About - This Blog ... & Me
About This Blog
Some random thoughts on life, science, technology, data, photography - just about anything really … oh, and some muddy dogs and horses :-)
You may have noticed this is a rather odd blog. There is no central theme and it has posts on different subjects … lots of different subjects. This is deliberate and a bit of an experiment on my part. Some of it is detailed in the post The Ghost of Blogging Yet To Come (with apologies to Charles Dickens), but basically this blog is a reflection of me. My mind tends to roam in a lot of directions and I have a lot of interests. I used to try and segregate these into separate blogs but it just got complicated, frustrating and annoying for everyone concerned. Not everyone will understand this blog, but at least I'll enjoy it :-)
How to use this blog
"But it's so confusing - how do I find anything?"
The secret is to use the tags and the menu at the top to find related posts. Indeed one of the menu items actually is a page that lists all the tags (hint: it's the one labelled Tags). If you just try to follow things in posting order you'll probably get very confused … but probably learn quite a lot about how my mind works :-)
I'll admit a search facility would be nice, but I'm waiting on the good folks at Ghost to add that to the core functionality. It is definitely on their roadmap.
Update: I'm now using a custom theme that includes a local search facility and adds Disqus comments. At the moment I'm using the Bold Theme by Aspire Themes. I can highly recommend this theme. It's very clear, clean, and is fully responsive. It also adds local search, Disqus comments and a dynamic tags page to the basic Ghost functionality. For an alternative which also adds search and Disqus but lacks the dynamic tags page, I can also recommend the Polar Theme by GBJsolution.
My Avatar
I found this picture on 123RF.com when I was looking for a header image for an article. It just clicked with me so I started using it as my avatar image. Strangely enough, since I found it I've started growing a beard. Life imitating art, perhaps? :-D
About Me
I'm 50 something, live in the UK countryside with my better half and two dogs. It makes for a full and interesting life. I might have beard :-D
My Video Collection
I have something over a thousand movies and TV series on physical media, mostly Blu-ray and DVD, but I'm not a movie buff so I can spout elequently about this actor or that director :-)
You can see my collection at Collectorz.com
My Book Collection
I mostly read science-fiction books :-) More recently, I've being listening to a lot of audio books as it means you can "read" while you're doing other things like gardening or walking the dogs.
You can see my collection at Collectorz.com
The audio books aren't in the collection catalogue yet - it's on my to-do list :-)
My day job
I earn my living by playing with data, and sometimes refer to myself as a Data Scientist. Between 2012 and 2014 I did a part-time MSc in Data Science at Dundee University.
"We're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths..."
My wonder and curosity for the world is still very childlike and very much alive :-) My interests are many, wide ranging and change from time to time.
I have the ability to become very good at something in a very short space of time, but once I'm good at it I'll often start looking for the next challenge. This is one of the reasons I like Data Science, it's a field that is incredibly wide and changes rapidly. It turns out these are the characteristics of a multipotentialite
The Multipotentialate
"A multipotentialite is someone with many interests and creative pursuits."
There's a very good TED video by Emilie Wapnick that explains it here
If you don't fancy watching the video, there's a nice (and quick) summary here -Emilie Wapnick on Being a Multipotentialite
The Blog icon
OK, obvious I admit it, but we're all seeking illumination and crave those lightbulb moments when we suddenly GET IT :-)
And at the end a quote
You'll notice that there are often quotes at the end of each post. These may or may not have anything to do with the material post. I just like the idea of always ending with a quote :-)
My Favourite Quote
My all time favourite quote comes from Walt Disney. You may recognise it from the film "Meet the Robinsons", where the phrase "Keep Moving Forward" keeps cropping up. The full version of the quote is shown at the end of the film, and if you've read more than one or two of the posts on this blog you'll realise just how well this quote fits me :-D. The world is full of new and interesting things and I simply can't resist having a look at them all and playing with most of them.
“Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths. We're always exploring and experimenting.”
— Walt Disney
Photo credits:
Header Montage - Self & 123RF & Pixabay
Avatar - jossdiim/123RF.com
Multipotentialite Infographic - QAspire.com
Blog icon - anthonycz/123rf.com
Disney - skeeze/Pixabay.com