I had a message from a friend of mine. Let’s call her Amy (names changed for privacy). Amy has a friend not-called Bea and Bea has a 4-year-old daughter, Charlie.  Charlie has recently been diagnosed with Leukaemia.  Charlie has just started chemotherapy and her hair has started to fall out.

Amy knows that my wonderful wife, Sally, is a dab hand with a pair of knitting needles. So Amy asked if Sally could knit a hat for Charlie.

But Sally is mum to our 8-week-old son, and barely has time to make a cup of tea, let alone knit.  It’s very much life-one-handed here at the moment!

So, I put a call out on Twitter.  I have a few creative followers and was pretty sure someone would be up to the challenge.

The response was amazing! I mean, I know things have gone way more viral, but I had a mass of re-tweets, new followers, and, of course, offers of hand-knitted hats.  The first within about two minutes from the generous and creative Jennifer Begg (@livefreerange).

The internet is AMAZING!

Enigmatic AND cool in a robot babygro!

It’s been a while. But with good reason.

If you follow me on Twitter or are friends on Facebook then you will know that we are now a family of three.  Our baby, Isaac, arrived on 1st December and has been our primary occupation for the last 5 weeks.

This post is a bit of an explanation about why you’ve not “seen” much of Isaac.

Sally and I both use social media a lot so you may think that it would be entirely natural for us to keep some detailed online records of the pregnancy, birth (well, not the birth, but the immediate time after), and early days with our boy.

BUT…our interest in social media actually swings us the other way.  We appreciate the highly public, potentially insecure, and increasingly commercial nature of social media and we’ve taken the line that we want Isaac to have a substantial amount of choice about what is published about him online.

We find it embarassing enough when our parents bring out the box of baby photos.  As far as possible we don’t want Isaac to have all his embarrassing newborn and childhood days already online for the world to see.

So, for now, we are not publicly posting lots of photos and videos of him.

It’s a far-from-simple decision because:

• We’ve really enjoyed seeing the children of friends and family of ours grow up through photos and videos, mostly posted on Facebook.
• We’re really very proud of our little boy, he’s a very cute little kid, and we love showing him off.
• We have made some really good friends that we mostly interact with through the medium of social media.

But we also have other friends who’ve taken the more private route and I don’t find we miss what isn’t there.

That’s not entirely the end of the decision though.  We value technology and its ability to store and present information.  So we do have a private space online for close friends and family to keep up to date with Isaac’s latest news and photos.

If you know us well then there are other ways in which you will get to see Isaac as he grows up, if not in person (which, I can tell you, is by FAR the best way).

If you REALLY want to see some photos then drop me a line and we’ll see if we can send some by more private means.

Or, just take my word for it. He’s an amazing little man with a face from Sally’s side of the family and Ross’ big hands and feet.  He has lots of funny facial expressions and a growing vocabulary of little noises.

And we love him to bits.

I cannot tell you what a gaff it’s been to reinstate this light after having our ceiling re-plastered. I think this was the fifth attempt. Failures I recall are:

1. Not cutting a hole for the rose.
2. Running out of arm strength because I was too stupid to remove the glass bowls.
3. Wiring it wrong.
4. Not having long enough screws to reach the joists through the new, thicker plaster layer.

And this wasn’t even the thing that got me electrocuted…that’s a WHOLE other story!!!

Photographically, an unusual angle can turn a relatively simple object into a thing of beauty. Different angles gave different exposures. Here’s some different views:

I have an idea brewing which applies ideas from breast feeding to getting more people cycling. Who's intrigued?

November 8, 2011 4:35 pm via TweetList ProReplyRetweetFavorite

@magicroundabout

Ross Wintle

And…it turns out, several people were intrigued.  So I ought to explain myself in full.

The National Childbirth Trust

Yeah, yeah, you all know, we’re having a baby (real soon!) right.

We decided, after some good feedback from friends and family, to go on the National Childbirth Trust’s ante-natal class.  This is worthy of a post of its own, but in general was very good.

One of the sessions was dedicated to breastfeeding.  We won’t mention the fact that I got to wear lipstick.  We WILL mention the fact that it was run by a knowledgeable woman who obviously cared greatly about the welfare of women and babies at what can be a very stressful time.  She said “if you have any problems, call me any time, we can give you help and I can come around and help you work out what’s going wrong and how you might be able to make things easier” – or words to that effect.

And it’s true. We have her number. We can call. She will help. She reinforced the fact: “call me, I want to help”. The course tutor reinforced the fact “call her, she wants to help”.

What a fantastic service! And she, and the team of breastfeeding counsellors in Swindon (and, I believe, around the country) are 100% voluntary.

So What’s Breastfeeding Got To Do With Cycling?

I was impressed by this. Very impressed. And it got me thinking.  Here’s someone who:

• passionately believes that a particular activity is good
• understands that that activity isn’t always simple/easy
• longs to help others take up and sustain that activity

I’m like that.  I’m like that about cycling.  Many of the regular readers of this blog are like that about cycling too.

