14:01
After several hours of procrastination, I'm starting out on an adventure, feeling a little tired, very fat and generally not my best. I'm writing a prototype mobile app to gather clinical survey data for a study my uncle will soon be running throughout hospitals in Edinburgh. The first port of call was Trigger.io's Forge tool, which compiles and packages HTML and Javascript to both Android and iOS mobile devices. This doesn't look like it'll be suitable for my needs, so I've registered as an Apple developer. The learning curve looks steep and so far it's taken nearly an hour (and still going) for Xcode to install on my tiny MacBook Air. The mini DisplayPort adaptor that is meant to connect my laptop to my monitor doesn't work, so I've ordered a new one in anticipation of the long hours that I don't want to be spending peering at an 11" screen.

This is an Easter Bank Holiday adventure. Time for some more matcha.

14:28
Xcode installed successfully! I'm running through the beginner's 'Hello World' tutorial. Xcode looks pretty slick but I'm a little terrified at the sight of Objective-C - having mainly programmed in C# and Java since my second year of university...

22:05
Was massively side tracked while going through the 'Hello World' tutorial and ended up catching up on the last but one copy of Wired. Then I went to the gym, came back, ate dinner ad played with my baby cousin for a few hours and watched an episode of Futarama. There's always tomorrow...

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Olympics!
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Brothers!
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A sneaky photo of the city I call home.
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A magnificent two story train.
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Luxury in first class ;-).
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Beautifully fogless.
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Again, no fog!
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Traffic and windmills. Fantastic.
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A terrifying climb up to the summit.
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Good morning Yosemite!
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We're very lucky not to have run out of fuel!
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Unfortunately these guys have all deserted!
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(During the trip, I decided to take a quick survey of all the riders, just after we had left Arusha in Tanzania. This has been sitting on my hard drive since then! It's time to finally use it - this will be a first in a series of posts about the results. 52 riders participated in this survey, out of 69 total riders, a subscription rate of about 75%. I've not discounted sectional riders but there were relatively few of these.)

When starting the Tour D'Afrique, it quickly became clear that I was one of the youngest riders on the trip. The two main logistical barriers to the trip seem to be getting time off from work and financing it. Most young people have plenty of time, either before or after studying and don't have other constraints which tie them to home - such as a family or mortgage. Having enough money to do the trip is pretty difficult though and I worked hard for four summers and had to borrow some money from my parents in order to fund the trip! (Incidentally, the third barrier to joining the TDA is your fitness! Arguably though, this is something that can be fixed with a little dedication and perseverance.)

A few weeks ago, I was catching up with a friend over a drink and he had a dozen questions about the trip and more specifically EFI. This Wikipedia entry details EFI fairly well but I was curious to find out what the breakdown of EFIers was, by age. Brian at Tour D'Afrique very helpfully extracted this data for me and I've combined it with the data from our trip below.

The very first question we asked people was what their age was. I've plotted a histogram of the 52 riders ages on the graph below, bucketed in 5 yearly intervals. The average age of riders on our trip was 35.2 years, of which 28% had a birthday on the trip. (Theoretically this should be 32.9% but it's close enough.)



You'll notice the following-

• The bulk of riders are aged between 25 and 45.


• There are a reasonable number of younger riders but far fewer older riders - this is probably indicative of the fitness level required to do the trip.

Using the data that Brian gave, I've plotted a histogram of the 100 EFIers ages on the graph below, again bucketed in 5 yearly intervals.



This is a little different to the 2010 age distribution-

• There is a similar peak between 25 and 45, although here it appears to extend to 50. 40-44 is a little bit of an anomaly. I think this is due to fitness.


• There are no EFIers younger than 22.

Out of interest, I've plotted the age distribution of EFIers against riders on our tour on the graph below. You should not that this is not statistically sound because the EFI data is taken from ten tours versus just one for the age distribution!



What is interesting is that-

• There are proportionally more older EFIers than riders on the 2010 tour.


