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Questions from senji:

1) What is the one thing you miss most from the period when you were out of work between Zeus and nCipher?

A couple of specific things that I enjoyed were getting to know lark_ascending and the semi-regular pub lunches with j4; the more general thing that covers both of those and more was the freedom to do things without tight constraints of time and location.

To consider the specific example of lunch, these days lunch with a friend on a weekeday has to be with someone who is in town or can conveniently get there at a suitable time, has to be located in town, and can't take too long. While there are a number of nice people and places that do fit those criteria, there are others who I'd like to but unfortunately don't.

2) You seem to write a lot of software, but 'release' comparatively little of it. Why is this?

I'm incredibly bad at finishing things; my CVS is littered with incomplete projects that I lost interest in, sometimes because someone else had already done something good enough or better, sometimes just because my attention wandered elsewhere. It's something I'd like to fix.

It seems to be less of a problem at work, as you might hope and expect. Deadlines and clear requirements concentrate the mind. Perhaps I should write the hobby software to some kind of psuedo-contract with someone - but then, one of the things that I like about hobby programming is the lack of pressure to do anything other than noodle around.

Anyway if anyone has any specific requests, I'm all ears.

3) Out of the places you've worked, which did you like the most after the first month, and why?

I think I'd probably go for Zeus, though I think my reasons for that mean that if Zeus and nCipher had happened the other way around then it might have been nCipher. At elmail my role was that of essentially lone programmer with some sysadmin responsibilities and software development was just one small (and shrinking) part of the firm's business. In contrast at Zeus I was part of a team of developers, in an organization where software development was quite central. Getting out of elmail, which I'd been getting very annoyed with, certainly helped.

4) Which places, other than Cambridge, would you like to live in?

I used to really object to London as a place (too big and too dirty being the main objections in my mind) but lately I'm much happier with it, and I think that'd be one of them. Combined with some other shifts in opinion over the last couple of years I'm wondering if I'm undergoing a shift in world view of a sort; December of this year would be an obvious good point to review this more carefuly from.

5) What do you usually consider when purchasing a book (fiction or non-fiction)?

Fiction I tend to look at the first few page and see if it grabs my attention. There is a bit of a selection process before that involving familiar authors, reviews and recommendations from friends but it can also be as simple as a striking cover or title or good positioning in amongst the other books in a display.

Non-fiction largely means history at the moment. Being about a specific topic I'm already interested in is key; that is to say, I'm tending to form ideas about which aspect of history I want to learn more about and then seeking out books about it, rather picking the books on some other criterion and reading about whatever period they happen to cover. Counterexample: a positive review can override this.

An area I'd currently like to read more about is the Ottoman Empire.

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Keep intermittently bothering me and it'll happen sometime l-)