And so I find myself thinking, what if we had “Cycling Counsellors”?

What if there were people you could call and ask questions like:

• I’m thinking of buying a bike, what sort of bike should I get?
• How can I easily get from A to B on my bicycle – I don’t know the safest/quickest way
• What simple safety checks should I do to my bike every now and then? How hard are they? Can I do them myself?
• My tyre’s flat/chain’s come off/handlebars wobble/brakes aren’t very good, what should I do?

Why Not?

I mostly had very positive responses to this idea. I think it’s a good one. But I, myself have questions about it, and some people pointed out some useful things.

It’s all online!

There’s masses of books, internet forums, blogs, Twitter accounts, bike shops anyway. Don’t these provide that service?

Yes, to some extent they do. And, in particular, there’s LOADS of good information online.

But despite reading lots of books, articles, blogs, and so on, about birth, parenting, and breastfeeding, Sally and I still found the one-to-one, practical, visual stuff in the NCT course massively valuable. And exploring some of the issues and difficulties with other, real people has been really important.

I think there’s a lot to be said for personal, local knowledge. My experience of riding in London is testimony to this. As is Town Mouse’s trip through Newcastle.

Surely someone else is doing it already?

This is a great question – and one of mine! But I don’t think they are. Councils do personal travel planning, explaining to people their travel options. CTC have local groups, but, from what I understand, they’re mostly about social rides and for already-experienced cyclists (though I’m sure novices would be welcome too). Sustrans have rangers who look after paths, and maintain the national cycle network. And I’ve heard of Bike Buddy things where you can get someone to show you a route for your commute.

But there’s no centrally co-ordinated, trained, recognised means of doing such a thing. Is there?! (Please comment if you know something I don’t).

I’m sure it would be great to get CTC, Sustrans and local councils to take up this idea. But, to my knowledge, no one’s doing it yet.

Is it needed/wanted?

Who would take up such a service? How would they find out about it? Wouldn’t people abuse it as a way to get cheap bike maintenance?

I don’t really know the answers to these questions. It’s just an embryonic idea. It would be great to tie in to personal travel planning projects that councils might be doing and to other local cycle/transport projects that are going on. But…hmm…needs thought.

What are you going to do about it.

Ah, it’s just a flash-in-the-pan idea. I’ll forget about it in a few days time. And besides, I’m having a baby any day now.

I dunno. What do you think? Is there mileage in this? Or is the notion of a nationally co-ordinated team of cycling counsellors a crazy dream?

In similar vein to the last pic, this one shows code. But it’s specific code. This is an email header: the writing on the envelope, the stamp, the ‘return to sender’, that gets you message from sender to recipient.

I’ve been working a lot with emails in the last couple of days, trying to find the best way to decode this complex structure.

The main challenge with this photo: not including any sensitive data!!

I’m seeing a lot of this these days. I’ve seen plenty of attempts at photographing code and I do find something beautiful in it. Not always symmetry, but patterns emerge and individual characters blend together into broader ‘brush strokes’ that appear.

But it’s not just static either: this is the engine room of that increasingly interactive place, the Internet!

The photo? I’ve seen these done with ultra-shallow depth of field, but I quite like it being deeper. It’s not a better effect, just different. The odd patterns created by capturing a screen on a digital camera bring texture too.

Here’s a gallery with another pic:

This is actually from a couple of days ago. I love sun-sets and sun-rises and am mostly of the opinion that they’re not worth photographing. They are beautiful, temporary, unique, ephemeral, and are better enjoyed in the moment. Plus, the photo never does it justice. However, occasionally I still try and capture it. On this particular day I wished I was atop a tall hill and could see for miles, but I tried to make the best of what I had: nice thirds, make a point of the telegraph pole, etc. not bad.

Haven’t been very good at the photo-a-day thing. This rubbish snap kicks things off again and simply represents the fact that my amazing wife made her legendary chocolate brownies last night. Just one of about a million reasons why I love her.

Nomnomnom!

Sometimes I spend a chunk of time writing a comment on someone else’s blog.  I find it a shame that that’s not somehow linked here, so…as I’ve invested the time writing…I’m copying that here.

There’s a great discussion going on on Emma Mulqueeny’s blog that’s people giving advice to a young person who’s thinking about going to Uni to study computer science, or something similar.  Well worth a read if you’re in that position yourself.

Here’s my take on the matter (slightly edited).

I hope you don’t mind but I’m not going to answer [the young person's] questions directly. What I would like to do is share my own experiences and lessons learned.

I was interested in computers from about age 12 – this in the day of early PC’s and Commodore 64?s. I got good GCSE’s and A levels (Maths, Physics and Computing) and then, more because I was interested than because I wanted it as a career path, I went to Uni to study computer science.

I studied at York, which had an excellent department and course which taught lots of good fundamentals of computing at all different levels, from low-level electronics and maths up to Object-Oriented software design.

The story of how I ended up at York is a whole other comment/post, but I’d agree with what was said above about looking at syllabuses and what areas of research the Uni is interested in. As I looked around some were really into robotics/cybernetics, some were into graphics and modelling of motion and particle dynamics, others were into formal programming principles. I think the latter will give a better grounding for programming, but that’s just my opinion.

