Action for Children @ByteNight

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I’m a lucky, lucky bugger. I have a wonderful fiancée, great friends and colleagues, I live in a warm, dry place and have a fun job. I’m male and white, in a sexist, racist world. I have access to good healthcare, and pay almost nothing directly for the medicines I need. Chances are that most folk who read this blog share a lot of the same luck.

But I’ve always known that many people don’t have anything like so much luck, so when a good, slightly mad chance is thrown my way to do something for others, I’m happy to take it on.

So this Friday evening, I will be joining my colleagues Sally Smith – Edinburgh Napier University, Ben Paechter, Adrian Smales and others at Byte Night 2017, an IT sector initiative to raise both money and awareness of disadvantaged and homeless children with the Action for Children charity. You can read more about Action for Children here: https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk.  Continue reading →

Memories of ECIL 2017

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Disclaimer: this is my personal blog. It’s my digital stream of (un)consciousness, my on-line wearing of mountain-bike shoes with rainbow laces, lycra, colourful buffs (headscarfs) and whatever else I like, where I can be the aging and raging hippie that I really am, and where my vegan cyclopath tendency raises bidigital salutes to the nonsense that today’s world imposes on the vast majority.

OK, with that out of the way (along with admitting that I wear buffs and rainbow laces almost all the time), here’s my patchwork-zeitgeist of ECIL 2017. Patches are in roughly chronological order, and some are about specific individuals. You know who you are! Continue reading →

Eleven points: monsoon madness, Queensferry clarity, fear of flying

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So who else got soaked in last night’s downpour? I got more than slightly wet on the way home from Napier, then absolutely drenched on the way to spinning. The rain even got through my rubber wallies into my MTB shoes. I didn’t bother to change into road shoes for the class so I had dry footwear for cycling today. So all through the spin I could feel the water sloshing around my socks and turning my toes into prunes. And we got wet again on the way home. Continue reading →

Family misfortunes: Bruce- or system-error?

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Following on from this post…

Yesterday’s knock again my state-socialist tendances has been mollified by a pleasant but so far futile interaction with HMRC. My mother and I spoke with with a very pleasant HMRC helpdesk staffer last night (Thursday 7 September). Once my mother had given her permission for me to speak with HMRC about this issue, I tried yet again to register my mother for SA using the access code HMRC had sent her, while describing what I was doing to the HMRC staffer. Yet again this failed. The code had arrived in a letter dated 4 September Continue reading →