Tag: review

Another year passes, the key news is that T(now 13) has grown massively, he is taller than both of us now and has gone through three shoe sizes in the last year. I’ve been googling “How to bonsai a teenager”! Online school is working out pretty well, T wants to return to mainstream school in the Autumn – a small, relaxed one with intake at the start of GCSEs.

After a couple of years of long COVID I’m back to running again but I’m only able to build up slowly. I also managed holidays to North Wales, and Dorset – back to the homeland – which I haven’t been up to for a few years.

I’m sort of retired – circumstances make looking for work a little challenging at the moment also it turns out not working is quite nice!

This year I published 18 book reviews, a game review (for Black Myth Wukong) and a Rosetta stone post on Rust, the programming language. I’ve actually read four further books on school leadership and behaviour – reviews to be published at AFIS.

I had several themes in the books I read this year; one theme was autism: Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children by Phil Christie, Margaret Duncan, Ruth Fidler and Zara Healey was a bit academic. The books by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker, The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout and When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse were much better and more helpful – they have a bit of a cult following amongst parents of neurodiverse children. Untypical by Pete Wharmby is a combination of a personal memoir and a guide to making life easier for autistic people, I think the major takeaway for me was the ongoing stress of trying to fit in to systems not designed for the neurodiverse.

I also read three books on Africa by African authors: An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi, Africa is not a country by Dipo Faloyin and It’s a Continent by Astrid Madimba and Chinny Ukata. Badawi’s book is encyclopaedic – from the earliest African civilisations finishing briefly with the post-War independence movements. It feels like a jumping off point for further reading. Faloyin’s book was my favourite of these three, partly for his pastiche of How to write about Africa an essay by Binyavanga Wainaina but also it was more explicitly an African view of Africa. All three books attempt to give an equal coverage of the 54 diverse countries of Africa which in a way is a drawback because Africa is so diverse.

Also in history, I read about Mesopotamian cultures The Library of Ancient Wisdom by Selena Wisnom. I struggled to decide between Science and Islam – A History by Ehsan Masood and Pathfinders – The Golden Age of Arabic Science by Jim Al-Khalili in reading about Islamic Science, so I read both. Wisnom’s book is perhaps my favourite of the three – it describes the rich literature of Mesopotamia written on clay tablets in cuneiform, spanning thousands of years. I read about Islamic Science because it was a gap in my knowledge of the history of science. Masood and Al-Khalili’s books are both fascinating and readable, Al-Khalili’s book talks more about the detail of the science and his personal connection to the region. They both do a good job of highlighting that the so called “Dark Ages” were only so for Northern Europeans, and how the work of Arabic scholars was critical to the Renaissance.

After binging on Roman history last year, I just read Roads in Roman Britain by Hugh Davies this year. A sort of retirement project for the author, who had worked as a civil engineer. For the purposes of understanding my own retirement I read Retirement – the psychology of reinvention by Kenneth Shultz, I think my main takeaway from this was that it would have been better to start thinking about retirement a few years before retiring! Related to retirement I got Brilliant Bread by James Morton – a fine collection of bread recipes which I have been following. Six Thousand Years of Bread by H.E. Jacob was a rather idiosyncratic history of bread.

Several books didn’t fit into a broader theme, 1666 – Plague, War and Hellfire by Rebecca Rideal – it centres on London, the Plague is the Black Death, the Hellfire is the Great Fire of London and the War is one of the Anglo-Dutch Wars. The book cast the Black Death and Fire in a different light for me, having learnt of them as a child in the seventies. The Book-Makers by Adam Smyth – through which I discovered one of my former colleagues runs a small press – talks about the technical process of printing, the evolution of the form of the book and the business of printing. A History of the World in 47 Borders by Jonn Elledge, difficult to summarise briefly but perhaps the most interesting takeaway for me was that the modern nation state is a 17th century invention. These last two titles I picked up browsing in a bookshop.

Finally there was Kindred – Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art by Rebecca Wragg Sykes – a review of where we are now in understanding Neanderthals – it’s fair to say our understanding has come on a lot since the seventies when I first learned of them.

This coming year I’m hoping to build up my running, and work out how to be retired. Hopefully I’ll be able to get out and about more as the year progresses.

