…th all this. It seems Docker can use up your disk in some circumstances. I freed up about 20Gb with this command, and it’s been OK since: /usr/bin/docker system prune –all –volumes –-force Configure Discourse General stuff Once Discourse has built (it looks like it’s spewing errors, even when it’s done), go to your new web URL for the server and with luck you can register it all OK. If you don’t get the setup email, try running /var/discourse/di…
Category: Living
Having left Tes Global, I have had a period of garden leave. Spinning out from the immediate world of design to concentrate on other things including, but not limited to, my family, reading, typing up a travel diary of a busking tour around Europe that I did during my gap year, and weight lifting. Meanwhile,…
Having re-designed the UI for MailOnline’s content publishing systems (currently producing close to 1,000 stories daily), my work there is now done. I’ve always been interested in how organisations work, and it was a great experience doing UX at the world’s biggest news site. I worked daily with journalists and editors of all kinds to understand how…
On this day in 2004, I wrote my first post here on Webtorque.org As with all things Internet, 10 years seems more like 50. Tim O’Reilly had just started popularising the term “Web 2.0“, and the digerati were people who did things like blogs – before Twitter came along and made everyone do it, sort of. For me,…
I was annoyed to see this report today via Mike Elgan’s G+ feed regarding rumours about Tim Cook’s sexuality. Elgan says, rightly, that: “Whether Tim Cook is straight or gay shouldn’t matter to the press or the public, and we should respect his and everyone’s right to choose whether to talk about their sexual identity…”…
After a little over 5 years at Hotels.com, part of the Expedia Inc. group, I shall be moving on to be Lead UX at MailOnline, part of A&N Media. It’s not actually the Daily Mail, but it is publishing, it is advertising funded, and as such it’s at the centre of one of the most…
“The Search for Heart River” is going to be the title of my new book. It’s a journey through endless examples of people posting ‘shop jobs, and the people who try to work out if they’re fake or not. It ends with a some inconclusive rubbish about human nature. Hey, if Malcolm Gladwell can make…
On the few occasions I’ve told myself the situation calls for a Gantt chart – or more accurately the use of MS Project to plan tasks and dependencies such that I end up with a Gantt chart – I’ve almost always been disappointed. In retrospect, the complexity of the project, or my lack of skill…
I was reading this Wikipedia entry today, and saw this: Roger Waters’ 1992 album “Amused to Death” was, in part, inspired by and deals with some of the same subject matter as Postman’s book. In The End of Education Postman remarks that the album had “elevated my prestige among undergraduates”, and says that he has…
So, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Limited say they will only let you link to their site if you have good things to say about them. From their “linking policy” on their site: “a. Links to the Site. You may create your own link to the Site, provided that…
For personal reference, and in case it helps somebody else, here’s a summary of how we built our single-storey rear extension on our 1900 mid-terraced house in North London, completed March 2010 (some photos are here). We’d not undertaken any building work before, other than having a replacement kitchen done a few years previously. Because…
If you put something up on the web, you need to give it a date stamp. Not doing so makes you look like Squidoo. So I’m shocked (no, actually, I am quite surprised!) that parliament.uk thinks it’s acceptable to leave them off. Maybe it means they just don’t care about things like accuracy. I guess…
Saying that hoards of my friends like Wired’s website is just a lie. Or at least implying that they do is disingenuous as I’m pretty sure that none of them have liked it. And is that huge number just made up? Who cares? This sort of casual fakery (which Facebook thinks nothing of, regardless of…
Mick Karn, once bassist with Japan – pop history’s most underrated band (albeit with one of the worst names ever) – died this week. I remember reading an interview with him years ago in which he was asked about his unique style of bass playing. He said he didn’t know how to play it in…
What I know about Internet protocols can be written on the back of a postage stamp, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering about them. Wikileaks’s recent call for mirrors (link may be down, obviously) got me thinking about the general possibility of a web site mirroring protocol that would make automatic the distribution and…
With my Kindle’s free worldwide 3G connection (which I’m hoping to make some use of when I’m travelling to the Americas next month), I thought I’d investigate options for reading RSS feeds. Being the geek I am, I liked the sound of Daniel Choi’s kindle-feeds, a neat little Ruby script that gets RSS feeds from…
I admit it, I’m on Facebook. I know they’re selling my information. They probably have a whole team of people called something like “Personal Data Merchandising” thinking up new and ever more devious ways to trick me in to giving away just that little bit more. I sort of know I’ll regret it. A bit…
It looks like my wife will be stranded in Japan this week following the Icelandic volcano eruption. I thought I’d better look at her travel insurance provider’s website (a company I’d not heard of called Holiday Extras), prior to playing the inevitable game of IVR over the phone. Frankly, I wasn’t holding out much hope…
It’s now clear that the government wants to control people’s use of the Internet, ostensibly on behalf of the media industry, but more likely in the longer term because (to paraphrase William Burroughs) control always needs more control. For a while now I’ve been thinking whether it might be time to tunnel my Internet traffic…
A couple of weeks ago, Lorenzo Wood posted a great example of one of the reasons why I find the use of office printers fascinating. I am amazed, amused, informed and utterly baffled by this in pretty much equal measure, all the time. A trip to the printer is almost as good as a trip…
