ago, I used to love using Pidgin for simultaneous access to
IRC, ICQ, MSN Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo! Messenger and all that jazz, so I fully approve of the concept.
5 Okay, not actually old-fashioned because I’m not suggesting you use
UUCP to send mail to protonmail!danq!dan or DECnet to deliver to danq.me::dan or something!
6 Most of the metadata including sender, recipient, and in most cases even
subject is not encrypted.
A childhood move
Shortly after starting primary school my family and I moved from Aberdeen, Scotland to the North-West of England. At my young age, long car journeys – such as those we’d had to make
to view prospective new houses – always seemed interminably boring, but this one was unusually full of excitement and anticipation. The car was filled to the brim with everything we
needed most-imminently to start our new lives5, while the removals lorry followed a
full day behind us with everything less-essential6.
I’m sure that to my parents it was incredibly stressful, but for me it was the beginning of an amazing voyage into the unknown.
To this house. In this car.
Live on Earth
Back in 1999 I bought tickets for myself and two friends for Craig Charles’ appearance in Aberystwyth as part of his Live on
Earth tour. My two friends shared a birthday at around the date of the show and had expressed an interest in visiting me, so this seemed like a perfect opportunity. Unfortunately
I hadn’t realised that at that very moment one of them was preparing to have their birthday party… 240 miles away in London. In the end all three of us (plus a fourth friend who
volunteered to be and overnight/early morning post-nightclub driver) attended both events back to back! A particular highlight came
at around 4am we returned from a London nightclub to the suburb where we’d left the car to discover it was boxed in by some inconsiderate parking: we were stuck! So we gathered some
strong-looking fellow partygoers… and carried the culprit’s car out of the way7. By
that point we decided to go one step further and get back at its owner by moving their car around the corner from where they’d parked it. I reflected on parts of this anecdote back in 2010.
The winner
At somewhere between 500 and 600 road miles each way, perhaps the single longest road journey I’ve ever made without an overnight break was to attend a
wedding.
The wedding was of my friends Kit and Fi, and took place a long, long way up into Scotland.
At the time I (and a few other wedding guests) lived on the West coast of Wales. The journey options between the two might be characterised as follows:
the fastest option: a train, followed by a ludicrously expensive plane, followed by a taxi
the public transport option: about 16 hours of travel via a variety of circuitous train routes, but at least you get to sleep some of the way
drive along a hundred miles of picturesque narrow roads, then three hundred of boring motorways, then another hundred and fifty of picturesque narrow roads
Guess which approach this idiot went for?
Despite having just graduated, I was still living very-much on a student-grade budget. I wasn’t confident that we could afford both the travel
to and from the wedding and more than a single night’s accommodation at the other end.
But there were four of us who wanted to attend: me, my partner Claire, and our friends Bryn and Paul. Two of the four were qualified to drive and could be insured on Claire’s
car8. This provided an opportunity:
we’d make the entire 11-or-so-hour journey by car, with a pair of people sleeping in the back while the other pair drove or navigated!
It was long, and it was arduous, but we chatted and we sang and we saw a frankly ludicrous amount of the A9 trunk road and we made it to and from what was a wonderful wedding on our
shoestring budget. It’s almost a shame that the party was so good that the memories of the road trip itself pale, or else this might be a better anecdote! But altogether, entirely a
worthwhile, if crazy, exercise.
2 Also, wow: thanks to staying up late with my friend John drinking and mucking about with the baby grand piano in the lobby of the hotel we’re staying at, I might be first to publish a post for today’s Bloganuary!
3 Strangely, all three of the four journeys I’ve considered seem to involve Scotland.
Which I suppose shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, given its distance from many of the other places I’ve lived and of course its size (and sometimes-sparse road network).
4 Okay, probably not for the entire journey, but I’m certain it must’ve felt like it.
5 Our cargo included several cats who almost-immediately escaped from their cardboard
enclosures and vomited throughout the vehicle.
6 This included, for example, our beds: we spent our first night in our new house
camped together in sleeping bags on the floor of what would later become my bedroom, which only added to the sense of adventure in the whole enterprise.