• Whereas the peak bucket for riders is to be aged between 25-29, the highest proportion of EFIers are aged 35-39.
  

In addition to the aggregate data above, I also have a gender breakdown of both riders from the 2010 trip and of EFIers.





Women appear to be generally underrepresented in both our tour and as a proportion of EFIers as a whole. However, the proportion of EFIers who are women is much less than the proportion of riders on our tour. There's a roughly similar age distribution for EFIers - whether man or woman.

All the way to Switzerland.
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We had some fun with the Gorillapod while road tripping in Norway at the end of last summer.

Commuterville.
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But with a good camera!
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Do we go? Do we stop?
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Leonardo DiCaprio is probably running around these streets somewhere.
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They look really good.
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Shah for government? Why not!
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...is that I'm able to ride my bike again! I've been for a short ride up and down the street. The bad news is that my knee still hurts like crazy. I'm hoping at least that it's going to heal itself with time because it has got a lot better since that fateful Wednesday morning.

In any case, I think my dreams of running my first marathon next year have probably been dashed, which is a shame. It's definitely still on the list for sometime soon though, should my knee permit.

I returned to work a week and a half ago which was, as many people warned, probably a bit too soon. It was immensely tiring for a week and come 7pm, I'd be pretty much wiped and unable to hold an intelligent conversation. Still, I survived and it let me get out of house! The dizziness has mostly gone away unless I lie on the left side of my head, which is a little worrying.

Anyway, enough medical offloading. I've started planning the replacement to the late Woodrup that was lost in the crash. Since that was pretty much my around town bike, I've decided to replacement it with the quintessential town bike: a fixed gear bike! None of the off the shelf bikes are sufficiently unique for me, so I'm going to be attempting to assemble a new bike from scratch.

This is what I've decided so far-
Frame: On-One Pompino
Fork: Surly Crosscheck (this was the fork I took to Africa)
Hub: Shimano XT Disc Hub
Cog: VeloSolo Disc Cog
As for wheels, that's to be decided but I'm probably going to get something ridiculously bright.

That's it for today, more as I decide it!

I've just arrived at the end of a relatively eventful week! No doubt if you've been following me on Facebook or Twitter, you'll already know what events I'm talking about.

Wednesday morning, running ten minutes late for work (late by my own standards more than actually being late), I was sprinting down St. Albans road between my house and Watford Junction where I park my bike on the way to work. Normally the traffic moves so slowly that it's safe enough without a helmet and it's barely 1.5 miles from door to door. This Wednesday morning however, as I later found out, a bus driver decided to headlight flash a Ford Ka coming the other way who was waiting to turn right. The Ford Ka didn't see me coming up the inside of the bus and took the corner - and the split second following, I have a very distinct memory of embracing the bonnet of the car with a lot of force at about 20 MPH. (If you want to see the actual junction on Streetview, check it out here.)

I don't remember much of what happened shortly afterwards so I'm just going to list what I've pieced together in some sort of approximate order-
1) Very many pedestrians helped me pick myself and my bike up off the road.
2) Several people called ambulances (in fact I think there were three ambulances and two police cars).
3) Supposedly my first reaction (undoubtedly one of shock) was to immediately start sending a message on my phone...
4) I started losing it as soon as I got into the ambulance. I couldn't remember my name, my address or my phone number. I had no idea who the current prime minister was and I thought I was late for school.
5) The ambulance took me to hospital at 9am.
6) Somehow the paramedics managed to call my sister and when I came to at the hospital, my sister and mother were by my side.
7) A CT scan, diagnosed concussion and four stitches later, I was slowly recovering. They kept me for a couple of hours to observe me and sent me on my way home at about 3pm.
(Fans of Geek on a Bicycle will be astounded that my shoulder didn't dislocate. I can reveal that it is a little sore but is very much where it should be!)

There is a picture of a broken me and my broken bicycle here.

