Headers Already Sent

2008 can be described in a single word: cracking! It’s been a busy year and has flown by. I’m going to sum it up quickly here for anyone who’s interested and also for my own future reference.

In a nutshell

I lived in Fleet, Hampshire for 6 months of the year before moving back to Kent. At the end of August I finished my 13 month internship at Sun Microsystems with the intention of going back to uni. This was short lived. I dropped out to “live the dream” which took me to San Francisco in November where Shazz and I secured seed funding for our web company.

Union Square - San Francisco

In terms of travel I went skiing in France in February, had a summer holiday in Turkey and an unexpected two week stint in San Francisco and Vancouver in November. Memorable weekends away include Alton Towers in Spring and a visit to Thorpe Park in the Autumn. Sprinkled between those were many good weekends in Brighton, Fleet and Whitfield, spent taking walks and soaking up the sun and fresh air.

Our hotel garden in Dalyan, Turkey

Speaking of fresh air, I’ve racked up around 12,000 miles in my car this year, and around 13,000 air miles. As in 2008 everyone went green (and absolutely barking too), for fun I’ve calculated my carbon footprint at 5.8 tonnes of CO2, only on flights / car. Does anyone care to enlighten me as to whether or not this is a respectable figure, or even accurate?

It’s been a good one for personal gadgetry too. My phone contract came up for renewal right at the beginning of the year so I got myself a shiny Nokia N95. It’s not so shiny anymore but it’s still serving me well. With the addition of my new MacBook Pro I’ll probably have to go for an iPhone next time (just so everything matches you understand).

Philosophically, this year I’ve looked really hard into Advaita Vedanta (Non-duality) and foolishly tried to make some sense of it. At the peak of my involvement I had a million and one troubling questions about life, the universe and everything. Luckily, it doesn’t appear that the mind can sustain this for long and after relaxing and stopping the questions I feel much better. It’s very clear to me now that that the idea of an “I” is an empty concept, stuff is just happening with no one doing it (like asking questions and looking for an answer) and it’s much better just to chill out and enjoy the show.

2008 was also the year that I started taking mustard seriously, discovered the stress of freelancing/job/side projects and had my hair cut after 3 years of solid growth, much to the delight of my friends, family and girlfriend.

New Year’s Resolutions

Sitting round doing a lot of computer work (and to a lesser extent I’m sure, my high beer consumption) has taken its toll on my body and earned me the nickname “fatty” amongst various friends. Not that I mind a little bit of extra weight, but I feel I should keep it in check before it gets out of hand. Beer bellies never looked that great with chicken legs anyway, so losing some tummy chub is the first priority.

Secondly, I want to work better. Not necessarily much harder or for longer hours, but better so that when I sit down to do some work I’m productive and not reading the news procrastinating. I’m well aware that this problem is experienced by pretty much everyone everywhere, so I don’t expect to completely solve it within a year. However, I’d like to find some effective techniques for improving my productivity during my working hours so that I can maximise my downtime.

What’s next?

2009 is set to be even crazier than 2008. I’m moving to Mountain View, CA in early January for a few months so I’ll be out of the country for a quarter of a year. And then who knows? We’ll see what happens and I’ll try to keep this blog updated a little more.

I’ve just finished setting up my current web projects on my shiny new MacBook Pro. One of my sites was throwing a 500 internal server error which meant that something was up with Apache, or an htaccess file.

I rewrite the URLs with mod_rewrite so my initial suspicion was that mod_rewrite wasn’t enabled in httpd.conf. This turned out to be wrong as it was enabled and it didn’t matter what was in the htaccess file, it still threw an error.

To cut a long story short I changed this line in httpd.conf from this

AllowOverride AuthConfig

to this

AllowOverride All

and the problem went away.

Hopefully this will help anyone who is having a similar issue.

<quasi-stealth mode>

Wowee! Three weeks ago myself and Shazz flew to San Francisco and explored the SF Bay Area in the hunt for a bit of dosh for our startup. I’m very pleased to report that we found it, so luckily it wasn’t a wasted trip.

This means that I’ve well and truly said goodbye to the world of academia for the time being as I’ll be heading back out to Mountain View to live for a while at the turn of the year. As dropping out has always been a dream of mine, this suits me down to the ground.

I’d love to share more here but for the time being we’re keeping things quiet. More will be revealed in due course (although probably not before Christmas, I’m rushed off my feet).