7 It was, fortunately, only a light vehicle, plus our designated driver was at this point
so pumped-up on energy drinks he might have been able to lift it by himself!
8 It wasn’t a big car, and in hindsight cramming four people into it for such a
long journey might not have been the most-comfortable choice!
Every pizza is beautiful. Except for the half of this one that has huge chongin’ black olives on (eww!).
Do you know what I love about pizza? Everything. Every little thing1.
First up, it’s a bread product. Bread is magical. You take flour, water, a pinch of salt, and a certain other magical ingredient, knead it, let it rest, knock it back, and bake it, and
you end up with food. The magical ingredient is yeast, and it’s a tiny living organism that eats carbohydrates and excretes a lot of carbon dioxide and a little bit of alcohol.
Humans use both, but whether you’re brewing beer or baking bread the process feels somewhat mystical and otherworldly.
But it’s not like rising a loaf nor is it like finishing a flatbread. Pizza dough is risen, but kept thin to act as a base for everything else. And already there’s such
variety: do you spin it out in a classic thin Neapolitan style to get those deliciously crispy leopard-print cornicione bites? Do you roll it out thick to hold a maximum depth
of tomato sauce and other toppings when you pile it high, per the Chicago tradition? Do you go somewhere in-between? Or perhaps do something different entirely like a calzone
or panzarotto? There’s no wrong answer, but already so many options.
Pizza is cooked fast: the relatively thin surface absorbs heat quickly, and you keep your oven hot, baking the bread and heating the toppings at the same time. If you’re
feeling fancy and fun then you can add some extras as it cooks. Crack an egg into the centre, perhaps, or drizzle some chilli oil across the entire thing. Or keep it plain and simple
and let the flavours combine as the dish cooks. Whatever you do, you’ll be enjoying delicious hot food within minutes of putting it into the oven: the cooking-speed to deliciousness
ratio is perhaps the highest of any savoury food.
Many pizzas2
include tomato sauce and cheese as basic toppings, which is already genius: both are rich in naturally-occurring monosodium glutamate, which coupled with the rich fats and saltiness
in the cheese and the sweetness and mild acidity of the tomato makes them frightfully moreish even before you’d added your favourite meats or vegetables.
Pizza is incredibly versatile, not just in the diversity of ways in which you might prepare and serve it, but also in the ways in which you can eat it. Sit at a plate with a
knife and fork. Divide it into slices and pick up one at a time (with optional “New York fold” if it’s otherwise too limp). Carry a large slice on-the-go, al taglio. Fold it into
a portafoglio so you don’t risk losing a single jalapeño off your hot-and-spicy meal, if you fancy. There’s no wrong answer.
If my favourite meal is pizza3, my second-favourite has to be leftover pizza. Because it reheats easily and makes a great next-morning snack. Or can be enjoyed cold,
hours or days after the fact. It’s even suitable for parbaking and chilling or freezing, making it an excellent convenience food4.
It’s widely produced in a variety of styles (and qualities) in restaurants and takeaways wherever you go, and its convenient shape means that it can be boxed and stacked with little
more help than, perhaps, one of those little plastic “tables” that stop the centre of the cardboard box sagging onto it.
Yes, please. This, please. Now, please.
So yeah, I’ll take a slice to go with mozzarella, peppers and red onion for my snack, please.
Footnotes
1 If you know me well, you’re probably well-aware of my love of pizza, although you might
previously have seen it articulated so thoroughly.
2#NotAllPizzas! You don’t have to feel constrained by the
bread-plus-tomato-plus-cheese-plus-other stuff paradigm. Swap out the tomato sauce for barbecue sauce on the base of a meaty pizza with a spicy tang or omit it entirely for a
pizza bianca. Replace the cheese or remove it entirely for a vegan or lactose-free alternative. Or dispense with both entirely and spread pesto on your base, topped with
roasted vegetables! The sky’s the limit!