As part of standard recovery, I'm housebound for a while - and won't be returning to work until Monday. I'm not supposed to drive for a couple of weeks and no sport for at least that long too. Whilst I can't say that I would have escaped without an injury if I had been wearing a helmet, it would certainly have lessened the impact of the concussion... I'm pretty certain the stitches on my face and general road rash all over my shoulders, arms and legs would still have been there. Lesson learnt though - I will be wearing my helmet forevermore, even if it is a slight inconvenience.

After four weeks of delays (mainly caused by the range of weather from abysmal to mediocre) and many months of me forgetting to book, I finally managed to capitalise upon an eagerly anticipated birthday present from my other half - a microlight flight experience!

For the last four years at school I was involved in our school's Combined Cadet Force (CCF) in the RAF section and as part of that, won a gliding scholarship where we learnt how to fly motorized gliders over a four day course. At the end of it, I successfully soloed the glider. In addition to this, for my sixteenth birthday, I started going for flying lessons and solo-ed a Piper Aviation PA-28. Unfortunately budget constraints prevented me from getting my private's pilot's license but it's definitely on my life 'to-do' list.

These were both completely unlike the experience of flying in a flex-wing microlight. The closest analogy I can think of is that of riding a motorcycle versus riding in a car. One is so completely raw and exposed and the other is relatively comfortable. You sit within three feet of the engine and you can see just about every component of the plane that matters. When you're on the ground, you're barely a couple of feet above the ground and it's very obvious that there's not much separating you from being shredded by the tarmac - no safety net.

I exercised my voucher with microlight school Clearprop at the Blackbushe Airport in Surrey. It took a few attempts to actually get flying - this sort of vehicle is very weather-dependent (and especially wind-dependent).

As for the actual experience, after a short briefing, we took off in what seemed like mere metres. All it took was a gentle push forwards on the bar and we were up in the air. In some sense, the control system, although different from most fixed wing aircraft (no joystick or yoke), is more natural - it's directly connected to the wing. This is called weight-shift because the action of manipulating the centre of gravity shifts the wing itself and this causes you to turn. There is no rudder so yawing is non existent. This makes flying in windy situations difficult.

Turning is much more physical (or feels that way) than most fixed wing aircraft too - requiring you to pull down on one side of the bar. This felt quite unnerving for me too, having dislocated my shoulder several times before - in the brief period between having my hands on my lap and holding the bar, there was a substantial amount of pressure on my arm from the wind. Luckily it stayed in its socket and I managed to approximately steer the aircraft in the right direction.

As for landing, this was a terrifying experience. There's no safety (as psychological as it might be) of having a big shock absorbing undercarriage underneath. As we came down to land, my eyes grew to the size of lightbulbs as we rapidly approached the ground.

An epic experience and one of the best birthday presents I've ever received. I'm definitely considering picking up the lessons again this next year.

Photos on GeekOnABicycle.

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So after a (very) long hiatus, I decided to cycle into work again on Monday, cycling from Watford to Old Street. This is not an inconsiderable distance but compared to my summer internship commute to Canary Wharf from Watford (26 miles each way), it's easier at just 21 miles. Sunday evening was, as always, a series of minor and major procrastinations where, although I was meant to be getting my bike ready for the journey in, I decided to go visit friends, listen to music, watch television and tidy my room.

Waking up bleary eyed on Monday morning, I somehow convinced myself that today was going to be the day I cycle in (the first time is always the hardest - both from a logistical and a psychological point of view). In my pyjamas, I started rummaging around my 'box of bits' in our garden shed looking for my sturdy pannier rack which went with me from Cairo to Capetown (on my bike for the first four weeks and in my suitcase for the last four months when it became obviously useless). I came out, defeated, with another, much less sturdy pannier rack that attaches to a seat post. This loyal pannier rack was what had taken the load of my school books and uniform when I first started commuting in the fat days.

