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  • 2010
  • 2009
  • 2008
    • October
    • September
      • SNIS - YAMFLA (Yet Another Meaningless Four-Letter Acronym)
        09/26/08
        The world of Information Technology overflows with its arcane jargon and acronyms, but it is by no means, the sole offender of creating inpenetrable and mysterious language.

        I was recently driving along and saw this displayed on the dot-matrix on the back of a bus...


      • Fool Us? More Fool you!
        09/08/08
        I stayed in an bizarre hotel in Kensington last week and was rather struck by the immense length of the central corridor, and odd green-ness of the lights, creating an institutional, Soviet/Stalinist feel to the place, and the sense that you could walk and walk and never find your room...

    • July
    • June
      • The Maths of Pointless Numbers
        06/26/08

      • Of Washing Machines and Software Errors
        06/06/08
        The human brain is constructed so that it is very good at seeing patterns (even where there are none), and so "coincidentally" after my previous spat on the same topic, I have been suffering my own version of Call Centre hell this week - just trying to book an engineer to come and mend our

    • May
    • April
    • March
      • The Smell of Danger: Another study of the Blindlingly Obvious
        03/31/08
        I had an odd sense of deja vu when reading the headline Human noses 'can detect danger' . Didn't Gospodin Ivan Petrovic Pavlov work all that out all that stuff about conditioned/conditional reflexes back in the 1890/1900's?

        So I looked at the abstract on the Scie

      • Easter Snow: Devant le Deluge
        03/24/08
        First an earthquake, now a White Easter, if I were superstitious, I should be expecting some further meteoro- geo- or otherological event to be coming up soon.

        The snowy countryside is certainly pretty...

        ..but maybe it could presage the inundation of the low-lying lands by

      • 20-20 Hindsight: who needs it?
        03/20/08
        I have recently been reading "Plundering the Public Sector" by David Craig and Richard Brooks, and now halfway through have been getting more and more irritated with the adversarial tone of the book, and its tendency to shower blame everywhere in unequal amounts.

        UK Public Secto

      • From Antiques to Comedy Electronics
        03/10/08
        Horncastle in Lincolnshire is quite well-known for its antiques shops where you can filch through piles of broken crockery, dusty books, rusty buckets and dead peoples sheets.

        It is less well-known as a venue for comedy electronics. However appearances can be deceptive, as indeed I dis

    • February
      • Shaken, not Stirred
        02/27/08
        Well, that was exciting...It is not often that this remote and dusty corner of England shows up on the national news, but the earthquake of last night was certainly an interesting seismological experience.

        Lincolnshire is not exactly an active seismic area, as the BGS press release shows<

      • The Tyranny of the "Customer Journey"
        02/19/08
        I cover many miles in my working year and am now very familar with the various petrol stations on the routes radiating from Lincolnshire. In my travels, one of the most irritating new inventions of the retail designers is the "Customer Journey".

        The Customer Journey is an use

      • Stupid PIN machine design
        02/10/08
        According to statistical studies, being taller than average is supposed to bring some advantages in love and money. However, being 6'4" tall, my experience is certainly different when it comes to being a taller person in an average sized physical world, and I have for many years harboured

      • Technorati Profile
        02/03/08

      • On Traffic Lights...
        02/01/08
        I was disturbed by Martin Cassini's report on Newsnight proposing the abolition of traffic lights, which surely don't deserve such a fate.

        Being fascinated by many forms of technology and their place in their world, traffic lights are often one of the first things I have seen

      • Functional Specialism: the Dead Hand of Adam Smith
        02/01/08



        Of course, the next question is (with 10 years hindsight), what should be the shape of organisations for the 21st and 22nd century?

    • January
      • Single Retail Banana: How does that work then?
        01/17/08
        "How does that work then?" is one of those phrases like "What's that all about, then?" used by stand-up comedians to punctuate their observations about life and "that".

        One of the curses (and blessings) of my personality type is that I probably can te

      • Sir John Harvey-Jones: Unsung Technology Hero?
        01/14/08
        It would be a shame to pass by the death of Sir John Harvey-Jones without mentioning that he is possibly an unsung hero of Information Technology.

        He will probably be more likely remembered for many other things, but I recall (dimly) that he experimented with building a live Company Boa

      • ...Died in a Blogging Accident: Who could be at Risk?
        01/12/08
        Until I read XKCD this morning, I had never thought that blogging could in anyway be a risk to my or anybody else's life. But then I thought further, if it was true, who might be at risk, and what might make one more succumb when blogging?

        Well, I don't know any better this e

  • 2007
    • March
      • Web 4.0: Watching the Web Grow Old
        03/20/07
        I was interested to see in a recent article in The Economist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee gave an analogy between Web 1.0 being, to paraphrase, the “Net in Nappies”. With Web 2.0 we now entering the teenage years (going out, getting drunk, making a fool of yourself, showing off, sharing stuff with your mat

    • January
      • Creating Picture Blogs
        01/01/07
        I fancied the idea that it would be good to be able to create blog postings that look more like that standard text plus a picture.

        I actually achieved the goal of tweaking SPHPBLOG so that it can display HTML cut out of a Microsoft Publisher created web page.

        Of course, this

  • 2006
    • January
      • New Technology Awards 2006
        01/16/06
        Before the New Year gets too old, I thought in an atypical moment of whimsy that I would just briefly mark the transition into another year by putting forward nominations for a select few things that annoyed, amused or excited me in 2005.

        Oscar Wilde award for Technology as Art - Beautif

  • 2005
    • February
      • Challenges of Rural Telecommunications
        02/04/05
        For those of you who have never ventured outside major urban areas, the pleasures of country living may yet have escaped you, especially with the easy availability of 8-20Mb broadband in many towns and cities.

        Lincolnshire is a very rural county in a neglected corner of the UK, sandwiched