Life-&-Living

The Queen advertises for a dish washer to come on staff… My local MSP wonders if they’ve not heard of a dish washing machine. The WHO drills down into the alcohol stats.. Apparently alcohol killed more people than AIDS or TB in 2010.. Sobering.. Understanding the story.. Thirteen perspectives…. Brain chemicals and dating.. A primer. Teju Cole’s ‘Open City’ hits the shelves… The New Yorker, The Daily Beast and The Apostrophe weigh in with reviews. The kid named Facebook..Ostensibly its a testament to the impact FB had on the Egypt Revolution.. Hopefully, the kid doesn’t get a lot of stick for the name though.. There’s an app for that… Tracking relationship changes on Facebook gets the Web2.0 makeover….. SMH.. Web mourning? Help for the blokes - wristbands that warn of potentially PMSing partners. Bringing faiths together by cuisine.. The Faith and The Hot Dog show..

‘Spiritual’ love goes social… The story of Vicars connected by a witty comment on Facebook A soup ladle turns out to be a life saver in more ways than one.. Meet the bloke saved from a tiger by his wife’s soup ladle ‘Life is short, have an affair?’… Al Mohler muses on the Ashley Madison business model.. GABA receptors may be the reason for anxiety around that ’time of the month’ for the lasses.. The ’thief’ who sued the bloke he tried to steal from - and got 13k pounds.. A not so short history of Aji-no-moto.. And the scare scaremongering around MSG. Man vs Machine.. 1-0 to the machines on Jeopardy..

I suspect that the truest measure of how sensibly one has aged is how well one is able to take a long hard look at choices - and their potential long term effects - before acting. Time, that most elusive of customers, respects no one. From the day that we are born, our share - ladled without so much as an explanation lobbed in our direction - ineluctably runs out like sand in an hour glass. Each passing second once spent is lost, left to float in the seething morass that is the conflation of opportunities missed, acts of omission and of omission and perhaps on the odd occasion windows of opportunity fully utilised. ...

I never celebrated turning thirty. The significance of achieving that chronological milestone was lost in the hustle of every life - a barely discernible peak in the flat line that had become a monotonous existence. I had just lost a cast iron guarantee to return to my old job in Nigeria followed quickly by the petering out of what I thought was a nice, strong girl connection. One day I fell asleep, the next I awoke to being thirty plus. ...

This is slowly becoming a yearly thing on this blog. The 2009 and 2010 Versions are linked. Since 2010 I have opted for focus areas rather than a list.. So here goes the 2011 plan. God/Faith: Failed to make any headway in this regards last year - It’s a new year.. Let’s hope we fare better this year with resolving the God issues and getting back into a church community. Work & Career: I safely navigated getting back into work after a poorly thought out decision led to me quitting my last job. This year the focus is on chasing a couple of certifications to boost my profile as an independent contributor. This is slightly complicated by the Girlfriend being stuck in North America. This year I intend to get my professional membership of at least one UK and one North American Engineering body sorted. People and Socials: Last year was the year I splurged on social media connections. This year, I need to have a strategy for social media interaction. The goal of this strategy is to focus on sharing information, keeping the loose chatter to an absolute minimum. For real life connections, I have been blessed with having a couple of old friends from undergrad in my city, so as a minimum, I should hang out with them once every couple of months.. Health and Weight: 2010 was the year, the bulge finally beat me. The keg ballooned out of control. I bought a home treadmill in my attempt to regain control. This year, I hope to win the battle - running thrice weekly on the treadmill. Family: The family connection hasn’t been great up to the end of the year. This year I hope to call the parents and siblings at least once each week. Financial: The numbers from last year indicated I saved approximately 25% of my gross earnings - in spite of significant expenditure on trips to the US and gadgets. This year, I hope to up the percentage to 30%. In conjunction with a promised pay rise at work, it should be a good year - if I avoid splurging on any new gadgets.

Having earned (if I say so) the right to put my feet up and relax at the end of what has been a particularly hectic year of working, travelling, reading and volunteering, one has the luxury of reflecting on how the year has panned out on a personal note. This time last year I had just packed up my bags, cut my final ties and jumped on the East Coast train service up north to Aberdeen. There was the small matter of needing to restart life on a number of fronts - new job, new city, new house, new friends and all. The first few weeks took getting used to, especially as the job description involved a change of focus - from being the bossy, fastidious-to-a-fault, hard to please client to being part of a service delivery team. January was spent managing the work transition, eased somewhat by having the use of shared company accommodation alongside a colleague with Geordie connections. There were many nights of discussions on a motley of topics well into the night as we both grappled with coming to terms with redemption and second chances - he after invasive heart surgery, me upon returning to daily work after a messy resignation. ...

A few of the info-graphics that captured my eye this year.. Football Chalkboards: For us the discerning football enthusiasts, chalkboards were the revelations of 2010. Granted the Guardian debuted with them in early 2009, but the Roy vs Rafa debate for us Liverpool fans ensured chalkboards became the ultimate resource for assessing how high up the pitch the lads press, passes completed, oh and the aptly named heatmaps. Twitter is not a conversation: Us Twitter apologists usually claim Twitter as a conversation for being one of the reasons we stay on Twitter. Sadly, the data does not support that claim, as this info-graphic from 2010 showed. The world according to Facebook: In December, Paul Butler at Facebook came up with an interesting info-graphic; a world map based on Facebook connections. Marriage In America: TIME asked if marriage in America was still required. Al Mohler argued that we all do, and this PewSocial info-graphic captured the data. Infostate of Africa: Fascinating… via AppAfrica Flickr account…

I think cab drivers are a microcosm of the larger society and that if a sufficiently large sample is analysed, one can gain critical insights into the mind of a city. This has to be the year where I used cabs the most. Tight deadlines at work, atrocious weather conditions, moving houses and a few late night jaunts around town conspired to leave me needing cabs at various times this year. The downside was largely financial – I ended up racking up significant costs on renting cabs over the year. On the plus side, I think I gained a window into the mindset of this city. ...

Winter has struck its first tentative blows - two successive days last week we woke up to see our world carpeted with a thin layer of snow. Karla - Benny’s wife who has lived all her life in this town - swears that this is the first time she’s seen snow fall in October. Considering last winter was one in which several firsts going back thirty years were bested, that singular piece of news leaves one with a sense of dread. Those who should know better also swear by their instruments that this will be yet another long, hard, harsh winter. In anticipation - and I should add as usual - the gas and power suppliers are inching the rates upwards. Not since 2008 has there being such a significant hike in prices. Predictably there is discontent at huge profits, pay for executives and other such perceived signs of exploitation in the face of price rises. One paper goes as far as saying ‘Christmas will be ruined’ - for an annual average increase of a princely seventy pounds or 67.2 bottles of Becks premium lager…. The days when we bemoaned twenty-six degree weather seem so far away now.. ...

A bloke can do no worse than believe his own hype… Sigh.