DominicHamon.com

Life is like a grapefruit

Thanksgiving | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

Link: Thanksgiving | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine

This is one of the simplest descriptions of the spin-statistics theorem, one of the most important results from quantum mechanics, that I’ve read.

Everyone should read this to get a glimpse at how important quantum theories are to our everyday life.

Posted on 2008/11/28 by dominic in personal | Leave a comment

One week

The title of this post is misleading: The family has been in San Francisco for more than a week, and I’ve been at work at the new job for two weeks, but somehow it feels like this is the first week that I’ve actually been here.

I obviously can’t write much about what I’m up to at work, but I can write that I’m having a fun time on some relatively straight-forward ramp-up and training work messing with some prototypes, and that I now have an official team to belong to. I’ve started having conversations with people on the team, including the lead, about how things could be developed, and what needs to be done, and I’m really encouraged as we all seem to be thinking along the same lines. If this was EA, we’d be in alignment. Or on the same page.

Outside of work, this week has been a big step forward too: One lease signed (yay!) and deposits paid (boo!). This weekend was also a far cry from last weekend which was a blowout thanks to a nasty virus. After finishing up with the realtors we made our way to City Hall for a walk around, hoping to find a farmer’s market, which we didn’t, then walked up Market to the Embarcadero and had a passable lunch at Market Bar. After that, a bit of a walk down the bayfront to grab the light rail home. Last night, we met up with some friends who moved here from Singapore just before we did in Magnolia bar at Haight and Masonic.

We took a cab there, and had a fun time with an old hippy who called himself “Taxi Dude” and was convinced that the Russians were trying to start a new war, and that the Russians and Arabs are fighting a turf war over the coffee shops of Amsterdam. We learned all about his Swedish friend Rolf and his “time of inequity” in the early 70s in Europe.

The food was great, the beer flowed smoothly, and the bill was more than reasonable. Oh yeah, the company was pretty good too!

Today was, of course, a lazy day. We’d already decided that we’d either do brunch or the cinema for Bolt in 3D. This morning came, brunch didn’t happen, so I dove into a couple of hours of WoW. Both myself and the wife then felt we needed a walk to clear out the cobwebs, so we wandered over to South Park to see if we could find a cafe to sit outside with the pooch and have a coffee. No such luck, sadly, but we did end up wandering up to el cheapo mexicano restaurant for a light beer and a bite. The walk home was a little chilly, but in that invigorating way that you just don’t get in Singapore. I was warm enough walking in a sweater, scarf and hat, and couldn’t be happier.

The more time I spend in this city, and walking around in this city, the more I love it. I know I’ve not even thought about beginning to maybe scratch the surface, but even without diving to the great depths that are available, I feel at home.

I can’t wait to get to work this week to see what new challenges are waiting for me, and I can’t wait until next weekend to see what new places are waiting to be explored.

I never did get to the cinema, but that can always wait until tomorrow.

Posted on 2008/11/24 by dominic in personal | Tagged eating out, san francisco, weekend | Leave a comment

Thank you to Wil Wheaton for this 5 minutes that made my night.

Posted on 2008/11/23 by dominic in personal | Tagged monty python, star trek | Leave a comment

I can stop whenever I want

I bet you’d thought I’d forgotten all about you, and was going to continue with lame updates that were just reblogs of other peoples’ far more inspired efforts. Well I didn’t, but I have been incredibly busy.

Playing WoW.

Well not just that, though it was the focus of the weekend. I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me begin just before the weekend…

diddley-doo diddley-doo diddley-doo

So on Friday, one of my new workmates made the wondefully sweet offer of inviting myself and Mrs Dominic to brunch on Sunday with his family at Samovar. It was sweet as he has known me all of a week, and all I’ve done is pester him with inane questions with blindingly obvious answers which has stopped him from getting on with his own work. I also noted that he was playing the aforementioned game at lunchtime, which started us talking.

I thought I’d mentioned this in a previous post, but I can’t find it. Warhammer Online arrived and was played for a couple of weeks, and then just slipped away from me. Part of this was the move, and part of it was that I could, for some reason, only play it on the wife’s laptop, and not on the uber-machine of doom that I traditionally play PC games on. Even the might of EA’s technical support team couldn’t help me! I did want to play it more, and I genuinely like some of the decisions they’ve made in terms of opening up co-operative gaming to a level that WoW just hasn’t, but then I saw WoW being played. And the new expansion came out. Poot.

