Today was the last day of EMF 2018. The events and parties will continue on late into tonight and people are welcome to camp the last night but there will be fed facilities tomorrow morning.
We decided to leave early, packed up today and are spending the night in a …
I realize that I have mentioned EMF a number of times now but not really explained what I am referring to. EMF or Electro Magnetic Field is a festival held every two years, where people do fun things with technology in a field.
There is fast internet and WiFi across …
We arrived at EMF1 and set up camp just in time to make the opening ceremony. Well, we were 5 mins late but the opening ceremony was 15 mins late. Unfortunately our 3 year old didn't want to sit in the marquee long enough, so we headed out.
I …
Warning This post is just be a typical rant from a dad having spent the day on the road. TLDR: road trips with kids are a pain.
So today we have driven from central Scotland to Droitwich, just North of Worcester.
As we were just getting started I found that …
Over the last couple of weeks I have had a several emails inviting me to a hackerX event in Edinburgh. These are advertised as "an invite-only recruiting event for developers".
Yesterday I emailed them back informing them that I wasn't a programmer or developer but in fact a chemical engineer …
The last day of work before a holiday is always a weird experience. You obviously don't want to start any new projects1 that can't be finished within a few hours.
Everyone else knows this and so they start to avoid even asking you. As a result it makes for …
In the last three weeks I have completed three lunchtime runs. Today's was the fastest of them but not as fast as I was running last May or last year1. One of the reasons for the slow run may have been the warm and humid conditions 2 but at …
Sometimes things seem bad1
Today was one of those days
All was good post nap.
So in the week before going on holiday I have had to deal with:
This afternoon was the point where all these problems were sorted and there was nothing else for me to do …
Sometimes you need to appreciate the things you have while you still have them. Because when the washing machine brakes the week before you go on holiday, you certainly miss it.
This site no longer used jQuery1. I only noticed that I was using jQuery after I ran some benchmarking tests on the site. The site did well in enough but jQuery contributed a significant amount of the load time.
After digging around, the only place that I found jQuery …
At lunchtime today I attended a Lunch and Learn Session put on by Schneider Electric about the triton atack on a SIS1. Before the talk I was vaguely aware of the incident but without any details.
It appears that the attackers managed to get through most of the layers …
I have been trying to reconcile two competing ideas around how to approach projects.
One idea is expressed here by Tom Scott:
Do not try and produce something if you can't actually make it properly.
The next idea is expressed by Hank Green …
I have a program at work that generates some slides to display on various screens around the site. The program is a bit of a hack and bodge but it mostly works. I have set up a pretty good error handling system and regularly check it to see if anything …
Today was the LUCS1 Canal Fun Day in Linlithgow. There was lots of stalls and boat rides and one of the main events is the annual cardboard boat race.
It was fun to watch what parts I could between the crowds, though there was also a bit of nostalgia …
Today we spent the day doing nothing. At least nothing I would consider answering "what did you do at the weekend?" with. We did make it as far as Tesco, but that was the only excursion.
It was partially nice to spend time as a family together rather than galavanting …
One of the nice things about working in a blast resistant building is that none of the windows open. This means that the air conditioning is able to cool the air within the room without risking some bright spark opening a window"to help keep the place cool".
Unfortunately sometimes …
Earlier this week, I decided to install Plex on my home server after getting irritated that I couldn't watch anything on my media server easily.
My home server currently consists of nextcloud and subsonic. Over the years nextcloud has been getting used more and more with the many additional apps …
I have just finished reading an article about the challenges and opportunities of remote working, and I noticed that many of the bits of advice that the article provides to remote workers could equally be applied to those of us that work on the same site1.
In-person time is …
Earlier today I was attempting to make some changes to a Windows server in a secure way1. I fully accept that my knowledge in this area is not particularly strong and so I started looking for the information online. This was harder to do than I initially thought.
It …
I went for my first run since my early summer break today. I have been very poor with my running since leaving university and never gotten into a consistent training routine. The only thing I have been consistent with is that I take a break from running from some point …
I would like to take the opportunity to thank Abby Norman for her wonderful podcast series Let Me Google That.
Almost every day she picks a subject that interests her and does a five to 10 minute talk about it. These subjects can be on almost anything, the history of …
Last time we hosted a picnic party I failed to post that day, breaking my streak1.
Not today. Today I am posting no matter what!
I have previously written about alarms and following on from yesterday's post I want to write about stale alarms.
These are alarms that initially come in, but for some reason the operator cannot remove them. They are usually classed as stale if they have been on the alarm page continuously …
I have previously written about nuisance alarms particularly during shutdowns, but today I want to cover the fundamental questions of what an alarm is and what it is not.
The definition of an alarm is:
Alarm: An audible and/or visible means of indicating to the operator an equipment malfunction …
It is nice to know that when a safety concern is raised, it gets acted on quickly.
