sneeu.com

The Answer

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 12:08:26 +0000

My co-worker Chris, made the following observation. I suspect it was meant to be rhetorical, but I was curious:

you can follow dictionary.com on twitter... what for? A word a day for the rest of your life?? How far do you think we'd get? — Chris Shennan

Chris and I are both proud Scots, and were both born in 1982. For a Scottish male born in 1982, the average life expectancy is (a somewhat shocking) 69.1 years.

Combine that with the number of entries in the Oxford English Dictionary:

the Oxford English Dictionary [contains] approximately 301,100 main entries — Wikipedia

Sprinkle it with some Python magic:

import datetime

birth = datetime.datetime(1982, 5, 19)
age = datetime.datetime.now() - birth

life_expectancy = datetime.timedelta(days=(69.1 * 365 + 69.1 / 4))

print float((life_expectancy - age).days) / 301100

And we get the following morbid answer: if I started to follow the dictionary.com Twitter account today, and died on schedule, I'd get through 5.06% of the O.E.D.

Minimal

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:48:49 +0000

Phone; Cards; Keys; Gum; Wallet by sneeu

I hate clutter. It's visual noise. It's distracting. Something I'm trying to do is reduce the clutter I own, carry, live, and work with. These are some of the more noticeable things I've changed, or had changed for me, so far.

Keys

I once carried two keys for work, two car keys, two flat keys, and a key-ring. I now carry three keys: two flat keys, and a key for Ro's car.

Phone

When I dropped my iPhone I ended up with the cheapest phone O2 had at the time: the Samsung E2100. I miss Tweetie, and the "feel" of holding an iPhone, but I don't miss the permanent distraction it becomes.

Computer

I'm lucky enough to be able to declutter both my home, and work computers. I keep my desktop, dock, and menu-bar as simple as possible. I use software with familiar, or simple interfaces. I prefer Spotify to iTunes; Safari to Firefox; Twitterrific to Tweetie. The list is endless.

I also recently discovered Geek Tool, which allows me to display the time and date on top of my desktop background. And I built MNMLNws, which removes my need to visit the BBC News website. I've started to use "t" to manage my tasks.

Feeds, Twitter & email

I use a really minimal NewNewsWire, and subscribe to only 20 feeds: mostly friends, and a few niche blogs. Other things I might be interested in will find me: either via email or Twitter.

I only ever send plain text email.

Clothes

I can usually be seen wearing Cons, a black American Apparel t-shirt, and jeans, most likely Superdry.

Tea Making Tips

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 08:29:19 +0000

Some great war-time advice about making tea. Very similar to George Orwell's essay, A Nice Cup of Tea.

A notable weekend (in beer)

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:38:57 +0000

Tyskie by mannikon.

Yesterday I spent most of my day with my best-man-to-be, Keith. We met Steve for a burger and an IPA at the Cambridge Bar, then saw District 9 (trailer) with a Guinness at the Cameo, met Joe and Maddie for soft drinks at Favorit, my cousin Scott for an Ossian at Doctors, and finally met Ro from the train and, with Liza, went for a Thai curry with a Singha.

Today has been less boozy: some required chores, met Ro's cousin Andy and his girlfriend for lunch at Diner 7 (somewhere we've been meaning to go since we moved to Leith), the ritual Sunday visit to Asda, and then a few hours to myself reading Programming Scala by Venkat Subramaniam, while listening to Pavement's Crooked Rain Crooked Rain (Spotify), and a somewhat cheeky Tyskie.

And Ro's home with the promise of tapas.

Essential Mac Software

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:30:02 +0000

My life would be a lot more difficult if it wasn't for these things:

1password, Aperture, Airfoil, AppZapper, Base, Billings, Caffeine, click2flash, Delicious Library, Dropbox, Flickr Uploader, git, Keynote, LittleSnapper, NetNewsWire, Numbers, Pages, Parallels, Pixelmator, Python, S3Hub, Skype, Spotify, TextMate, Things, and Tweetie.