Return of the Beard

So today is my last official day in the University of Liverpool office. Time for a bit of reflection.

This is a self indulgent “For the sake of history and my bad memory” post so feel free to skip it.

It’s just over two years since I left Belfast, and in those two years, life got weird(er).

TL;DR for my own benefit in years to come:

• Worked for DSTL for a while on autonomous maritime systems
• Went to the Bournemouth Airshow
• Studied FPGA programming at Cambridge
• Coordinated a Raspberry Pi Outreach programme between Farset Labs, W5, and Digital Circle (along with the inimitable other Andrew; Mulholland)
• Spoke at TEDxBelfast and the All Island Innovation Conference
• Built a green field network research lab from scratch (it’s still not finished)
• Joined the Liverbeards
• Contributed to a joint project using atomic clocks for submarine location
• Went to GDC in San Francisco as part of an InvestNI organised Trade Mission
• Visited the Microsoft and Google campuses in SF
• Visited Noisebridge (and didn’t get involved in any drama…)
• Presented some research at Stanford
• Played with the Intel Galileo
• Went to Prague
• Got my first paper rejection
• Met the Queen, Prince Phillip, the Duke of York and a load of interesting entrepreneurs at Buckingham Palace
• Participated in VC negotiations and biz dev for a small tech firm
• Spoke at Ignite Liverpool (The video doesn’t do the animations justice…#cringe)
• Drank my way around Manchester with a load of beards
• Secured funding for a Farset Labs Raspberry Jam outreach programme
• Saw Dylan Moran Live
• Presented at a defence conference
• Attended a death metal gig in a suit
• Lost my passport and poster on the way to present at another defence conference…
• Took part in the Worlds Biggest Catwalk
• Presented at TrustCom in Helsinki
• Played glow-in-the-dark-haunted-house-mini-golf as part of what goes down in history as the most random night of my life…
• Was named Liverbeard “Beard of the Month” (well, I was leaving, they had to give me it sometime… :p )
• Participated in a mayoral discussion on smart cities
• Got the most unheard of submission extension
• Finally got rid of a collection of “joke” twitter accounts I’d wired up to IFTTT ages ago and forgotten about… (Sorry QUB…)
• Got a trim from barber-to-the-stars, Cutthroat Pete
• Entered and won my first “food challenge”; a hot-wings challenge (and didn’t cry about it afterwards), also earning my second consecutive Liverbeard-of-the-month-status.
• Discovered far too many awesome bars in Liverpool
• Made some amazing friends I won’t be able to get rid of for the rest of my days
• Managed too many Undergrad, MSc and MEng projects

That’ll do.

Thanks Liverpool! You’ve been a blast and I’ll be back soon enough.

Belfast, prepare yourself.