I’m a hetero single white 29 year old male, recently moved to London, UK. I enjoy candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach.
I work with databases and web technologies for an ignoble private company which I’m not allowed to identify. A decade ago, when you’re supposed to do it, I failed abysmally at my first higher education attempt (in Astrophysics), and I’m now working my way through a part-time bachelors degree in Economics and Maths, with the intention of applying to a reasonably prestigious institution for a Masters in algorithmy-mathsy-information-theoretic-stuff when I graduate in a few years. If successful, I will be over ten years older than most of my peers, and can’t decide whether this is fantastic or horrifying. My long-term goal is to make awesome things for people to use. I sometimes do this anyway.
My primary hobby is swing dancing. I’ve been doing it for a little over four years, and by most people’s standards I’m probably pretty damn good at it. I travel all over the country, and occasionally internationally, to learn and dance with similarly enthusiastic people, but I’m starting to reach a point of diminishing returns with it, in that it’s not getting any more fun and I’m not getting that much better.
Last November I started to learn to play the piano. I’m still not very good at all, but I now have a much more solid grounding in musical theory. Previous to this, I attempted to learn to play the saxophone (I had a pretty good version of the Pink Panther theme tune going). I am also a strong tenor, and the quality of my singing voice is enough to really surprise most people.
Earlier this year I developed a minor obsession with figure drawing. The human body is amazing and fascinating to look at. There are a lot of crossovers between this topic and dancing, and I have recently started a blog where I discuss these things.
I’m quite tall and stocky. I used to be very overweight, but lost over 45 kilos between 2005 and 2008. I’m currently trying to properly trim up by dancing more regularly, with some success. I don’t read a lot of books these days, but I suspect my information diet is larger than it has ever been before.
Recently (the past couple of years) I have been discovering that I am a lot more competent than I previously thought. This is simultaneously pleasing and unnerving.
Recently (the past couple of years) I have been discovering that I am a lot more competent than I previously thought. This is simultaneously pleasing and unnerving.
After growing up wanting to swim around academia as an astrophysicist, I dropped out of my first attempt at university, bummed around for a bit and eventually got a fairly rubbish tech support job. You reach a point and think “ah well, this is what my life is like, then. I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was”.
But maybe I am. I’ve gotten progressively less and less rubbish jobs doing more and more sophisticated things, because it turns out I’m good at solving progressively harder and harder problems. I’ve resumed formal study, and discovered it’s easy once you have some sort of work ethic and care about the subject matter. I might be running a decade behind schedule, but it’s my goal to solve the biggest problems I can get my hands around. In retrospect, that’s many times more exciting than the astrophysics plans I had when I was younger.
Oh, go on then.
I’m a hetero single white 29 year old male, recently moved to London, UK. I enjoy candlelit dinners and long walks on the beach.
I work with databases and web technologies for an ignoble private company which I’m not allowed to identify. A decade ago, when you’re supposed to do it, I failed abysmally at my first higher education attempt (in Astrophysics), and I’m now working my way through a part-time bachelors degree in Economics and Maths, with the intention of applying to a reasonably prestigious institution for a Masters in algorithmy-mathsy-information-theoretic-stuff when I graduate in a few years. If successful, I will be over ten years older than most of my peers, and can’t decide whether this is fantastic or horrifying. My long-term goal is to make awesome things for people to use. I sometimes do this anyway.
My primary hobby is swing dancing. I’ve been doing it for a little over four years, and by most people’s standards I’m probably pretty damn good at it. I travel all over the country, and occasionally internationally, to learn and dance with similarly enthusiastic people, but I’m starting to reach a point of diminishing returns with it, in that it’s not getting any more fun and I’m not getting that much better.
Last November I started to learn to play the piano. I’m still not very good at all, but I now have a much more solid grounding in musical theory. Previous to this, I attempted to learn to play the saxophone (I had a pretty good version of the Pink Panther theme tune going). I am also a strong tenor, and the quality of my singing voice is enough to really surprise most people.
Earlier this year I developed a minor obsession with figure drawing. The human body is amazing and fascinating to look at. There are a lot of crossovers between this topic and dancing, and I have recently started a blog where I discuss these things.
I’m quite tall and stocky. I used to be very overweight, but lost over 45 kilos between 2005 and 2008. I’m currently trying to properly trim up by dancing more regularly, with some success. I don’t read a lot of books these days, but I suspect my information diet is larger than it has ever been before.
Recently (the past couple of years) I have been discovering that I am a lot more competent than I previously thought. This is simultaneously pleasing and unnerving.
Care to elaborate on that?
After growing up wanting to swim around academia as an astrophysicist, I dropped out of my first attempt at university, bummed around for a bit and eventually got a fairly rubbish tech support job. You reach a point and think “ah well, this is what my life is like, then. I guess I’m not as smart as I thought I was”.
But maybe I am. I’ve gotten progressively less and less rubbish jobs doing more and more sophisticated things, because it turns out I’m good at solving progressively harder and harder problems. I’ve resumed formal study, and discovered it’s easy once you have some sort of work ethic and care about the subject matter. I might be running a decade behind schedule, but it’s my goal to solve the biggest problems I can get my hands around. In retrospect, that’s many times more exciting than the astrophysics plans I had when I was younger.
That’s quite wonderful, actually, and one decade is not that much, if you are on the right path.