A couple of years ago, I was obliged to find out about the user experience of Verified by Visa and the Mastercard SecureCode systems for inclusion on our site. it was plain to me from the outset that the designers of 3-D Secure (the protocal on which these are based) had not a clue about…
Earlier last week, the mighty Joshua Kaufman brought my attention to Jakob Nielsen’s latest alertbox about removing masks from password fields. This sparked some interesting debate, and it got me thinking again about passwords and security in general. It has often seemed to me that the first mistake people tend to make in applying security…
“To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet. It’s distracting. It’s meaningless; it’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.” Ray Bradbury (90) doesn’t explain why he doesn’t like the Internet, but I think I can make a good guess based on the “it’s in the air somewhere” remark.…
What, exactly, do otherwise intelligent Americans find so objectionable about the effective use of swearing? Here’s Seth Godin, marketing guru and otherwise all-round sharp cookie, upholding the grand US tradition of wondering more than seems even remotely reasonable about somebody who likes to put swear words in their books. Who cares? You may as well…
I know people love to hate Slashdot, but I’ve always had a soft spot for their experiments.
The campaign starts here. The word “Internet” needs to be capitalised. It needs to be capitalised out of respect for its importance and the fact that it’s a proper noun. We don’t write about “the pacific” or “oxford” or reading “the times newspaper.” We should not write about “the internet” for the same reason. I’ve…
Come Together – and I put a donk on it (3.2Mb mp3). Wonder what the rights position is on this? Donk your own.
In January of 2008, a new property website called Zoopla! started up. With property prices going ever skyward, it wasn’t exactly a surprising launch, but Zoopla! itself was surprising. Like all very good ideas on the web, it was simple and well executed, yet allowed for good, often complex, effects to happen: list every house…
Headphones are wonderful things, and I’ve been amazed at what I’ve been hearing through them recently. In a fit of nostalgia, I decided to sit down and re-visit Grace Jones’s version of Sting’s Demolition Man (mp3, 5.6Mb). Leaving aside its merits as a pop song, I think it’s one of the greatest feats of studio…
Server upgraded, Webtorque will be looking rather sqiff for a while until I work out the WordPress theme that I heavily hacked up and forgot to note any changes to… Enjoy. [LATER] Pretty much done now. Wish I could work out a way of removing that pesky horizontal line beneath the header image.
Webtorque will be down this weekend for maintenance while I try to upgrade the server. It went wrong the first time, so here’s hoping. My Tiscali hell is also continuing though, so the downtime may be longer than it needs to be. Think of it as a rest.
My god this is awful. The entire weekend my net connection with Tiscali has been so slow that YouTube, podcasts, BBC news and even Gmail have been pretty much unusable. I tried running a speed test just now and it timed out! I now realise why I’ve always found broadband hell stories so boring –…
For the past two weeks, and coincidentally at exactly the same time as my family have been away, I have had no Internet access, and very little TV reception at home. I count myself as a pretty intense Internet user (although I watch very little TV), so was interested to see what would happen without…
For some reason I’ve been noticing a lot of greenwashing recently. At work we have plastic recycling bins along with receptacles for waste paper and cans. This is good because we get free bottles of water, juice and other modern comestibles. So, at least by recycling we can do something to offset the wanton destruction…
I ‘ve had a login on Plaxo for about two years now and have only received a couple of invites from people I know, but I’ve had a several in the last couple of months. Maybe it’ll be the next Facebook? I won’t be there if Plaxo does explode though. Plaxo is so far my…
With various digital media building up on my little hard drive, I thought I’d get one of those media streaming boxes so that I can watch or listen it all in my living room downstairs. TED talks, podcasts of various kinds, camcoder movies – ah lovely. I knew video formats were going to be a…
Regular readers will know that I had a free mobile phone last year, thanks to a 100% cashback deal. This year however, I’ve not been so lucky. After hearing nothing from Phones 2 U Direct.Co.Uk Ltd after my first cashback claim in September, I served them a court order to get a response. They replied…
Webtorque will be moving servers soon (maybe this week… maybe next). I’d be delighted if anyone actually notices, but we may be down for a day or so while I get the web server back up. There’s a chance I might delete everything in the process – indeed sometimes I want to do that anyway,…
Travel broadens the mind, and so it is that today I leave LBi to start work with Expedia. In my case I shall be joining hotels.com as an interaction designer. Expedia makes a lot of sense. Having worked for about ten months on First Choice Holidays while at Wheel last year (although my work has…
Last week I got a mail from somewhere announcing the launch of a new property website called zoopla.com, so I thought I’d have a look. It’s a pretty nifty residential property sales site: good web2.0 thinking going on, nicely executed. Whoever put it together knows their stuff. But it has a few things I thought…
I’ve not worked on an FMCG site in ages, so I’m taking the liberty of plugging this one, which we did for Sony Computer Entertainment this year. SingStarGame.com went fully live in all territories last week. I’m on there too if you look hard enough. It’s running at about 1,000 registrations a day right now…
Will Wikipedia survive the constant sniping its been getting about quality, style and everything else? In the last few weeks, I’ve observed (nay, been involved with) two issues relating to their conflict of interest policy. To save the blushes, I won’t divulge who was involved, but the first incident started when a PR operative at…
One of the things I like about Facebook is spotting odd coincidences. Here are two friends, one living in Tokyo, the other in London, neither of whom know each other from Adam – but their status messages make nice bookends.