I didn’t get the new expansion as I don’t have a character that is at a level to enjoy the new content, however I did agree to buy a copy from the chap at work when it arrives, so that he could dash out and get one on launch day. See, I’m nice like that. Completely selfless motivations.

Anyway, Saturday came, and I thought “buggrit”, and reopened my account. I played all day with a new character and had a great time. During this time, the missus was getting gradually sicker and sicker, but thought she’d bounce back. She didn’t.

Sunday morning came, and it was clear we had to cancel brunch. I felt really bad as it was such a great opportunity to connect with someone here in the city, and it was a generous offer to make, but it was a day of nursing. Nursing that involved making sure the wife was well fed with soup, had plenty of aspirin, nasal sprays, vapour rubs and any other remedies I could find, before getting to level 14 before the end of the day.

This does not mean, however, that I will now be spending every waking hour playing. Oh no. I still have those 42000 words to write for my novel in the next 13 days, and I’m living in a brand new city that is clamouring for my attention. In fact, I didn’t play at all today. I spent this morning signing a lease for an awesome apartment — the first one we saw, which doesn’t happen often — before finally applying for my Social Security Number.

The lease signing was fairly uneventful, as those things go. I actually read the contract very carefully this time; something that I always promise myself I’ll do better next time, and always fail to spot the glaring we’re-going-to-keep-all-of-your-money clause. This time, I think I got it. Though watch this space, of course.

Applying for a Social Security Number was also the proverbial slice of pie (apple, I suppose it must be). I expected a nightmare of queues and forms and efficacious little jobsworths shuffling me from one window to the next complaining that my middle names are too long (they don’t fit on the forms. Ever. Thank you, parents) or that they don’t know where Jersey is, or they confuse it with New Jersey and can’t figure out how I’m British, etc, etc. Instead, after waiting for twenty minutes for my number to be called, it took all of 5 minutes and I was out of there. I just keep being impressed by this country, how friendly everyone is, how easy everything is, and how people in service roles, interacting with the public, actually provide a service! It’s unheard of, I know!

Today was also a large milestone in that I finally finished the gauntlet of paperwork thrown down by those bureaucratic vampires in HR and Benefits. Dragging the missus through the small print of health plan schedules when she was drowning in snot does seem a little ironic, in hindsight, but it is now Done.

Tomorrow, I might actually get to do some work at work, instead of paperwork at work. That, and a little levelling, of course. And next weekend, when everyone in the house is back to full health, we shall Brunch and be merry!

And maybe squeeze in a couple of levels.

Posted on 2008/11/18 by dominic in personal | Tagged brunch, mmorpg, warhammer online, work, world of warcraft | Leave a comment

A high-resolution image of earth-rise on the moon. Not upscaled, not digitally enhanced, the data was always there, just unreadable. NASA have now read it and released it.

via cache.gawker.com

Posted on 2008/11/17 by dominic in personal | Tagged space porn | Leave a comment

Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.

Lord Byron
(via kari-shma)

Posted on 2008/11/16 by dominic in personal | Leave a comment

Your Weekly Address from the President-elect | Change.gov: The Obama-Biden Transition Team

Not that the content is not important, but what is more important is the choice of medium. This is a fantastic start to the promised transparency of Obama’s administration, and shows a rare understanding of how to speak directly to the public.

Posted on 2008/11/15 by dominic in personal | Tagged obama | Leave a comment

Please. Someone wipe the drool from my chin.

Posted on 2008/11/14 by dominic in personal | Tagged trailer, watchmen | Leave a comment

Fun with Windows CMD.exe

While I was in a semi-conscious state this morning, my body awaiting the arrival of sweet, sweet caffeine, and due to some issues I’m having with my work environment setup, I happened to check out what environment variables were set. I noticed one named ‘PROMPT’ that I immediately assumed worked similarly to the PS1 and PS2 environment variables under bash.

I briefly searched to see if I could find any documentation on this, but came up short and decided to do my own digging.

