www.yada…eh…thingy what was that?
During a brief, but ultimately successful, shave this morning, I had the radio on as usual. Listening to XFM as I sometimes do, you get the horror of radio ads.I heard one today for the FSA and specifically Money Made Clear. It was an expensive ad, known names doing...
Technology and Social Responsbility
Yesterday saw the change in penalty in the UK for driving while on a mobile phone.This will doubtless cause a surge in the sales of various handsfree kits, bluetooth headsets etc.Cue collective hand-rubbing of technology providers.It struck me that there is a far...
CSS Tinkering
Inspired by the ongoing CSS travails of ManicMorFF, I decided to try a little CSS tinkering with the blog template tonight. Not everyone's idea of a quiet Froday night in, I grant you, but I find it all strangely relaxing. But only if it works, if it doesn't work I...
Photo Blog #3
Not done a photo blog post for a while. The dark and dreary Scottish winter tends to keep the camera in its bag. Anyway, it emerged into a lovely weekend in the West. There is a large selection of the shots from that weekend on MorgueFile. Here is a smaller taster,...
The Emperor’s New Vocabulary
Many years ago, I attended a conference in Amsterdam. I knew one of the people presenting so, a week or so before I warned him that I didn't want his presentation to feature of the words 'leverage' or 'synergy'. When the day arrived, before he started, he got me to...
Unintelligent Design
I'm an atheist. Its not something I generally shout or pontificate about, atheists tend not to, as pointed out by Richard Dawkins in the marvellous The God Delusion.I'm not here (yet) to go off an any particular anti-religious rant, I just felt the urge to point out...
The Unexpected Attractiveness of Random Broadcast Media
Driving home tonight listening to XFM we were pleased to hear the sudden appearance of This Charming Man by The Smiths. Clearly, a classic, but not often heard on the radio. Silence fell in the car, all talking stopped and, after a brief moment of listening, we sang...
Miniature Music
It wasn't one of the most exciting things I have ever done, but I have just about finished ripping all my CDs onto hard drive. Something close to 40GB of the stuff. It took a long time but it has been worth it for a whole number of reasons.Firstly, and unexpectedly,...
Turner Prize Nomination
Many silly, pointless things get nominated for the Turner Prize.I think art should be a thing of beauty, something that affects you emotionally, fills you with awe and wonder.Therefore, I'd like to nominate Denis Bergkamp's goal against Argentina in the 1998 World...
Ants Are Not Pants – Success in a Process Free World
Have you ever sat and watched ants at work? It's fascinating. Drop a small pile of sugar. Word soon gets round. Then they all appear, forming nice ordered lines, one in, one out, until all the sugar is gone. But that's an easy task. They can build enormous colonies,...
All Around The World
Signed up for Google Analytics recently, you get quite a lot of cool stuff for free. And, for the record, I don't subscribe to the "Google are the next Microsoft, taking over the world, yada, yada" thing. The do some very useful stuff.Anyway, in Analytics you get a...
Death by Popularity – The Web Hosting Conundrum
There is a bit of a conundrum with the Internet. The more popular a site is, the more likely it is to fall over. This is especially true when you get a sudden spike of popularity.I can remember on September 11th, hitting the news sites to be met with a spectacular...
When new technology gets old
Technology moves very fast these days (Cybil Fawlty, specialised subject 'the bleeding obvious').Not so many years ago, well, 26 years actually, I had a ZX81 and it was the pinnacle of home computing. And, believe me, it was fab. Thing is, it has no particular legacy...
A billboard!
Been a bit lax posting news of photo usage lately. I was inspired to post some more by news I just received of one of my photos being used on a billboard in Las Vegas. Pleased with this one.many thanks to Julie Hurd for the photoHere are a few more while I'm on the...
Snap!
My reader(sic) may notice that I have added Snap to my site and blog (if you have no idea what this is, hover over an external link and you'll see). I suppose there are many arguments with regard to its usefulness but for now the novelty of it is tipping towards the...
Frank Who?
My love of all things space is known to most who know me, so I suppose it is a little surprising that I have yet to comment on such matters herein. Time to put that right.I am hugely interested in the US Manned missons on the 60's, Mercury through to Apollo not only...
The Silence of the Editor
Quiet round here. I'm editing the Beatle Man. Its going OK. In the re-read I made myself laugh. I take that as a good sign. I'm at Chapter 11 and I've come to one of the first and biggest excisions. Dropping a character and a small sub-plot. Its strangely painful but,...
The uselessness of modern man
Hey wow, look at me, typing into this computer, blogging if you don't know. I've got qualifications you know, I know so much stuff, I am the modern man, OK, not in that metrosexual way, but I am a man of technology, I know stuff, I can do stuff, I am going for the...
Convergence, Information, Learning and Semantics
Hope the subject line didn't put you off, couldn't think of anything suitably pithy to summarise what I wanted to write about.Lets get the background out of the way. We have the Internet crammed with great information repositories (and even more rubbish ones), we have...
No, not the Brandy
There are those among my reader(sic) that believe my love of Albert Camus comes from a teenager's desire for pretentious chic or, at best, some sort of angsty, pseudo-philosophical hankering. ( And anyway, if I had wanted to be pretentious for the sake of it, I was...