Grudgingly attaching the pannier rack to my carbon seat post (and ever conscious of the increasing probability of my seat post shearing in two horizontally), I managed to fill my panniers with all sorts of 'necessities' - almost everything I needed except for a hoody which I decided would take up too much space. Walking out onto the road in my cycling Android jersey, a delightful gift from my friend at Google, I realised that short sleeve was perhaps a bit short sighted.

Rolling twenty metres down the road, strange noises already started coming from my bike and when I braked to a halt, there was an unnerving juddering. Investigating further, the pannier rack had already come askew and the edge of one of my pannier bags was rattling against the spokes. This is something I was very used to when commuting to school but it took a small leap of faith that my panniers would make it to work in one piece. As for the juddering, it merely seemed to be alignment of my brakes and in true Kenyan style, I figured it would be fine to get me to work.

Sure enough it was, and really the only difficult I had was that the pannier partially unclipped itself at a couple of points during the journey. The handling of the bike with a seat post mounted rack was quite sketchy - my road bike is much lighter than my mountain bike was and the pannier rack must have moved the centre of gravity much higher. Every time I stood up to cycle, the bike was start oscillating quite wildly.

As I got to work, it became harder and harder to unclip. I realised somewhere near Euston that my left SPD clip was missing a single screw. This meant that when I twisted my foot to unclip, the cleat would stay where it was and just rotate around the single retaining screw. When I finally got to Old Street it took a good five minutes of hopping around on my bike to unclip.

The commute overall was pretty damn slow. I left home at 08:30 (admittedly late) and reached work at 10:10. Normally I leave home at 08:25 and reach work at 09:15 when travelling by train. While the distance was slower, the traffic was pretty horrendous and there was no real clear stretch of road. Part of the reason for the traffic is that I was on Euston road - which skirts the congestion charging zone (and presumably carries a higher volume of traffic after 07:00). The frequent traffic lights also kill average speed - at least the route to Canary Wharf has relatively few interruptions!

In a nutshell, I'm not convinced that commuting to Old Street is worth it for me - I might do it a few times a week because of the fitness element but it certainly doesn't compare to public transport when it comes to convenience. At least not in the same way that commuting to Canary Wharf did.

People who knew me well at university know that for a short while (about a term), I graphed my sleep in order to figure out the relationship that my productivity (and enjoyment of life) has with my sleep levels. Anyone who's studied at Cambridge knows that terms are notoriously irregular - you'll start off with no work and then a week later find yourself trying to finish three sets of supervision work in one night. This makes it almost impossible to have a 'normal' week and to sleep the same amount every night.

When graphed and analysed, I noticed a few interesting facts-
- At that time, I used to sleep in multiples of 1.5 hours - and if I woke up a multiple of 90 minutes after I went to bed, I'd wake up feeling good.
- One day of good sleep often wasn't enough to reset my fatigue levels - I needed three nights of solid sleep to feel at the top of my form. This rarely happened during term.
- Even if I slept for 12/13 hours after an all nighter- it still wasn't enough. All nighters were disastrous for my productivity for the rest of the week.
- Generally 7.5 hours of sleep was good enough if I hadn't been training (i.e. cycling). If I had trained, I would require 9 hours.

This worked well for a few years and I've been tweaking my 'rules' as I go - I know the effects of caffeine and alcohol on my energy levels and try to adjust where I go. The irony is that, lately - mainly since starting work, I don't often get very good sleep. I've always been a light sleeper but generally I've always managed to sleep through the night.

It's been hard to pinpoint the reason and during a routine medical, the blood test revealed my thyroid levels were a bit off. To cut a long story (spread over six months) short - I've been diagnosed as hypothyroid. Standard treatment of hypothyroidism is the synthetic hormone levothyroxine. This is working, but with some annoying side effects. I've been finding it harder still to sleep - waking up in the middle of night regularly. I've also had some sort of headache constantly. Now with enough time, my doctor will probably be able to tweak the dosage so that these can be avoided. But the point being, I can't adequately control my energy levels as I used to, which is most likely now going to be the case for the rest of my life.

