This year Helen and I are spending New Years with Toby and Gigi who are over from Geneva. Yesterday we went for a long walk - 17km - on the South Downs. It was a misty, windy day - not altogether pleasant! Afterwards we went out to dinner atÂ
Bus Stop, a Caribbean restaurant in Brighton. The food was absolutely delicious!
Last night Helen's choir - Some Voices - performed Romeo and Juliet at the Troxy in Limehouse. It was a superb show - really atmospheric and the music was excellent!
The show was based on Baz Luhrmann's version of Romeo and Juliet. The audience was divided into the Montagues and the Capulets. The Montagues were wearing Hawaiian shirts - surf-casual dress. The Capulets were wearing red and black, with a more formal Spanish gangster look. We filed in to the Troxy in different queues depending on whether we were Capulets or Montagues.
The choir sung songs based on the movie and there were actors and dancers performing key scenes. It was a true spectacle!
I just had my application approved for Graduate Statistician at the Royal Statistical Society. I have been thinking about volunteering as a statistician to a charity - apparently charities have a need for statisticians!
We bought some wild mushrooms from a store in St James Street today while we were out on our afternoon constitutional. There were some weird looking blue mushrooms there (although they look purple now). They look so colourful!
I decided to try and make raisin bread in the bread maker. It turned out really well! I used the standard wholemeal recipe, but with about 90% wholemeal flour instead of about 60%. I also added in 3 tablespoons of milk powder, some whey (strained off from home-made yoghurt), about 1.5 teaspoons of cinnamon and about 200g of sultanas.
I am currently experimenting with coding using a Vortex Pok3r Mechanical Keyboard. I'm not sure whether it was a good buy or not. My rationale was that has a programmer, my keyboard is my primary tool, and it makes sense to have the best that I can get. I quite like the action of the keyboard, but it is too early yet to tell whether it is making me more productive or not.
I finally took the plunge and bought a pair of Air Pods. So far I quite like them (although it's only been a few hours). I quite like the way that you can pause the track you are listening to simply by taking one headphone out of your ear. Playback resumes when you put it back in your ear. They are quite expensive though, and I'm fairly sure that I will lose them unless I develop a routine way of storing them.
Back in the late 80's/early 90's, I used to argue that programmers should do their coding on an 8086 machine, an IBM XT for example, rather than something more powerful like a 286. My argument was that by using a slow machine, you had the same user experience as your average user, and you could optimize the program appropriately.
Continue reading “Big Iron”
It seems like the World is breaking down, with increased terrorism in Europe, Trump supporting Neo-Nazis in the US, and the insanity that is Brexit. I've decided that I need to ignore politics for my own peace of mind, and focus entirely on maths, programming and science!
I met up with some of my old team from BNP Paribas last week. I found it striking that everyone who was there is now working directly with Machine Learning. It was quite inspiring!
For the last few years I've been building Trading Execution Algorithms for Westpac. Time to do something different!
I decided to enroll in Coursera's Deep Learning Specialization. I've just finished the first week, and I am really enjoying it. Andrew Ng is a fantastic teacher. I did his previous course on Machine Learning and loved it.