loonyblurb

As my blog has been relatively quiet recently, I thought I’d take this opportunity to let you know that an article I’ve written about how to write for the web has just been published on my company’s website.

I work for a small company called Rendili, and you can find my article here.

I hope that it’ll prove useful, and if anyone wants to make any comments or add anything then please feel free to post your comments here on my personal blog.

Thank you!

So today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day organised to highlight the wide-ranging contributions and achievements of women in science and technology.

Ada Lovelace

While in general I try to stay away from the whole gender debate surrounding these industries, I don’t think that anyone can deny that women form a very definite minority in these areas. There are a whole host of reasons for this, none of which I particularly want to go into and none of which are going to be that quick and easy to solve. But I believe that everyone has the ability and opportunity (however small) to help change mindsets, throw out the old stereotypes and encourage a more open and welcoming atmosphere.

In regards to today’s post, it can only be a good thing that women are being publicly recognised for the work that they do. This will hopefully lead to them being inspired to keep up with the good work and stand as encouragement for others just starting out or looking to join the profession. One day I hope that we won’t really need events like these as they’ll have served their purpose, and our industries will be freed from the stigma and issues that arise from having such a wide gender ratio.

I should also point out that throughout my time working as a developer, I have received a massive amount of help and support from both friends and colleagues, male and female, and I would really like to thank all of you! You’ve been brilliant!

But in the spirit of Ada Lovelace Day, I am going to highlight one person in particular who has helped me such a lot in past, both personally and professionally, and to whom I owe a great deal.

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I’ve been feeling bad about not posting for a while, but I’ve just realised how long it’s been!

All I can say is that it’s testament to how busy I’ve been recently. I take quite a bit of time tweaking my blog posts until I am happy with them, so as a result I’ve got a few unpublished posts and some ideas that as yet are unwritten, but I just either don’t have the time to complete them or just can’t get my head into the right frame of mind for writing.

As such things have been a bit quiet around here recently.

However I shall be taking the opportunity to hopefully kickstart everything again tomorrow, as it’s Ada Lovelace Day.

I meant to take part in this last year but couldn’t quite get everything up together in time. I shall be joining in this year though to help celebrate the contributions and achievements of women in science and technology.

Will you?

So today is blog action day, and this year the big drive is to get everyone talking about climate change.

Now this is quite a big topic and one that I feel quite strongly about, among many other things. It’s just unfortunate that I’ve been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to really work on putting this post together with lots of interesting (and quite scary) facts and figures like I had originally planned. So instead you’ll have to put up with just a brief ramble from me that may or may not go some way towards encouraging you to think about the state that the world is currently in.

Pretty much everyday there’s some story in the newspaper about climate change or the causes and outcomes of climate change. Be it global warming, deforestation, you carbon footprint – all sorts of things. For example I came into work this morning and the first article that appeared on my google reader was this from the bbc:
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My 101 Things in 1001 days list:

• Start day – 01/06/2009
• End day – 27/02/2012 – so clearly failed on most of these but I’ll try again with a new list

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Well today is the 50th birthday of that wonderful old car, the mini!

I just mention it here as I believe it should be celebrated, and it also gives me the chance to reminisce about my own first car, my lovely beautiful Red Hot Mini!

My Mini Red Hot

As a car it was wonderful to drive, I knew exactly where all the corners of the car were for parking due to it’s excellent all round vision and I could squeeze it through the tiniest gaps. When I was having a bad day there was nothing better than driving down the street and finding another mini driving coming the other way, flashing their lights and waving in greeting. That never failed to cheer me up!
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Welcome to my new blogsite, loonyblurb.net, owned by me, loonytoons!

This is the new home for all my random thoughts, ravings, rantings, ponderings and general cerebral wonderings so hopefully over time it will fill up with a collection of entertaining if not interesting things. That said it will mean that I will have to be good and keep posting to it as otherwise it would all be rather pointless but hopefully that won’t be a problem. There might be some really random posts going up though!

So anyway, welcome to my site, come in, sit down have a look around! I am always working to add new content so please do check back now and again.

But without further ado, here is a picture of my dog to complete the welcome (ah bless, isn’t she sweet).

Luna the Lurcher