4 Obviously I prefer a lovingly-crafted hand-stretched pizza, freshly-made under ideal
circumstances. But pizza is so good that it’s still usually perfectly acceptable even when it’s mass-produced at economy scale and frozen for later consumption, which is more
than can be said for many foods.
“Tank sleepy. But Tank listen your idea in case it tasty idea.”
I’ve tried to explain to our occasionally-anxious dog that, for example, the dog-and-human shaped blobs at the far end of the field includes a canine with whom she’s friendly and
playful. She can’t tell who they are because her long-distance vision’s not as good as mine1, and we’re too far away for her to be able to smell her
friend.
If this were a human meetup and I wasn’t sure who I’d be meeting, I’d look it up online, read the attendees’ names and see their photos, and be reassured. That’s exactly what I
do if I’m feeling nervous about a speaking engagement: I look up the other speakers who’ll be there, so I know I can introduce myself to people before or after me. Or if I’m attending a
work meet-up with new people: I find their intranet profiles and find out who my new-to-me colleagues are.
“Oh! Is you! Hurrah!” /buttsniffing intensifies/
Wouldn’t it be great if I could “show” my dog who she was going to meet, in smell-form.
I imagine a USB-C accessory you can attach to your computer or phone which can analyse and produce dogs’ unique scents, storing
and transmitting their unique fingerprint in a digital form. Your subscription to the service would cover the rental of the accessory plus refills of the requisite chemicals, and a
profile for your pooch on the Web-based service.
Now, you could “show” your dog who you were going to go and meet, by smell. Just look up the profile of the playmate you’re off to see, hold the device to your pupper’s nose,
and let them get a whiff of their furry buddy even before you get there. Dogs do pretty well at pattern-matching, and it won’t take them long to learn that your magical device
is a predictor of where they’re headed to, and it’ll be an effective anxiety-reducer.
Seeking investors for a genuinely terrible crazy business idea. Photo courtesy SHVETS production.
The only question is what to call my social-network-for-dogs. Facebutt? Pupper? HoundsReunited???
Footnotes
1 Plus: I get contextual clues like seeing which car the creature and its owner got out
of.
Making a conscious daily effort to write more has been… challenging. I feel like my thoughts come out half-finished, like I’m writing too trivially, without sufficient
structure, or even too-personally. But I’m loving the challenge!
Anyway – happy birthday Matt! Forty is a great age, highly recommended. Hope you love it.
Describe an item you were incredibly attached to as a youth. What became of it?
I really struggled with this question: I couldn’t think of anything that I was especially attached to as a kid.
Our kids have very strong attachments to a knitted blanket from her babyhood and to a stuffed toy elephant he’s slept with since he was very young, respectively.
Maybe it was just that I couldn’t think of anything; that the memory was lost to time and age.
So I did the obvious thing… and reached out to my mum.
“Muuuuum… where’s my… whatever I used to be attached to? Also… what was it?”
It turns out that apparently my recollection is correct: I really didn’t have any significant attachments to toys or anything like them. I didn’t ever have any kind of “special thing” I
slept with. I recall in my later childhood being surprised to learn that some people did have such things: like all children, I’d internalised my experience of
the world as being representative of the general state of things!
Why, I wonder, are some children different than others and get this kind of youthful attachment to something? Is it genetic?1 Is it memetic,
perhaps a behaviour we subconsciously reinforce in our children because we think it’s “normal”?
Being attached to napping with a dog doesn’t count, right? (‘cos I’ve definitely done that at least once, although for obvious reasons I’ve only managed to take photos of
others doing the same.)
I’ll bet that some clever psychologist has done some research into this already2, but that sounds like a
different day’s exploration.
But more seriously, my mission – if I have such a thing, is:
Today’s my first day back at work after an decent length break (if you exclude the Friday after Christmas, when I did a little, I’ve
been away from my day job for over a fortnight), and I’ve got a lot to catch up on even before I kick off running a training course I’ve never delivered before, so that’s all
you get for today. But so long as my Bloganuary streak (which now almost makes it onto my leaderboard!)
continues, I’m counting this as a win.