I am now recovering from my long COVID, I can get out and about more now without getting exhausted – I even went on holiday to Rhosneigr for a week in the summer! I have fewer days feeling absolutely awful. This was in part a result of the local long COVID clinic, the instructor for the long COVID exercise classes I attended mentioned that some long COVID sufferers had issues with “mast cell activation syndrome” (MCAS) which can be addressed by dietary changes – essentially a low histamine diet. This has worked for me although I can’t drink alcohol or eat mature cheeses which has been a bit of a blow.

I have been working with the Humanitarian Data Exchange for UNOCHA for the past year which I have really enjoyed, that contract comes to an end shortly so I will be looking for freelance work. I’m also thinking more seriously about retiring. As a result of having paid work I felt able to spend freely, I bought myself a new guitar (an Epiphone Les Paul Standard gold top) and an electric bike (a Rayleigh Motus) – the electric bike has been brilliant and helped me get out and about. I think this is part of the reason I can think about retiring, other middle aged men would buy a Gibson Les Paul and a motorbike for x10 the cost of my purchases!

This year I reviewed 13 books. I started the year with Her Space, Her Time by Shohini Ghose which was about a history of women in physics, generally astrophysics and cosmology in the late 19th and 20th centuries. I followed this with A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout which provided an alternative view to how best to design software. Also in this theme was Beautiful Code edited by Andy Oram & Greg Wilson, an edited volume of essays on pieces of code that their authors were particularly pleased with. In the computing theme I also read The Rust Programming Language by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols – I’m currently learning Rust. I actually read this book online which is a novelty for me.

My favourite book of the year was An Immense World by Ed Yong this is about animal senses, I picked it up slightly reluctantly thinking that there wasn’t much to say about the five senses and that everything was pretty well known by now. I was wrong on both accounts! I enjoy Yong’s writing, this combined with the subject matter made it my favourite.

I had a bit of an Alice Roberts binge. I read Ancestors, about burials in prehistoric Britain, a few years ago. This year I read Buried and Crypt which are partner volumes to Ancestors which cover burials in the first millennium and the first half of the second millennium respectively. Buried has a secondary theme of migration and Crypt of disease and injury. I also read Anatomical Oddities by Alice Roberts – I must admit this one didn’t really appeal to me. It is a collection of anatomical illustrations with some commentary, Roberts is a very fine illustrator but the text for the book was incoherent.

In the past I have mainly read on the history of science with most material relating to the 15th century and onwards. Roberts’ books got me interested in the earlier history of Britain. I started with Britain BC by Francis Pryor which covers Britain prior to the Roman invasion. Echolands by Duncan MacKay covers Boudica’s revolt against the Roman’s in 60-61AD, it’s a sort of history/travelogue combination which I found very engaging. Roman Britain – A New History by Guy de la Bédoyère is a beautiful, encyclopaedic coffee table book which covers the whole of the Roman occupation of Britain. I am now interested in the late Iron Age coinage in Britain.

To finish with a couple of books which didn’t follow any theme. I read Daphne Draws Data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic which is a book about data visualization for children – I reviewed this at the request of the author. I rather enjoyed it and hope to be able to borrow some of the illustrations for my own presentations. Sound tracks by Graeme Lawson is a history of musical instruments via archaeological artefacts. What struck me here is how little of musical instruments survives (usually only metal parts), and also how long sophisticated flutes and pipes have been in existence.

I took part in the Chester mid-summer parade, as a pirate – as I have done for the last few years – I was able to sit down a lot of the time which was a big help.

Our son is now at online school (Minerva’s Virtual Academy), he is settling in well but getting to this point was not voluntary and was traumatic.

We’re looking forward to a new year of improving health, semi-retirement and lower stress education!

This year has been rather unusual as a result of redundancy, and long COVID.

I caught COVID in February 2022 and my fitness has been in steady decline since then – I used to be able to run 3x10km per week but through 2022 I struggled to work my way back to that level and in fact each time I made progress I was knocked back to a lower level until by September this year I stopped running. I have also missed out on holidays and family gatherings – knowing that an half an hour or so of mild exertion would leave me exhausted. In the spring of this year I approached my GP, and after a long series of tests which showed I was in otherwise excellent health I ended up in my local long COVID clinic in October.