The constant process of diagnosis, especially for a condition like this has got me thinking - it must be very difficult to be a doctor indeed. Not purely from the sheer amount of knowledge you need but the feedback loop you have from your patients. Administer some medication, wait six weeks, take a blood test, look at a number and re-evaluate. On one hand it is a straightforward process but on the other - it is slow, prone to error (I was almost misdiagnosed when the wrong blood test results were used) and there's no instant gratification. Software development on the other hand gives you an answer in minutes, occasionally hours and very rarely days. There's no waiting required. And finally - there's always a logical or rational reason for something to happen the way it does. This is not always true in the human body and there's still a large amount of the 'unknown'. The human body is non deterministic.

That, dear readers, is why I'll never be a doctor.

Anyone who knows me well knows that-
1) I love biscuits.
2) I have to drink milk while eating biscuits or cake.

Mid last week I had a (mini) epiphany. I was at my cousin's house for her birthday party and for the first time in an immeasurable amount of time, I had cake without milk. Surprisingly, it was good. I spent much less effort trying to coordinate milk-drinking with cake-eating (it's the same really as the cereal and milk problem - you don't want to have extra milk or extra cereal left at the end...). Only concentrating on the cake meant I was able to really enjoy and appreciate it.

I guess this points to a wider trend in my life - that of multitasking. I'm notorious for doing multiple things at the same time and not just while at work. At home I've got a ridiculous three screened set up (and four if my laptop is up) and normally I'm doing a dozen things at the same time. It's probably because I spent so little actual time at home but I can't help thinking it's detrimental to the quality of how well I accomplish various tasks.

Admittedly a lot of what I do at home doesn't require much intellectual concentration - the last couple of hours I've been editing photos while watching television and catching up on reading - but I worry sometimes that this way of working carries itself over into other parts of my day.

As promised, a slightly more elaborate (or rather, descriptive) update.

As you may or may not have known, I had been working at a large investment bank for the last year since returning from my travels. It's a place where I interned twice and enjoyed enough to want to return to as a graduate - the work was interesting and the people were great.

Without going into full detail, our graduate scheme requires us to complete several six month rotations before choosing a team to permanently settle in. The incentive structure for the process of picking placements at each stage is maligned and essentially I had a poor first rotation placement (great people, dull work, learnt very little) and as a result didn't get my top preference for the second rotation team. I enjoyed my second rotation team but it wasn't somewhere I wanted to stay permanently - the work was semi-interesting but there was very little support from the team, purely as a result of it's small size.

Our graduate scheme was shortened to just two rotations and beginning in August, we began the process to choose a team to settle in. I found that most of the interesting teams either already had a graduate in mind (someone who had previously been on that team) or that I didn't have the requisite skill set (when competing against other graduates). Suspecting that this might be the case, as soon as we heard news of this change, I fired off my C.V. in an email to popular music recommendation website - http://last.fm.

Roll around to mid September and for the most part, it was exactly as I had guessed. I'd gone through the interview process at last.fm and with an offer in hand, I spoke to our graduate HR who, unfortunately, weren't willing to offer any other choices. With some trepidation I sent in my notice of resignation.

Quite a few people tried to convince me before I left the bank that I'd hate it outside of finance - they were shocked that I was even considering leaving investment banking and they thought I'd get bored. Naturally these fears played heavily on my mind in the four weeks preceding my new job. Luckily it was more FUD than actual insight.

I've been working at last.fm for a week now and it's great. The people here are wonderful - very helpful, friendly and they know their stuff. There are fewer politics than at the bank and I find it a much more productive place to work. There's no bureaucracy blocking me from doing my job, I have a fast computer and access to whatever developer tools I want to use. In addition, there are fewer distractions throughout the day, no pointless meetings and no constant interruptions. We get to use cutting edge technologies too, versus the cutting edge of three years ago at the bank. As a technologist, I feel more at home here than I ever did as a graduate at a bank.