What are your thoughts on the concept of living a very long life?
Today’s my 43rd birthday. Based on the current best statistics available for my age and country, I might expect to live about the same amount of time again: I’m literally about half-way
through my anticipated life, today.1
Naturally, that’s the kind of shocking revelation that can make a person wish for an extended lifespan. Especially if, y’know, you read Andrew’s book on the subject and figured that, excitingly, we’re on the cusp of some meaningful life extension technologies!
I’ll be leaning heavily on the only book I’ve read on the subject for this one.
My very first thought when I read Andrew’s thoughts on lifespan extension was exactly the kind of knee-jerk panic response he tries to assuage with his free bonus chapter. He spends a while
explaining how he’s not just talking about expending lifespan but healthspan, and so the need healthcare resources that are used to treat those in old-age wouldn’t increase
dramatically as a result of lifespan increase, but that’s not the bit that worries me. My concern is that lifespan extension technologies will be unevenly distributed, and the
(richer) societies that get them first are those same societies whose (richer) lifestyle has the greater negative impact on the Earth’s capacity to support human life.2
Andrew anticipates this concern and does some back-of-napkin maths to suggest that the increase in population doesn’t make too big an impact:
In this ‘worst’ case, the population in 2050 would be 11.3 billion—16% larger than had we not defeated ageing.
Is that a lot? I don’t think so—I’d happily work 16% harder to solve environmental problems if it meant no more suffering from old age.
This seems to me to be overly-optimistic:
The Earth doesn’t care whether or not you’re happy to work 16% harder to solve environmental problems if that extra effort isn’t possible (there’s necessarily an
upper limit to how much change we can actually effect).
16% extra population = 16% extra “work” to save them implies a linear relationship between the two that simply doesn’t exist.
And that you’re willing to give 16% more doesn’t matter a jot if most of the richest people on the planet don’t share that ideal.
Fortunately, I’m reassured by the fact that – as Andrew points out – change is unlikely to happen fast. That means that the existing existential threat of climate change
remains a bigger and more-significant issue than potential future overpopulation does!
In short: while I’m hoping I’ll live happily and healthily to say 120, I don’t think I’m ready for the rest of the world to all suddenly start doing so too! But I think there are bigger
worries in the meantime. I don’t fancy my chances of living long enough to find out.
Gosh, that’s a gloomy note for a birthday, isn’t it? I’d better get up and go do something cheerier to mark the day!
This post brought to you from my bed at the forest chalet I’ve spent the weekend in!
Footnotes
1 Assuming I don’t die of something before them, of course. Falling off a cliff isn’t a heritable condition, is it? ‘Cos there’s a family
history of it, and I’ve always found myself affected by the influence of gravity, which I believe might be a precursor to falling off things.
2 Fun fact: just last month I threw together a little JavaScript simulator to illustrate how even with no population growth (a “replacement rate” of one
child per adult) a population grows while its life expectancy grows, which some people find unintuitive.
Well that sounds like a question lifted right off an Oblique
Strategies deck if ever I heard one!
I occasionally aspire to something-closer-to-veganism. Given that my vegetarianism (which is nowadays a compromise position1 of “no meat on weekdays,
no beef or lamb at all”) comes primarily from a place of environmental concern: a Western meat-eating diet is vastly less-efficient in terms of energy conversion, water usage, and
carbon footprint than a vegetarian or vegan diet.
In an ideal world, with more willpower, I’d be mostly-vegan. I’d eat free range eggs produced by my own chickens, because keeping your own chickens offsets the food miles by
enough to make them highly-sustainable. I’d eat honey, because honestly anything we can do to encourage more commercial beekeeping is a good thing as human civilisation depends on pollinators. But I’d drop all dairy
from my diet.
I suppose I’m not that far off, yet. Maybe this year I can try switching-in a little more vegan “cheese” into the rotation.
If you had a freeway billboard, what would it say?
