Hello World

... and welcome to my blog. Though I don't know who you are, it's nice to have you here.

This is my first attempt at blogging, though I did keep a diary for a while when I was 15. The thought of what I wrote back then makes me cringe so much that I've never opened it since for a stickybeak. I'm hoping this incarnation may be a little more useful and interesting for all concerned.

So what, you may ask, am I planning on writing about?

Mainly I'm planning on writing about my work. I'm a PhD student in Computer Science, studying the information dynamics of computation in complex systems (so no prizes for working out where the blog title came from). This I do full-time, though I spend two days a week as an R&D Engineer at a company providing mobile handset location solutions. It's an interesting mix, being able to do the scientific investigations that I love for most of the time, while still fulfilling my engineering craving to create. (At one stage I thought about calling this blog "Engineer/Scientist and not the other way around", a la Zoolander).
Perhaps more importantly, doing the engineering work part-time satisfies my craving for an income to top-up my student allowance. :)
In any case, apart from writing about juggling the two, I intend to do a fair bit of writing about my science, expanding on my own work and commenting on other things that are out there. This is something that is really gaining popularity in the scientific community at the moment; this is a good example (with self-aware commentary on this topic).

Apart from that, I'll write about a lot of day to day stuff going on. For example, one of the next posts I'll do will be about the mythtv box i've just built and how much I'm loving it. But more of that later.

Unlike that diary I mentioned, I do want this to be something that I can reflect on, particularly to see how my thinking changes as my career progresses. Also, obviously this incarnation is open to the public. I don't think it will bother me if no-one reads it, though it would be nice to think that someone, somewhere was getting some value out of it. Time will tell.

In any case, hope to see you here again soon.