To sum it up, the first question most people working at the bank asked me when I said I was leaving was 'how much are you getting paid at the new place?'.
The first question that most people working at last.fm asked me when I mentioned I used to work at the bank was 'what were you working on?'.
I'm happy to be a part of the second group :-).

Dear readers,

I apologise for the lack of updates over the many past months. I've been rather busy with a variety of things and that seems likely to continue. However, my life is about to undergo a relatively significant change and with that change, I've decided to get my house in order (quite literally as well as metaphorically).

I'll go into more detail in a following post but the short story is that I've decided to leave my first real job for a variety of reasons. As you can imagine, this is quite a terrifying step to take but ultimately, I hope, one for the better.

More detail soon, but it's good to be back and I hope to be writing more frequently :-). I'll also be updating this site so that it's a bit less 2010 and a bit more NOW().

A stunning drive.
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We came across this beautiful view from the bridge.
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Leaving nothing but the wake and our tourist money behind us.
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Under angry clouds.
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Rickety wooden bridges and camera toting tourists.
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Look out for the orcas.
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And an oil tanker.
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Twilight incoming.
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One day we'll swim across the dock.
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Like a giant Warhammer table.
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We're in Mombasa at the moment, my last taste of Africa for 2010 (and my first, briefly, of 2011). Nothing has really changed here - it's the same hotel we've been to twice before and the same beach we've visited four times in the last five years. I'm pretty certain that of all the holiday destinations in the world, returning here, to the same place, ranks fairly low on my list.

This lacklustre holiday which, family time aside, feels like a little bit of a waste of time seems typical of my life in general at the moment. I've started as a graduate at a large investment bank (where I interned twice) and absolutely detest the work I am doing at the moment. It's a short first rotation (just two months left) but I wonder if the next will be any better.

The problem I have with this work is not that there's too much of (that's absolutely fine, I have no problem working an 80 hour week if the work merits it) but that it is so incredibly dull and not necessarily that useful in the business sense either. Without going into too much detail, essentially I'm adding missing pieces of functionality to an application to abate pressure caused by internal politics. The functionality (and generally the application itself) isn't complicated, rather just tedious. The tedium of actual development is compounded by the extensive QA process that surrounds any change to the application and while the majority of my changes are new, affect a minority amongst the 3,000 users we have and might only even be used by support - I still spend 60% of my time doing QA tasks.

It feels like I'm wasting my time - this is the time when I can really give it everything but lack motivation to do so. I've barely learnt anything new though in the last three months besides how to use various systems and how to produce QA documentation to satisfy the regulators. This causes a sinking feeling in my stomach every time I talk to (some of) the other graduates and they tell me how much they're learning. I recall my internship where I learnt a huge amount - both of software development and the business need that necessitated our work.

So instead of stagnation, it's almost like recessing. My hire-ability is sinking each week that I learn nothing and forget a little bit more all that I learnt during my Computer Science degree. As my hire-ability sinks, it becomes harder to jump ship, to break out of the circle and to get back onto the true road of career fulfillment. I will not go down without a fight though - my eyes are open and actively scanning for opportunities.

And finally, I'm not the only one - this is a common theme amongst quite a few of my graduate colleagues. My faith in the HR department has been shaken by their failure to place the brightest graduates (who they apparently go to great lengths to hire) in positions which they will enjoy and where they will have their capabilities pushed. Sure, it's not a problem on their side - they often mention how many applicants they get - it is easy to fill our positions as graduates (we should be lucky to be where we are, of course!) but they need to treat us better. It seems that we're regarded and treated as merely numbers - without recognition of the fact that we have different desires, skill levels and ambitions.

This is going to cause two problems: 1) the brightest students will no longer flock to work here in the way they have done (the economic crisis of 2007/8 has already gone a long way to reducing the number of students who are chasing a career in finance) - graduates talk (and I have been talking too) to their peers in the years below and 2) the brightest graduates will leave - several of my colleagues are pursuing potential opportunities elsewhere.

Mmm.
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Could sit and stare into this for hours.
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