The Personal Website of Michael Foord

We rejoice in the ambiguity, for in it lies redemption I love the word rigour. It conveys either, or both, strict discipline or something that was really hard work. I've found the rigorous application of theoretical principles a really useful way of learning those principles. Learning what they really mean, and what those principles are good at achieving and what they're not good at achieving. I've been rigorous in my discipline in meditating. I've meditated for an hour a day, generally six days a week, for a number of years now. My trade is as a software engineer, a computer programmer. I taught myself to program by becoming really passionate about it. What you love you learn. I learned the art and craft of engineering in my first professional job, at a small startup in London called Resolver Systems. There, for the four years I worked there, we rigorously applied the principles of Extreme Programming, a strict variant and really the progenitor of the &quo

Working out what the work is is the work. My dragon is growing. The consciousness of an animal is not fundamentally different from that of a human, we are after all merely a different kind of animal. So it's fun to observe and try to understand the lizard brain. Sapphira's body and brain are different, with much more behaviour "hard wired" and instinctual rather than learned, but nonetheless her conception of the world and her surroundings exist in her imagination. By watching how she sees her world and interacts with it, by becoming part of her world and interacting with her, I can start to feel how she sees her world. She is a hunter. She kills and eats her prey without compassion or mercy. It is her nature. Nature itself is red in tooth and claw, and just as we do she partakes of that nature. As I am part of her world, she is also part of mine. I live in her imagination and she in mine. Our worlds intersect. And in my imagination she breathes fire. The par

If you make decisions you can feel proud of then you're able to respect yourself. Authority I like having authority figures in my life. Not the kind of authority where people decide who is in charge and that they have the right to tell you what to do. That's delegated authority and it generally becomes awful because it's too easy for self interest to take over. I recognise that authority when its wise to do so, but I don't like it. The authority I like is to find people in my life who know more than me on a topic, and who demonstrate in practise that they do. They're not hard to find, I doubt there's a single topic where I know more than anyone else in the world. There's always someone, somewhere, who knows more. I will then consider them an authority on the topic and be more likely to believe what they say, including within the area of ethics and morality. It's very easy to hurt people and it's very nice to have people in your life, or in