Having said all of that, maybe you don’t know what specific area you want to go into? I certainly didn’t and I suppose the course that I did gave me some future direction.

ALSO…remember that you’re going to spend three years of your life at Uni and you’ll want to be comfortable and enjoy it. I’m from Swindon, a not-so-big town, and after visiting Imperial I quickly lost interest as I would have found London expensive and stressful. York was cheaper, quieter and more friendly. It’s a personal thing, but worth thinking about if you decide to go to Uni. You may long for the big city life!

The course mostly did me well, though I felt that it was highly geared towards people who would stay on for further study (masters, PhD, etc). The final year in particular covered topics that were highly theoretical and specific to the research interests of the University I was at.

In terms of practical application, probably everything I learned in the first two years was enough. I did a straight 3-year degree and I WISH I’d taken a year in industry. I’d encourage you to do something practical like that and see how IT works in the real world as well as in the theoretical playground of a University. I was fortunate to get 13-weeks work as a junior DBA. Totally different to everything I was studying, but hugely important in my future career.

It’s also true that you don’t have to be an academic star to be good at this stuff. Some of the best people I’ve worked with in IT have been school leavers or people who didn’t finish at school. They got simple jobs in IT firms and worked they way up, succeeding by having industry knowledge, a willingness and ability to learn, and a good work ethic. As I worked in IT operations it was easy to see that some of those in lower-level jobs (shift operators, etc) had great prospects and would quickly move into more technical positions.

So, anyway, I graduated and was fortunate enough to get a job where I used a lot of the skills I’d learned at Uni, working in safety-critical software engineering. This was amazing and I left that first job for personal reasons rather than because I disliked the work.

My second job (look at my CV if you want to know) was in a big IT/telecoms firm. And I guess some companies will be better than others, but experience was actually quite stifling. Initially they invested in me, but ultimately I found that the the large corporate only had one thing on its mind: cash! And if they’re a PLC that also means cash-for-investors-and-shareholders. I found the large corporate to care little for real innovation and creativity.

And so I left in February to go freelance and be creative and do my own thing and learn masses about business and technology and creativity and working in partnership and…so much more. I LOVE it. I love problem solving on MY terms, I love learning new stuff. Yes, I end some days weary and frustrated – that happened when I was employed too – but I always wake with fire in my belly because I’m doing the thing I love doing: using technology to help people solve problems.

A final thing to throw in. For a long time I thought my degree was pretty worthless in terms of real-world application. But when I worked for the big corporate I learned that the foundations of computer science that I had made learning new things SO much easier. The classic case was a training course I was on learning a scripting language. When it came to exercises, initially I was the slowest. Everyone else was just rattling off the answers they’d memorised or copied from the course notes. But I was questioning how things worked to try and get “under the bonnet” of the language. When it came to later, more complex exercises, my greater understanding of how the language worked meant that I could solve the more complex problems much more easily. That “digging down” was informed by the fundamentals I’d learned in my degree.

So I guess my lessons are:

• Knowledge of the fundamentals is very useful – more useful than I realised.
• But real-world, practical application and experience is also hugely valuable.
• My opinion is that you can be good with either, but to be great you need both.
• Research courses and universities well – it’s a big decision that could affect you a lot.
• Decide on a route – this will inform your university decision – perhaps you can find a course that specialises in medical applications?
• OR…don’t decide on a route. Pick a place that looks good and have your future guided by what you learn on the course.
• I disagree that learning the current thing (Cloud, “Web Science”) will do you well. If you learn the fundamentals you will quickly pick up whatever the current trend is. Plus, web development is only one area of programming – it’s a quick, easy way in, but probably, ultimately, a short-term approach.
• This is also a personal opinion, but I find the languages of the web pretty poor. They let you get stuff done very quickly, but don’t encourage good software engineering practices. Learn something well-structured and strongly-typed first (maybe something functional?) to get the principles. Any code that you later write in something like PHP or JavaScript will be FAR better as a result.
• Often small companies are doing the interesting stuff. My experience is that large companies stifle innovation. There are probably exceptions to this (Google, Apple), but you’ll need to be really good to get in. REALLY good!
• I think [the young person in the original post] will do really well. They sounded intelligent, hard-working, and had a desire to be creative and solve real world problems.

There’s a little bit more (and some repetition of what I’ve said) on my blog – I’m thinking specifically these two posts may be useful/inspiring:

• http://blog.wintle.me.uk/2011/03/im-a-php-expert/
• http://blog.wintle.me.uk/2011/02/sparks/

To anyone reading this, feel free to leave a comment here if you want to discuss my experiences. I’m always happy to share!

A bit behind on daily pictures. This from Sunday as I completed the third coat of paint on the ceiling of our lounge, which we’ve had re-plastered.

I like the abstract-ness, and the weird dark patch that the iPhone’s HDR produced. And I like the smooth, white ceiling we now have too!