The long COVID clinic has been really helpful – after an initial evaluation appointment (an hour long with two people!) I now have a monthly meeting with an occupational therapist whose main advice is not to do too much and rest. I’m currently stable but not doing much, looking forward to working my way back up very cautiously.

This summer, at the age of 53, for the first time in my life, I was made redundant. This was a rather stressful process, mitigated slightly by the fact that at the first hint of redundancy being on the cards (invitation to a meeting with line manager and a representative of HR) I made my “can I retire?” spreadsheet and that looked like a possibility! I am not retiring though. I wrote a “Leaving Address” blog post. After spending the summer lounging around doing not much except a little DIY, I then spent the Autumn doing little on the advice of the long COVID clinic.

Then I became employed by mistake*! My old boss from ScraperWiki got in touch asking if I was available because UNOCHA were looking for someone to do maternity cover. I worked on the establishment of the Humanitarian Data Exchange for UNOCHA nearly 10 years ago. The day after my first contact I spoke to someone I’d worked with 10 years ago, submitted my CV and filled in a form. I had a contract inside a week! I’m really enjoying the work. The end of year townhall meeting was a bit of an eye-opener – it included personal testimonies from people working in Türkiye (where there was an earthquake earlier this year), Yemen (war zone) and Gaza (also war zone).

I blogged about 18 books this year, including biographies of Richard Trevithick, John von Neumann, Margaret Cavendish, and Grace Hopper. If nothing else they highlighted just how exceptional and unusual people who warrant biographies are. The Grace Hopper biography was prompted by Broad Band by Claire L. Evans a book about women working in computing over the years since Ada Lovelace in the first half of the 19th century.

There have been a few books that fit under the diversity theme, in addition to Broad Band, On Savage Shores by Caroline Dodds Pennock – about native Americans in Europe from the 15th century, Femina by Janina Ramirez – about women in the medieval period and The First Astronomers by Duane Hamacher . The First Astronomers is about aboriginal astronomers from various parts of the world (although mainly Australia) – they are very astute observers, aware of phenomena only recognised in the West in the later 19th century. I also gained a better appreciation for oral traditions from this book, stories are not meant to be taken literally – they are mnemonics to pass on vast bodies of knowledge as accurately as possible. I think these books have had the biggest impact on how I think.

There was a thread of books on data visualisation too – starting with Storytelling with data by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic continuing with Data Points by Nathan Yau, Resonate by Nancy Duarte and finishing with Storytelling with you by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. In other technical books I also read Masterminds of Programming by Federico Biancuzzi and Shane Warden – about the inventors of a number of programming languages, and The Mythical Man-month by Frederick Brooks Jr. The Mythical Man-month is a classic in software project management, written based on experiences in the late sixties it has the air of fifties era sci-fi, fantastically insightful in places but deeply anachronistic in others.

With time on my hands I also started a series of technical posts of my own, on the ecosystems for different programming environments – starting with Python and Typescript – this turned out to be quite revealing – Python is my “first” programming language at the moment but researching the Typescript ecosystem clarified my understanding of Python.

I read a couple of historical overviews, The Earth Transformed by Peter Frankopan, about the impact of the environment on human history and vice verse, and How the world thinks by Julian Baggini – this is a comparative history of philosophy. The Wood Age by Roland Ennos and Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines and the Health of Nations by Simon Schama are difficult to classify. I must admit I struggled with Foreign Bodies, it featured incredibly long chapters, and the longest sentence I recall reading in English.

My son started high school, which went very well. There is a lot more preparation than there was when I was growing up, transition days, a couple of summer school days and a WhatsApp group! Mrs H is now Dr H – she graduated from her EdD in October.

Personally, I am hoping for a better 2024 with some recovery from long COVID and perhaps the continuation of the work I am doing with UNOCHA.

• Withnail and I reference :-)

As is traditional here I present an annual review of my blog which is largely comprised of book reviews but this year includes some technical posts as I learnt some new software engineering skills.

In book terms I started the year with Natives by Akala – this is the autobiography of Akala, – it fits into the Black Lives Matter theme which I started in the previous year. Railways and the Raj by Christian Wolmar also has something of this air, the way the British ran the Raj, and the subsequent violence on Partition are a salutatory lesson.