I always loved it when a book or exam paper or similar contained a page whose only content was the words “this space intentionally left blank”. It tickles a particular part of me: the
part that wonders how “keep of the grass” signs get there without anybody treading on the grass, or laughs whenever somebody says something like “nobody drives in Oxford, there’s too
much traffic.”
This is not the famous painting, The Treachery of Images.
Would a nostalgic person reimplement this set-up but in a modern browser? Why yes, yes I would.
Thinking about the future
But I’m also keenly-focussed on the future. I apply a hacker mindset to every new toy that comes my way, asking not “what does it do?” but “what can it be made to do?”. I’ve
spent over a decade writing about the future of
(tele)working, which faces new challenges today
unlike any before. I’m much more-cautious than I was in my youth about jumping on every new tech bandwagon2, but I still try to keep abreast and
ahead of developments in my field.
But I also necessarily find myself thinking about the future of our world: the future that our children will grow up in. It’s a scary time, but I’m sure you don’t need me to spell that
out for you!
Either way: a real mixture of thinking about the past and the future. It’s possible that I neglect the present?
Footnotes
1 By the way: did you know that much of my blog is accessible over finger (finger
@danq.me), Gopher (gopher://danq.me), and Gemini (gemini://danq.me). Grab yourself a copy of Lagrange
or your favourite smolweb browser and see for yourself!
2 Exactly how many new JavaScript frameworks can you learn each week, anyway?
What topical timing, given that it’ll be my birthday in four days!
My birthday is slightly overshadowed by the proximity to it of our eldest child’s birthday, but we can still find enough overlap of interest to do some fun things. Here we are last
year, for example, at a magic-themed cocktail-making
workshop (with non-alcoholic recipes for the kids, of course).
Of the things I have least but treasure most, perhaps the biggest is time. Between work, volunteering, and childcare, I often find myself rushing to cram-in any of the diversity of “play” activities I engage in.1
I always feel particularly guilty if I step away to do “me things” that put me out of reach, because I know that while I’m off having fun, my absence necessarily means that
somebody else has to be the one to break up whatever child squabble is happening right now2. It feels particularly
extravagant to, for example, spend a weekend in pursuit of a distant geohash point or two3.
A fancy dinner in a hotel bar in the middle of a two-day geohashing expedition across the Midlands, as far from work and home responsibilities as I can manage? Yes please!
So one of the best gifts I ever received was for my birthday the year before last, when Ruth gave me “a weekend off”4, affording me the opportunity to do
exactly that. I picked some dates and she, JTA, and the kids vanished, leaving me free to spend a few days hacking my way
from Herefordshire to somewhere near Birmingham in what turned out to be the
worst floods of the year. It was delightful.5
Most people can’t give me “time”: it doesn’t grow on trees, and I haven’t found a place to order it online. It’s not even always practical to help me reclaim my own time by taking fixed
timesinks off my to-do list6. But for those
that can, it’s a great gift that I really appreciate.
It’s my birthday on Monday, if anybody wants to volunteer for childminding duties at any point. Just sayin’. 😅
2 Ours can be a particularly squabbly pair, and really know how to push one another’s
buttons to escalate a fight!
3 Unless I were to take the kids with me: then if feels fine, but then I’ve got a
different problem to deal with! The dog’s enough of a handful when you’re out traipsing through a bog in the rain!
5 I think that Ruth feels that her gift to me on my 41st birthday was tacky, perhaps
because for her it was a “fallback”: what she came up with after failing to buy a more-conventional gift. But seriously: a scheduled weekend to disconnect from everything
else in my life was an especially well-received gift.
6 Not least because I’m such a control freak that some of the biggest timesinks in my life
are things I would struggle to delegate or even accept help with!
I feel like this question might be a little US-centric? Or at least, not UK-friendly!
The question doesn’t translate well because of transatlantic differences in our higher education systems (even after I skimmed a guide to higher education across the pond).
Let’s try instead enumerating the education establishments I’ve attended post-school. There’ve been a few!
Preston College
I’m the leftmost of the unwashed nerdy louts in this collection of unwashed nerdy louts: Preston College’s Computing A-Level graduates of the 1997-1999 class.
