wade.one » Ego-centric

Category Archives: Ego-centric

Posts that are more about me than anything else.

America, religion, marriage for all and why those who disagree are not American

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The next time anyone mentions anything to do with America and refusing to accept gay marriage, straight marriage or any marriage between two people – particularly those people in government jobs, please just point them to the first amendment page on Wikipedia and quote: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof Or in modern English: The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one … Continue reading →

Heterogeneous Parallel Programming – Completed and Certified!

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I just got my certificate through from Coursera for completing the Heterogeneous Parallel Programming by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on Coursera and I’m very happy! It was a fun (and free) course that covered primarily CUDA programming but towards the end went on to OpenCL. Fun course to do and really helped me rethink parallel computing. The principles taught in the course can be applied quite easily to multithreaded programming.   This was one of the things that started me down the route of my libraries on GitHub – parallelisation, logging, etc. It’s a course I would recommend to anyone interested … Continue reading →

Help us with our first house!

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Years ago I met my partner in Leeds, I was an office guy, he was a soldier in the US army serving over here. This was back in the time when we weren’t allowed to let them know we were a couple as the American army had the DADT (don’t ask, don’t tell) rule in place. We got this place together when it was affordable to rent for us both at the time. Unfortunately a few years later the American Army found out about us and he was kicked from the military. The cost of renting this house was no … Continue reading →

Ah…but can it play Crysis?

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Yes, yes it can! And by that I mean my new Geforce GTX 260, new OTT MSI motherboard and new 42″ Viera Plasma TV can. I maxed out all the settings, put it on my TV and hit “Play” and it worked a charm, if not a little disorientating when the screen shakes and blurs. It’s always the best test “ah, but can it play Crysis”? And I can very happily now say yes!

Feeling Better and Net Neutrality

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It’s been 5 days since I became ill and two days since I found out it was H1N1 and after taking tamiflu for the 3rd day now, I am feeling a lot better, it really clears up the symptoms very well; actually it just hides the symptoms like most over-the-counter cold/flu remedies but it’s stronger! I did find out after I received them you’re supposed to try and get them within 24 hours of contracting the virus as they’re most effective then, I was only 48 hours out. Annoyingly though my nose is still driving me nuts, it’s better but … Continue reading →

Home Remedies for the Common Cold

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I hate colds, they make you feel lethargic and depressed and make you want to stay in bed for 12 hours at a time even though you spend more time tossing and turning and getting up to blow your nose than you do actually sleeping. I’ve got a cold at the moment, I blame Dan at work, told him I’d get it on Friday but he stood over me, and now here I am, ill and moaning more than I should! Fortunately on Saturday as I was getting ill I was busy re-working our living room entertainment centre so now … Continue reading →

Derren Brown – How to Control the Nation

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I watched Derren Brown – How to Control the Nation last night as I wanted to see how his subliminal video (or as he calls it, PWA) would really work and while I know subliminal messaging can be easily ignored if you expect it, I wanted this one to work (it’s always more fun when things like this work for you than to rant about how cool you are that you could ignore it – you just miss the fun!) Anyhow, the result for me was it did work but only a little unfortunately. After the video ended and the … Continue reading →

Today’s musings

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Today’s work was a standard day, well except for the morning, actually no, that was a standard morning too, things didn’t work too well, they needed fixing, during which there were random jokes at Ben’s expense due to his pure love of graphs. With some help from Remo (my team manager) though, we did manage to work out some confusing MySQL queries – which as always, were actually remarkably simple, but until you see it, it’s harder than Michael Jackson visiting a pre-school (did I say this blog was probably bad for kids, fans of MJ and anyone who gets … Continue reading →

It goes without saying…

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…but never go to the gym without some kind of energy source. A piece of advice I keep meaning to pay attention to but it’s a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” I got home from work, had a drink of juice, quickly ate a Snickers then straight off to the gym to do some light cardio followed by some heavy weights – which felt great in that gym pain kind of way – only to finish and start to feel really sick as I had a shower as my body desperately tried to find an … Continue reading →

New underwear!

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No I don’t have a fetish for underwear, I just like to be comfortable and you don’t get much more comfortable than Aussiebum’s! We ordered some new underwear last week and after getting home from work today, it had arrived, fresh for Australia in the post. My favorites have to be the Saturate range, very vibrant, very comfortable and they attract a lot of attention at places like the gym.