Backwater

Today has been busy from beginning to end. Early into the office on the bike and late back, taking my normal long route. Team meeting this afternoon, trying to work out how we are going to deliver everything in very short timescales. I felt very proud of the guys today. They seem to be up for the challenge. They really are a great bunch of people. And despite the pressure and frustrations of developing software with never quite enough resources, we still manage to enjoy a good many laughs during the day.

The best thing about passing into one's second year is seeing that icon for the blip from the same day a year ago. I can see that I really was struggling to find my way with blip at the start, but the shots I chose are actually rather telling. The photograph of the clouds and then the cracks in the parched ground show how I am drawn to patterns. I guess this is what I'm always looking for in my field of view.

Trying to write about this I have been struck by how difficult it is to define pattern in this sense. After quite a struggle to find the right words I can only suggest that it's to do with regularity and repetition and symmetry. It's about capturing a sense of order within the greater disorder of the world. The patterns that are the most striking are those that involve self-similarity of some kind. Perhaps that's why the solitary winter trees are so appealing.

I've also realised that this preoccupation with pattern is nothing new. I've has this in me for as long as I can remember. As a young boy I used to help my Dad create horse racing betting systems. That was all about looking for patterns in the results. And I was indeed very young when I was doing this. He published, and made good money from, one of my very own systems when I was only 10 years old! A few years on I developed a passion for the patterns of prime numbers, especially the distribution of prime number pairs. I was a bit of an odd kid I guess! I had no idea at the time, but the analysis of the primes is one of the deepest and most important areas of mathematical research.

So, riding back home on another dull, cold, grey day, I was drawn to this spot today. I don't know whether that was because of the repeating patterns or just because I seem to be in a water phase at the moment, but I like the subdued feel to this. It captured my mood cycling home this evening. It's been a long and tiring day,