Nowadays young adults are required to be enrolled in education or training until the age of 18, but that wasn’t the case when I finished secondary school at 16. Because my school didn’t yet offer a “sixth form” (education for 16-18 year
olds), I registered with Preston College to study A-Levels in Computing, Maths, Psychology, and General Studies.
The first of these choices reflected my intention to go on to study Computer Science at University1.
Psychology was chosen out of personal interest, and General Studies was a filler to round-out my programme.
Then known as the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, this became my next academic destination as I pursued an undergraduate degree in Computer Science with Software Engineering.
This photo, showing off my admission certificate in my just-moved-into study bedroom, first appeared in a then-private post in October 1999 (after I’d had time to
get the film developed and scan the print!2).
Originally intending to spend five years doing a masters degree, I later dialled-back my plans and left with only a bachelors degree (although I still somehow spent five years
getting it). This was not-least because I was much more-interested in implementing Three Rings than in studying, although I at least
eventually managed to get away with writing
and handing in a dissertation based on my work on the
project3 and was awarded a degree and got to wear a silly hat and everything.
Of course, the real adventure at Aberystwyth was the friends I made along the way. Including this lot!
Since then, I’ve used my Software Engineering degree for… almost nothing. I started working at SmartData before I’d even completed it; the
Bodleian required that I had one but didn’t care what the subject was, and I’m not certain that Automattic even asked. But I still appreciate some of the theoretical grounding it gave me, which helps me when I learn new
concepts to this day4.
Aylesbury College
Almost a decade later, the academic bug bit me again and I decided
to study towards a foundation degree in Counselling & Psychotherapy! I figured that it I were going to have one degree that I never use, I might as well have two of them,
right?
Among this cheery group I stood out for a couple of reasons, but perhaps the most-interesting was that I was the only member of my class who didn’t intend to use their new
qualification in a practical capacity.
The academic parts5
of the work could be done remotely, but I needed to zip back and forth to Aylesbury on Monday evenings for several years for the practical parts.
The Open University
Almost another decade passed then I decided it was time to break into academia a further time. This time, I decided to build on my existing knowledge from my first degree plus
the subsequent experience and qualifications I’d gained in ethical hacking and penetration testing, and decided to go for a masters degree in Information Security and Forensics!
I even managed to do some original research for my dissertation,
although it’s terribly uninteresting because all it possibly managed to prove was the null hypothesis.
Smug mode activated as I prepare to add another degree certificate to the wall.
Something I’d discovered having been a student in my teens, in my 20s, in my 30s, and in my 40s… is that it gets harder! Whereas in my 20s I could put in an overnight cram session and
ace an exam, in my 40s I absolutely needed to spend the time studying and revising over many weeks before information would become concrete in my mind!6 It almost feels
like it’s a physical effort to shunt things into my brain, where once it was near-effortlessly easy.
People have occasionally suggested that I might push my field(s) even further and do a doctorate someday. I don’t think that’s for me. A masters in a subdiscipline was plenty
narrow-enough a field for my interests: I’d far rather study something new.
Maybe there’s another degree in my sometime, someday, but it’s probably a bachelors!
Footnotes
1 I figured that an A-Level in Maths would be essential for admission to a Computer
Science degree, but it very definitely wasn’t, though it helped out in other ways.
2 The ubiquity of digital photography nowadays makes it easy to forget that snapping a
picture to share with friends used to be really hard work.
3 Little did I know that 20 years later Three Rings would still be going strong,
now supporting ~60,000 volunteers in half a dozen countries!
4 While I love and am defensive of self-taught programmers, and feel that
bootcamp-plus-experience is absolutely sufficient for many individuals to excel in my industry, there are certain topics – like compiler theory, data structures and algorithms, growth
rates of function complexity, etc. – that are just better to learn in an academic setting, and which in turn can help bootstrap you every time you need to learn a new
programming language or paradigm. Not to mention the benefit of “learning how to learn”, for which university can be great. It’s a bloody expensive way to get those skills, especially
nowadays, though!