The default setting appears to be $P$G, which gives you your current path, followed by the ‘>’ symbol. I went through a heap of $<x> combinations to see what other things I could get into my prompt. Here are the results:

$A &
$B |
$C (
$D Today’s date
$E Some little box character
$F )
$G >
$L <
$N Current path drive letter
$P Current path
$Q =
$S A single space
$T Current time
$V Current version of Windows
$$ $
$& %
$_ Adds a newline
$+<x> x

My new prompt is then

$+[$T$+]$S$P$S$$$S

which looks like:

[ 9:38:26.39] E: $

Now if I can figure out how to get some colour in there, we’re laughing…

On a side note, does tumblr just hate html tables or am I doing something horribly wrong when I try to add them?

Update: If you type ‘prompt /?’ at the command prompt, the above list is laid out for you. That would have saved me some time. If you use the ‘prompt’ command to set your prompt, it seems to only hold for the duration of the cmd process, so it might be useful in a batch file. Perhaps combining this with the ‘color’ command and running that instead of ‘cmd’ directly is the way to get a pretty command prompt.

I’m fairly sure there’s a way to use the $e escape code to get colours too, but no success yet…

Posted on 2008/11/13 by dominic in personal | Tagged command-line, WinXP tip | Leave a comment

Finest worksong

Today was the first day of my new job. I’ve posted before about how I felt different about this change of job, as I already knew the people and what was going on at the company, however that really didn’t prepare me for actually being there.

I spent 45 minutes on a bus getting to work. Most people I’ve told this to think that this is an outrageous time to spend on a bus, but compared to the length of commute I regularly made in London, it’s actually quite reasonable. I’m also in the enviable position of having the beginning and the end of my commute be the terminals of the bus route. In other words, I’m pretty much guaranteed a seat.

I settled in, fired up the BBC Radio 4 News Quiz podcast, and enjoyed the ride. I spent much of the time watching San Francisco roll by, and tried my hardest to remember each intersection and my impressions of them to report back once I got home. It’s important to get a good sense of a place when you’re looking for an apartment to live in, and you want to pick the right area.

Once I was at work, I picked up my new pass and waited for orientation to begin. Orientation was much as I expected: Lots of paperwork, a couple of videos that appear to be selling the company to you, when you’ve already signed up for the job, and an attempt to remember every little thing I’ve worked on in my own time to declare as a past invention. The last bit always takes the most time. It was fun to see the videos that I last saw a year and a bit ago when I started in Singapore. Having actually been there and seen it for myself, and worked with the people in the video, I can say that they really need to update the video as the studio has grown dramatically.

A very quick introduction from the IT Service Desk, and it was time for lunch with my new peers. This is always a fun time for a new hire; the people you’re having lunch with are on a free lunch, as are you. And contrary to the popularly held belief, the lunch really is free. For that hour, a new hire will find themselves the most popular member of the team. Hopefully that popularity will continue for some, but it’s certain for the initial lunch.

The food at the Presidio Dining Commons is fairly legendary, as far as work canteens go. It’s an old mess hall, and is furnished in dark wood with beautiful views of the Presidio park and the Palace of Fine Arts. The food itself is fresh, with a selection of salads and sushi to simpler fare such as pizza and burgers. I opted for a rustic-looking veggie burger with a fruit salad on the side. I expected it to be a light lunch, but it knocked me out for the afternoon.

Fortunately, the afternoon consisted of me clearing out three weeks of email from Singapore (my account had been moved over and I’m still on all of the old mailing lists) and ensuring that I had all of the software that I need. A very slow introduction to the job.

Tomorrow, I have a morning of benefits orientation and timecard training, which is sure to be as exciting as it sounds, and then I have to round out the paperwork with an application for a social security number. I should actually start doing some work on Wednesday, and I cannot wait. I’ve been off work for three weeks, which has been great to clear my head of all of the old stuff, but now I have a void which needs filling. I’m dying to get my coding teeth into some new tasks and a new project, and start to find my place in the team.

All in all, today was a little underwhelming. I’m not sure what I expected, certainly not to be dropped in at the deep end, but right now I just feel exhausted. I’m putting this down to being out of shape. Much like an athlete who takes a break and then finds they can’t work out as hard as they could previously, and not that I know that much about that, I feel like my work muscles have wasted away a little. I’m just not used to being in an office environment, and the number of small conversations and interactions that I had today seem to have taken their toll.

At least I should sleep well tonight.

Posted on 2008/11/11 by dominic in personal | Tagged presidio, san francisco, work | Leave a comment

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