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Building the brand - stevenwilkin.com gets a facelift

I’ve just released the latest iteration of my “professional” site, stevenwilkin.com.

There’s the possibility the designers I’m working with will think my design-fu is weak, but the site badly needed something as it has been barely put to use in the years I’ve owned it.

I don’t know how the Steven Wilkin web experience will evolve but the words of Eric S. Raymond are ringing true when he mentions not hiding behind a hacker-style alias so I may put more emphasis on this domain in the future.

The future is looking exciting concerning the web and my own contribution to it these days so who knows what will transpire and of course I invite you all along for the ride :)

2008 06 12 Me
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Batch preparation of boiled eggs

In my post on batch preparation of oats, written in response to Trent’s post, I mentioned that I also prepare the boiled eggs I enjoy for breakfast in advance.

At the weekend past I’d just boiled a saucepan of eggs, cooled them with cold water and put them into a tupperware box when I remembered my previous post, so I took a quick snap to provide a follow-up:

boiled eggs - batch preparation

Whole, boiled eggs will keep for up to a week in their shells in the fridge and provide an excellent source of complete protein, saturated fat and dietary cholesterol along with a hearty dose of Vitamin D, all of which are essential to those pursuing an active lifestyle which includes weight training.

Don’t fear the fat and eat those yolks!

2008 06 10 Nutrition
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Steven Wilkin, professional coffee drinker extraordinaire

There have been times in my life when my job description could well have been best described as being a professional coffee drinker. These days however I’ve found gainful employment but continue to consume vast quantities of the stuff and even use coffee nomenclature to name my new *nix boxes.

During a caffeine-fueled session with my domain registrar I happened to lookup professionalcoffeedrinker.com; it was available, all sense went out the window and my money and myself were swiftly parted.

I wonder if this acquisition will have any effect on the Google Juice of the personal brand I have an eye to developing? And before you ask, yes, SEO information has been trickling it’s way into my RSS reader recently.

2008 06 05 Coffee
Geek
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A developer again I am

Monday was my first day as a developer with Creative Online Media and I must say it’s great to be wearing my coding hat again.

The culture-shock has been enormous: I’m not flooded with emails and phone calls all day, nor battling with bureaucracy and the people are really chilled-out. I don’t know myself!

The adjustment period will end and no doubt I’ll be required to produce product but I think this gig has potential :)

2008 06 04 Clerical Comments (0) Permalink

Ticket to ride - a break from the rat-race in Fermanagh

Ulsterbus bus ticket

I’m spending a few days down the country before I start my new my job catching up with my family, tinkering on some personal projects and just generally “getting my head showered.”

I’m enjoying the break from the daily grind with my only real task being to steel myself for the upcoming change to my 9-5 existence. I find myself so resistant to change: my levels of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt seem to automatically soar at the prospect of anything out of the ordinary, but I’m presented with a great opportunity to sharpen my development skills within a lower-pressure environment. Score!

Expect details of my new gig soon.

2008 05 28 Clerical
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Bye bye $BIG_COMPANY - Steve leaves the enterprise

I’m preparing myself for my last cycle home from $BIG_COMPANY.

On the whole the experience has been, well, experience: neither good nor bad but worthwhile all the same. I do have gray hairs now though.

Soon, process monitoring, environment management, receiving 700 emails a day and being on-call will be a distant memory. Along with my nemesis of the past 9.5 months, the Tibco TIC.

And yes, before you ask, I have my name barrel in my pannier bag ;)

2008 05 26 Clerical Comments (6) Permalink

BarCamp Belfast 2008

I attended BarCamp last year and I heard this morning that details of this year’s un-conference have been confirmed.

The fun is happening on Saturday 21st June, 9am - 5pm in the Peter Froggatt Centre at Queens University Belfast.

See you there!

2008 05 15 Geek Comments (0) Permalink

Oats - weekly batch preparation

I read Trent’s post on preparing oats at the weekend and decided to write about my own process. I’m also relieved I’m not the only one doing this kind of thing ;)

Part of my weekend routine involves preparing my breakfasts for the coming week. I boil a large saucepan of eggs which end up in a tupperware box in my fridge and I start a process which results in the following:

Oats - the breakfast of champions

Each container contains:

  • oats
  • raisins
  • teaspoon of cinnamon
  • pinch of sea-salt

Each week-morning, after I’ve washed and dressed, all that’s left to do is dump the contents of one the containers into a saucepan, add water and shell a few boiled eggs while my oats cook.

This leads to my favourite part of the day: eating a cooked breakfast and drinking fresh coffee while catching up on my RSS feeds.

2008 05 12 Nutrition
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command line history - me too

I’ve seen this on a couple of blogs recently so I thought I’d give it a go on the VPS this site is hosted on:

steve@decaf:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++} END {for(i in a)print a[i] " " i}' | sort -rn | head -10
190 ls
80 cd
24 cp
22 sudo
19 rm
14 svn
12 history
11 tar
10 wget
10 vi

And as root:

172 ls
59 vi
56 cd
22 apt-get
20 less
20 apache2ctl
17 apt-cache
15 cp
10 pwd
10 ps

I’m kinda suprised that ls comes out on top each time ;)

I wonder which commands Matt, Aidan and Philip have been using most?

2008 04 16 Distractions
Geek
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$BIG_CORP rides the snake - my first Python script

In between support tasks at $BIG_CORP I’ve been slowly reading through O’Reilly’s Learning Python and trying a few things out with the command-line interpreter.

The first script I’ve written that actually does something useful is countdown.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# countdown to 5pm
# 2008 SJW
import datetime
now = datetime.datetime.now()
home = datetime.datetime(now.year, now.month, now.day, 17, 0, 0, 0)
total_secs = (home - now).seconds
hours = total_secs / (60 * 60)
minutes = (total_secs - (hours * 60 * 60)) / 60
print hours, " hours and ", minutes, " minutes until 5pm"

Very simple I know but I just had to share it ;)

Thanks to Clintonfor the GeSHi WordPress plugin.

2008 04 14 Clerical
Distractions
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