R, ah

Today I was back in the office, but it was very much denuded of people, which gave me a chance to buckle down and work on getting to grips with R.

R is a statistical workbench of a computer programme, a heinously complicated yet very capable set of tools for analysing data. It's designed more for a programmer who's good at stats than the other way round though: it laughs in the face of easy user interfaces and although there's a million and one things it can do, everything involves installing an extra library here or there.

A proper celebration

After half a day more, I finished cramming all the virtual cogs into my database and everything worked the way it was meant to. To celebrate, I walked once around the office building, which was almost as exciting as Alan Shearer celebrating winning the English Premier League by creosoting his fence.

I returned home this evening to the rumble of thunder. The skies turned orange, then black, as the lightning flashed over our building, but the promised rain never came. Still, I whimpered and tried to hide in the wardrobe at every thunderclap. Why my wife thinks she wants a pet animal when she has a perfectly good me is quite mysterious.

Later, when the weather was calm again, I went for a run, an easy, slow one, that inexplicably ended up being a mile at marathon pace. Maybe it was the shoes, maybe it was all the tortilla chips I ate, perhaps it was two hours of dicking about on the xbox. Whatever it was, I was surprised. My legs work, my knees don't hurt, and I don't seem to have lost any pace. It's almost like I didn't run on Sunday.

In three days time I'll have been writing this blog every day for three years. I'm not sure if the next three years will involve as much sweat as this one, or indeed so many pairs of running shoes. We will have to see.

For now, that's all: I had a can of Pepsi last night and couldn't sleep, so I'm rather behind on sleep now, and my eyes are beginning to give up on me. Til tomorrow, then.

Getting my grind on

I spent all today number crunching. I spent all of yesterday on the plane wrestling with my database, trying to get it to conform to my ambitions, and only admitting defeat when we started our descent to Changi. I often suffer from a dilemma: am I trying to do something in the hardest way possible, and should really be giving it a rest and doing something else, or am I suffering from a paucity of willpower and just need to force myself to stick to the task for a little longer?

Amazon Web Services, perl and building applicatio​ns

Today I had nothing going on, so I went to the office and tried to build an application in perl to interact with Amazon.

Let's say that again, but try to be interesting:

In my copious spare time, I've been teaching myself to program by writing a script that will automatically buy me random things from Amazon.

Hopeless romantic

Valentine's Day arrived, and what better way to spend it than by sitting on the sofa at home on my own, with three different computers blaring at me as I wrestled with the in-and-outs of Javascript, trying to get my automatic comedian to talk on the web at last.

Automation software

I'm angry enough that if I had a spade, I'd probably try and commit a violent act of gardening on the next person I met. It's lucky nobody has issued a sunny 'hello' to me while I've been near a frying pan, or there would have been a death by cooking utensil on the news tonight. And it's very fortunate that I don't work in a rifle factory, or I'd be up on a roof right now. What is the source of all this misplaced rage? The title of this post should be clue enough: automation software, in some of its many guises.

Playing with language

Today I was looking at Get TEDPad, where a chap has run some statistical analysis against transcripts of the first five hundred or so TED lectures, and figured out how to generate snippets of new, non-existent TED speeches that sound either convincing and good quality English, or (when he switches it to the dark side) good quality English spoken by an idiot obsessed by whatever the New York Times tells him is important at this particular moment in time.