1. Had rather a long, interesting and slightly awkward conversation with some Icelandic chaps in a bar, covering the difference between belief and knowledge, origins of the Icelandic people and the nature of tools.

    Conclusions: Humans are the only animals to create recursive tools, and I am (apparently) an alchemist.

  2. Attempt to climb Esya thwarted by bad weather, closed bus station and confusingly numbered buses. Went for a 4 hour walk along the coast, which ended in a tasty kebab accident. Now reading Tufte at the office.

  3. I love it when there’s lots of snow on the ground. It enables us to see in (blurry) 4D.

    And I get to draw googly eyes on all the bins.

  4. Spent the evening at a colleague’s birthday party in a private bikers club in a Reykjavik suburb, drinking (water, of course), eating tasty food and playing poker, a strange game which seems to consist mainly of the following:

    • Give people some cards
    • Put some cards on a table
    • Move some bits of plastic around a few times — the bits of plastic are different colours, and make nice sounds if you click them together
    • Arrange your plastic into piles and click them together whilst sipping a cocktail (or water, depending on whether or not you are a bodybuilder/Buddhist/bodybuilding Buddhist).
    • Do poker with your face (to do: what is this?)
    • Intermittently tap the table
    • Nonchalantly toss some plastic into the middle of the table, or, if you’re hungry, toss your cards towards the dealer and go get some food — this is called folding but DO NOT FOLD THE CARDS it is confusing and not literal
    • Repeat 2-5 a few times, then show people your cards. Say some numbers out loud (optional: confused pause), and then one of you has won. Sometimes this is because a card has a bigger number than another, or because of the shape, or because of the picture.
    • The winner gets all the plastic, unless they ran out of plastic half way through, in which case they get that much less — use little piles for this purpose.
    • Repeat from beginning

    Thanks for a great evening everyone :)

  5. Has a go at making a chicken mushroomey cheesey sauce thing (inspired by an amazing Italian place here). Surprisingly it wasn’t unsuccessful — needs a bit more cheese next time though.

  6. Jovian Salak: @BarnabyWalters such nice weather! UK is predictably bad...

    Jovian Salak the weather here is predictably unpredictable :) It was gorgeous when I took that two days ago, since then it has been freezing, murky and (in the last few hours) snowing a lot. All good fun!

  7. Walked along a nice bit of beach-ish area near my flat. Realised that whilst I’m fairly experienced at creating UIs where the creation of sound is the end result (musical instruments), I’ve never really given much thought to the use of sound in other UIs.

    The house lights across the bay twinkle a lot — perhaps because of the heat. It’s cold outside here, but inside all the buildings is really toasty, thanks to ubiquitous geothermal power.

  8. Moved in to my more permanent apartment. It feels strange to move my stuff into a room rich with the owners identity — photos, clothes, book/film collection.

  9. Got the last few bits of rubbish out of what was my workshop, saw Jovian Salak (have fun in Nepal!), packed most of my luggage and got all the bits of paper required to get to Iceland together. Leaving tomorrow at 12 noon, flight at 8 in the evening. Probably spending the hours at the airport watching studio ghibli films.

    , and all that good stuff.

  10. conversation summaries:

    Doing acceptance in a different language to your application is philosophically a good idea.

    When syndicating data, the quality can be used to determine the canonical version even if the separate versions don't link to each other (example: photographer takes RAWs, gives TIFF to client, RAW is proof of provenance)

    Not drinking tea and not having cream on cream teas reduces the day to day hassle, stress and confusion of living in Devon by approximately 90%.

  11. Checked into Localeyes, Ashburton for the two-yearly eye excercise session. First time I’m having to pay for it (not being in school is scary)