I read a couple of books about scripts, one specifically focussed on Chinese script – Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu, and a second, very short book, on all scripts – Writing and script – A very Short Introduction by Andrew Robinson.

From a technical point of view I read Felienne Hermans’ The Programmer’s Brain which definitely provided a lot of food for thought, Software Design Decoded by Marian Petre and André van der Hoek and Data mesh by  Zhamak Dehgani. The topic of this last book, the data mesh, has been a central theme of my work this year.

My favourite book of the year was Pale Rider – The Spanish Flu of 1918 by Laura Spinney which was written before the covid pandemic, it was interesting to see the differences – no effective vaccines, or even a clear understanding of viruses and the similarities – arguments over schools remaining open. I also read The Art of More by Michael Brooks – a history of maths, it turns out accounting and bureaucracy were important drivers in the invention of maths. The last book of the year was Dutch Light by Hugh Aldersey-Williams – a biography of Christiaan Huygens – the second I have read.

On a more general history front I read Ask a Historian by Greg Jenner and Curious devices and mighty machines by Samuel J.M.M. Alberti, which is about science museums.

I continue to learn how to play the guitar, Play it Loud by Brad Tolinski and Alan Di Perna fits in with this – it is a history of the electric guitar, broader than The Birth of Loud by Ian S. Port which I read a few years ago. I have stopped with learning to play the (electronic) drums.

My posting this year was a bit more varied than it has been for a while, I started a thread of technical posts written as I clarified my thinking for a project I am working on at work – one of which, Understanding setup.py, setup.cfg and pyproject.toml in Python, has been my most popular blog post by a large margin and boosted traffic to my blog to the highest level ever! That’s not to say traffic is particular high – I had about 20,000 visitors this year. Versioning in Python was in a similar vein – technical information about some very specific technology. A way of working: data science and Software engineering for Data Scientists were a bit more general and philosophical, they have received rather less traffic.

In the summer the whole family joined Chester’s mid-Summer Parade as pirates which was a great deal of fun.

On the holiday front, we went to Ambleside in the Lake District for a week in July. The photos below are from Allan Bank by Grasmere – an exceedingly relaxed National Trust property. I was impressed by my new phone’s ability to take reasonable photos through windows – normally the inside of the room would be under-exposed, the photo album for the trip is here with many more photographs.

We also went to Dorset in October, where I grew up, stopping off at the gardens at Stourhead on the way down (pictured below). I scattered the ashes of my dad and stepmother with my stepbrothers in the New Forest. I was surprised how much ashes were involved – a large bag of flour-sized quantity for each of them. Dad would have been proud that two parties converged from two directions on the same location in the middle of the Forest from an X on an Ordnance Survey map, probably less impressed by me getting lost in a bog on the way back! Although as Mrs H said, getting lost having said a final farewell to my dad was rather symbolic. I posted a eulogy for my dad, here.

More photos from Dorset, including the Tank Museum, Monkey World and the Slimbridge Wetland Centre on the way back, here.

The Winter brought more entertainment, on the left you see me in my suit for the office Christmas Party. It is difficult to appreciate the sparkly-ness of the shoes but they are still out since I enjoy seeing them sparkle. On the right is the chief Roman from Chester’s Saturnalia celebration.

We all got covid earlier in the year, I still haven’t got back to my former running form – 10km in 50 minutes, I can only manage 3km in 15 minutes and struggle to run much further without post-exercise malaise setting in. My Garmin running watch generously tells me I still have the body of a 31 year old, 21 years younger than my calendar age!

I’ve have had quite a lot of counselling for anxiety this year – featuring Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) which I insisted on referring to as “disco lights”. It appears to have worked to some degree although in the depths of winter when I’m not doing anything that induces anxiety it is difficult to tell.

The year started much in the manner of 2020 with Thomas, now aged 9, going back to school for a single day before returning to home schooling because of the covid pandemic. Despite this he’s doing well, surprising his RE teacher by explaining what omnipotent and omniscient meant! In the Autumn term his class had a covid outbreak which he managed to dodge despite sharing a table with three of the infected. Sharon and I have both been vaccination three times.

