Tag Archives: Personal

Social Networking

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I seem to have been sucked into Facebook. I don’t know quite what it is, but it does seem to be addictive. My theory is that it’s the news feed, telling you what new things your friends are up to and who/what they’ve discovered on the site, which allows you to discover new things too. That’s definitely a concept I’ll be incorporating into a couple of web apps I’m currently working on. :-)

Anyway, you can find my Facebook profile here: Graeme Mathieson’s Facebook Profile. And for business networking, you can find my LinkedIn profile here: Graeme Mathieson’s LinkedIn profile. Feel free to connect to me on either if you feel you know me.

Shiny new Canon EF-S 10-22mm lens

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Annabel outside the front doorI’ve been lusting after a lens that will give me wide angle shots on an APS-C sized sensor for a while. There’s just something wonderful to me about the effect it has on clouds in a landscape shot. And being able to photos of a room is a great bonus.

It’s also the first time I’ve really played with Lightroom’s develop settings, turning the image into black & white, boosting the blues to get a really impressive looking sky. And, err, using the spot tool to hide a couple of blemishes. (Don’t tell Annabel I said that!)

I’m quite please with how, what was effectively a quick snapshot to try the new lens, has turned out.

Free t-shirts!

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Well, for me, at least. :-) After I mentioned my experiences with Splunk recently, a couple of Splunk’s folks got in touch with me by email, asking for my address. No, it wasn’t because they were going to send round “the boys” to teach me better ways of submitting bugs reports, it was to send me a t-shirt. A parcel arrived for me yesterday morning containing not just one, but two t-shirts, all the way from Splunk HQ in San Fransisco!

So, I’d just like to say two things: first of all, thank you very much for the lovely t-shirts, Splunk!

Secondly, my wardrobe could do with a refresh. Does anybody else want to send me t-shirts? (I’m an XL, and you can easily figure out my address.) I’d really love an OpenSolaris one, for example… :-)

Please stalk me!

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I’ve just created an account on iStalkr so that you can follow my every move on my blog, Twitter, last.fm, Flickr, del.icio.us and even the tumblr I’ve set up but not yet used.

The timeline idea is pretty neat, so that you have some sort of visualisation of when I’ve been doing what over the past few days…

That reminds me. I wonder if one of the old email addresses I used to use when I spent too much time on IRC still works: mathie@please.stalkme.org…

(via Alan)

Update Of course, an email has just reminded me that if you want to stalk me properly you’ll want to use Google Alerts. I already have alerts for ‘graeme mathieson’, ‘rubaidh’ and ‘woss.name’ so I know when you are talking about me. :-)

Levellers & Beer Festival

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I just discovered that the Levellers are playing at some folk/beer festival just outside Edinburgh on June 2nd. You can find out more about it here: Prestonpans Music and Ale Fetival. It’s conveniently near the 26 bus route, so should be easy enough to get to. Unfortunately, Annabel’s probably going to be off galavanting with her mum, so I’m wondering if anybody else happens to be going along, or wants to? I’ve no idea if tickets are still available. But it’d be great to see the Levellers live…

Electricity Consumption

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I’ve just been reviewing our electricity bill online this morning, as I was reminded it was now available. I keep having this sneaking suspicion that we spend an awful lot of money on electricity bills, but I can’t quite figure out if we’re being particularly wasteful, or whether it’s just because electricity prices have risen sharply over the past few years.

The house we live in now has gas central heating with combination boiler, a gas fire, and a gas stove top, although it’s an electric oven. So in a way, our electricity consumption ought to have lowered from the flat we moved out of a couple of years ago, which was all electricity (and exceedingly draughty!). I should check our old bills sometime and see how the consumption compares.

Anyway, over the past year, we’ve had an average consumption of 14.69 Kilowatt Hours per day. That’s for a two bedroom upper villa with two people living in it, both of whom are out at work most of the day.

So, I wonder. Are we average? Or are the neighbours nicking our electricity? :)

Bride of Frankenstein

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Bride of FrankensteinMy wife, Annabel, was in for a wee operation (a parotidectomy) yesterday and she’s just managed to escape the hospital this evening. The operation was a complete success with no sign of any nasty after-effects (the major risk with a parotidectomy is damage to the facial nerve which gives the appearance of having had a stroke and can be permanent!) and she’s now at home, convalescing for the next couple of weeks.

Here’s one of the piccies I uploaded to Flickr showing off the cool scar!

(Posted via Flickr.)