How are you?
Sunday, September 16th, 2012When people ask me, off the cuff, something simple like:
“How are you?”
I sometimes find it hard to know how to reply.
Obviously, partly this is an age old “I’m human, you’re human, we’re both alive” statement with no deep meaning, but usually there’s also a genuine feeling of “let me know if you’re seriously upset”.
Usually when asked I’ll respond,
“Good, I think”.
which most people, quite reasonably think is a fairly strange response.
The problem is that I don’t generally think about how I am – if I was upset or happy about something 5 days ago, it won’t be at the forefront of my mind.
I’m sure I can’t be alone in this, and it feels like this one of the bits of our culture that doesn’t really make sense.
TL;DR: I insist on responding accurately to an age-old greeting practice.
I need your help: challenge me something!
Sunday, May 13th, 2012
Find a horizon
In three months, I want to have completed 7 personal challenges.
I’m not too bothered about where the achievements weigh in on a global scale – I’m not trying to set a world record – just a “Tim record”.
I need your help to help me work out what to do. I’ve had a few ideas, some of them are ok, some of them aren’t so great. What do you think I’d find challenging?
A note: challenges have to be vaguely appealing to me – it doesn’t matter whether playing golf or BASE jumping are challenging, I don’t want to do either.
“Fitness”
Other suggestions welcome
- Complete a street marathon
- Swim over 100m across open, cold water without assistance
- Swim 30 consecutive lengths in a 50 metre pool
- Drop a stone in weight and maintain it for at least 30 days.
- Be able to do 50 sit ups in 5 minutes
- Be able to do 10 consecutive pull ups
- Run 70km over 7 consecutive days
- Run 10km in under an hour
- Climb up and down x000 metres in xxhours (how many?!)
- Do a 20 mile hill walk
- Do a 30 mile hill walk
“Skills”
Other suggestions welcome
- Get baseline climbing qualifications
- Get baseline kayaking qualifications
- Get baseline windsurfing qualifications
- Get surfing lessons
- Go paragliding
- Bake something new
- Make a short film (must not be a documentary, music video or advert)
“Culture”
Other suggestions welcome
- Throw two, 3 course, dinner parties
- Perform two open mic nights
- Prepare an entertaining 30 minute talk on notechnical subject and give it at two barcamps
- Learn the Melbourne Shuffle
- Write a song for Youtube
“Technology”
If anyone can suggest technical challenges that are actual challenges, that’d be good.
- Be able to deploy a 4 machine Magento cluster from a script (or systems provisioning system) with mysql master-master replication, Varnish ESI, local CDN, SSL, sane firewalls and low impact scheduled backups.
“Travel”
I’d quite like to have a travel section here, but I can’t think of anything that sounds appealing that’s a challenge. (I’m not a fan of “x countries in x hours” because it seems rather shortsighted, and liable to make sure you only see a bunch of airport lounges, in addition most “visit this country” challenges seem to essentially be “spend some money”, which isn’t really a challenge – the challenge was getting the money or being a creative routefinder.)
- Travel by as many different modes of transport as possible from A to B