We managed to go on holiday to Anglesey on the hot week at the beginning of the summer, much time spent on the beach and we all got a bit sunburnt. We also travelled down to Dorset to see my mum in October- the first time we have seen her in over two years. We stopped off at Stonehenge on the way, it is the first time I remember visiting Stonehenge, I probably did as a child since I grew up only an hours drive away. Things have changed at Stonehenge since I was young, you used to approach by parking at a visitor centre and crossing under a main road but now the road has been closed and grassed over and the visitor centre has been moved away so you approach by a half hour walk which reflects the approach our prehistoric ancestors are though to have made.

Overall we rather enjoyed the experience, it felt like a bit of a pilgrimage and once we got to the stones it didn’t feel too busy.

In domestic news we now have two new cats, Lily and Michelle – adopted from Warrington Animal Welfare which incidentally has a fine view of the Warrington Transporter Bridge. We adopted our previous cats, Bill and Ted, when we moved to Chester in 2004, Ted died a few years ago and Bill disappeared, presumed dead in April. Lily (on the arm of the chair below) is three, and her daughter Michelle is 8 months old – its a bit of a novelty having young, playful cats again. Unlike Bill and Ted, Lily and Michelle actually use the cat beds and cat tree we have generously provided, they have not tried to dig their way out of the lounger where they are currently largely confined (looking at no cat in particular, Ted).

For a while over the summer and autumn we had a trail camera setup in the back garden, this followed on from taking part in a hedgehog study run by Chester Zoo – they loaned us a trail camera to look for hedgehogs. None showed up until after we had returned the camera at the end of the study and bought our own! The highlights of our trail camera experiments were the evening a fox cub poked a hedgehog with their nose, and discovered it was prickly, and the tawny owl – an unexpected visitor for a suburban garden. We had quite a few foxes what looked like a family with three or four cubs – sometimes even showing up in the day time. And we have video proof that "yes, that is fox poo"!

I started and finished the year with books where the media was the message with History of Britain in Maps by Philip Parker to start, and Index, A history of the by Dennis Duncan which was about indexes specifically but also something of the history of the book. I have learned that indexes have been used as both satire and fiction.

I read a number of guitar related books this year, Guitar Method – Music Theory by Tom Kolb, How to Write Songs on Guitar by Rikky Rooksby, Guitar Pedals by Rob Thorpe, Riffs: How to Create and Play Great Riffs by Rikky Rooksby, Guitar Looping – The Creative Guide by Kristof Neyens and related to this Audio Production Basics with Ableton Live by Eric Kuehnl. My favourite of these is How to Write Songs on Guitar by Rikky Rooksby which is a bit of a "bigger picture" book, and rather more book-like than the others. I still play guitar badly but I treated myself to a new guitar (a Gretsch G2622 Streamliner DC in Ocean Turquoise, see below), it is a modest step up price-wise on my Squier Stratocaster and I think this shows.

On the more technical side I read Exercises in Programming Style by Cristina Videira Lopes which I really enjoyed, it shows the same program written in 33 different styles, all in the Python programming language. I also read Data Pipelines with Apache Airflow by Bas P Harenslak and Julian R De Ruiter, as well as writing a blog post on Python Documentation with Sphinx.

My history reading tended more towards the prehistoric with Hidden Histories by Mary-Ann Ochota which talks mainly about Prehistoric British landscapes, The Goddess & The Bull by Michael Balter – about Çatalhöyük one of the oldest settlements in the world, and Ancestors by Professor Alice Roberts – about prehistoric British burials.

On the Black Lives Matter front I read Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race by Reni Eddo-Lodge, Precolonial Black Africa by Cheikh Anta Diop, and Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera.

There were a couple of natural history books, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake about fungus and Much Ado About Mothing by James Lowen, about moths. Sort of related since it pertains to the biological sciences was The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson which is a biography of Jennifer Doudna, and the CRISPR gene-editing technology for which she won a Nobel Prize. And finally, Eye of the Beholder by Laura J. Snyder which is a joint biography of Johannes Vermeer and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek who were both born in Delft in 1632.

The year ends largely as it started with covid once again running wild in the UK, this time with the Omicron variant and we are unsure whether Thomas will return to school at the beginning of the year. Prospects are a little better because we now have a vaccine, and this seems effective against all variants although Thomas, as a 9 year old, does not receive any covid vaccinations.