Friday 17 June 2011

Something I wrote a while ago about the USA...

The following is something that I wrote a while ago as a Facebook "note", I thought I'd copy it here for you to read...


                                               
Wednesday, 21 July 2010 at 04:19 UTC


I've just had the most amazing drive in the most dire car along the most boring roads that I've ever encountered. Journey: Eastern Indiana to North-Western Indiana; Car: Chevrolet HHR; Time: 8pm to 11pm

I set off about 30 minutes before sunset, and as I got onto US-33 the sun hit the horizon, and the verges and the air above them started to glitter. The glittering was thousands of fireflies along the roadside reacting to my approach. As the sun dipped lower the fireflies became more obvious, until it seemed that I was driving along a tunnel of lights similar to a 70s sci-fi effect. Then Venus started shining in the sky above the sun.

And as the sun disappeared I was driving into a huge orange sunset with Venus overhead and surrounded by fireflies. Absolutely magical, and I've just done it no justice at all with these few brief words. But that is the story of my last evening in the USA.

Ohai2u!

Hello there!


So here we are... I have no idea where this is going to go, or how it will get there, but it should be interesting to find out.


I suppose the first thing I should tell you is a few things about me, for those too lazy to read my account; I live in Warwick in the UK and I am in the middle of a few things, I'll probably write about them now and then:

  1. A part-time MSc in Control Engineering.  This came about after an argument with a (now ex) girlfriend where we split up for a while, I decided that I would need something to do, and decided, for want of a better expression, to "improve myself" in a way that might make me more useful at work (q.v.).  At the time of writing I have about 9 months left to go (which will be taken up with my project, this will involve some Matlab and the report for which will have to be written in LaTeX).
  2. Teaching myself to play the guitar (this has been going on for about 6 years), one day I expect I'll get around to paying someone for a lesson.
  3. Relearning to play the cornet (I first learnt at school, a few years ago now).
  4. Running a photography business.
  5. Sitting on the board of a high technology company that is in the field of electric vehicle design and engineering.  Primarily I'm responsible for all electrical and electronic systems activities, but I also have some input into other areas, such as customer service and information systems.

Something I'm planning to add to the above is that I want to work through, "The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles" bNoam Nisan and Shimon Schocken, which is freely available at: http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/ so feel free to join in if you'd like to.