As part of the building works being carried out in our office, one corridor was blocked off with a wooden wall. As I was about to leave last night, I noted that two …
This is the 31st post I have made in as many days. One full month of posting something every day.
I am not sure how much longer I will be able to keep this up but in any case it has been a good run. I have managed to write …
As I wrote about last week, I am dyslexic and struggled to learn to read and write. The silliness of the English language is becoming more noticable now that my eldest son is starting to recognise letters. He is already able to recognise numbers1 and now we are trying …
Last night we tested out our new family tent. Previously we used a 4-man dome tent which worked well enough for two of us. It also was fine at EMF in 2016 when the weather was really hot, so we (two adults and a toddler) didn't mind hanging around outside …
These posts cover how dyslexia has, and continues to, influence my life.
Previously:
My performance at school started to improve once I started getting the targeted support. It also helped that in secondary school, classes were more interested in my knowledge …
These posts cover how dyslexia has, and continues to, influence my life.
Previously:
My previous post finished with the conundrum my primary school teacher had: They knew that I knew the answers but was not completing the school work on time. Most of my primary school …
These posts cover how dyslexia has, and continues to, influence my life.
I have been meaning to write these for some time but never quite managed to get the ideas out of my head and onto the screen before.
I am dyslexic and I really struggled at primary school. I …
For the last week, I have been a workplace nomad.
We were kicked out of our office. All of our stuff had been placed into storage boxes and I have had to live out of one laptop bag.
Initially I wasn't too bothered by the lack of proper desk. I …
I have decided to add comments back to this site. They were removed when I switched from wordpress to a static site generator (pelican) and I:
While I had considered writing a post on this theme, I had not intended to write it so soon after yesterday's post. What has made me change my mind is a post by Daniel Miessler stating:
If you aren’t reading at least one good book a quarter, you are …
I love to listen to podcasts, particularly when doing simple tasks. Podcasts allow me to learn new things and entertain me while I continue to get some things done. If I was getting my entertainment by TV, then I would have to sit still and be unproductive.
The key aspects …
If you are following using an RSS feed or look back at the dates published articles, you will notice that historically I have managed short bursts of relativity frequent blog posts, followed by long periods of silence.
Recently I have started trying to post something, anything, daily.
The main reason …
Within our plant, we use the PI as our main plant historian. We can access process history using PI datalink to import the data into excel. There was a situation last week where I was attempting to create a dashboard view of the process.
Unfortunatly one of the tags I …
I recently found out about a podcast that was started back in January 2013 called DisasterCast.
A podcast about scary things and how to stop them happening.
It is presented by Drew Rae who I recognised from his contributions to The Pod Delusion a podcast I was listening to …
At work, I have been asked to help look into why a web based tool has been having performance issues. I am on the team as an outside person without any direct involvement with the project so far. The suspicion is that it is a server configuration issue however those …
This afternoon I got a chance toplay with python again. I had been trying to do some analysis using Excel but I found that it was generally just getting in the way. What I thought should have been a simple tweak turned out to be a real pain.
Eventually …
This weekend, the office where I have worked for the last 6 years is getting split in two. Lots of engineers have been moved to new locations in other offices around the site and those of us who are remaining are getting squashed into a smaller area. The rest of …
My brother-in-law and his wife were visiting this weekend, mostly to see their nephews but they also wanted to see some of the local tourist attractions in the area which they hadn't yet visited.
It was an opportunity for us to spend time as a family and also go to …
At last week's party, one of the discussions lead to the power demand of your typical petrol station1. What would the power requirement of a typical station be, if the energy from the fuel were supplied by electricity?
This is assuming you have some form of local storage, such …
Once an engine attached to a train
Was afraid of a few drops of rain
It went into a tunnel
And squeaked through its funnel
And wouldn't come out again
The sad story of Henry, Rev. W. Awdry
The route I use to cycle to work goes under the motorway …
Today we had a school pupil shadowing our team, trying to work out what a carrier in chemical engineering would be like. Earlier in the week she spent time with developement and optimisation engineers but today it was the turn of the automation team to explain what control engineers do …
I remember a getting some advice from a lecturer when at university and thought I should save it here.
There are three Ss in life you should never pay for:
- Sex
- Stationery &
- Software
The stones a0t the bottom of our garden have now been replaced by grass.
So now we have more room for the kids to play on. And of course more to cut.
For a number of years now my preferred cycling bag has been a messenger bag but with clips built into it so it can be attached to a bicycle rack. I prefer this style over the traditional pannier bag style because it is more convenient to carry when you get …
Last weekend we hosted a BBQ picnic and had lots of friends over. It was a great day but I felt like I spent the whole time rushing about checking on folk and checking on the kids. I never really felt like I had a proper catch up with folk …