… Jonathan Sort of apropos of this – there’s been quite a bit of buzz about Tenori-on recently, which reminds me a bit of Eno’s Koan Project. But what happened to that and the company that made it? I can’t seem to find much on the web about it….
My six year-old son went on a trip to the park today with his holiday playgroup. There were various activities there, and among them it seems the Met were hosting some kind of “meet the Police” event. Part of this appears to have involved his fingerprint being taken. What the hell is this about? He describes it as being something the policemen did “for fun” – but I’m not laughing. I don’t know (and I need to ask the teachers who were at the event…
… I’ve been told that comments aren’t working. I think this might be related to a relatively recent upgrade to WordPress that might have broken the theme I’m running (I’m hoping it’s not to do with the very low version of PHP the server’s running). I’m going to see if I can fix this, but if you have been dying to tell me something, then jonathan at webtorque dot org will do you. …
… Michel The logo for London 2012 is terribly awful… More on 456 Berea Street and a lot of other sites… :-/…
Until yesterday, I’d not tried Any Questions Answered (AQA) – the old-school (as in not P2P) SMS-based answer service. For a mere £1, they will answer any question you have. I’d heard good things about them. Their website allows you to ask one free question, so I did: “Since 1950, how many people have been shot by the police in mainland Britain (excluding N Ireland) who were not later found to be innocent?” I was attempting to ask a straight ques…
There are some posts that no real blog can be complete without, and that is some opinion about Linux. I’ve been using Ubuntu for over a year now and it occurs to me that I should write up something on it. Not that anyone’s asked, but then that’s what blogging is all about really isn’t it? I switched from Windows to Ubuntu for no reason other than I wanted to see what it was like. I kept my Windows install in place on a dual-boot just in case, but…
… Toronto Zoo Finding any Cope in the bargain bin it always a good thing. Nice one, Brother, Ben Gilmore Big fan of the Cope… I think my favourite still has to be Ye Skellington Chronicles. Saw him live once were he came on stage wearing Y-fonts, yellow wellys and a a police jacket….
I took out one of those incredibly dodgy-looking “100% cashback” mobile phone deals last year. Much to my surprise – it seems to have worked. £35 a month for a 12-month T-Mobile contract with 200 free any time/any network minutes per month. The handset was free too – a K700i. I didn’t go over my 200 minute limit, but did spend some money on texts. I think I ended up spending maybe £20 over the year (a couple of mistaken calls to 0800 numbers I th…
Having taken this photo while waiting for our kid to chomp through a McDonald’s Kids Meal at new year (mea culpa – but it’s the winging, really), I’ve just noticed another frankly amazing example of a nutritional content “explanation.” This time, it’s on the cardboard sleeve of a pot of Sainsbury’s Cornish clotted cream (again, don’t ask). Here is a pack shot, and here is a close-up of what Sainsbury’s are calling the “Wheel of Heath” printed in …
Now this is interesting. Kaoru has been working on a site that allows you to upload videos – and schedule them. I like to think of myself as a contrarian (well, until it becomes uncomfortable), and there’s something about this site that tickles my contrarian fancies. Timeshifting, PVR-fuelled, 24-hour living is all the rage, and this is of course tearing society apart as we know it, obviously. But nobody, until now, has had the courage to explore…
I’ve recently been using StumbleUpon more, and although it’s fun, it’s not as fun as putting interesting strings into Google to see what turns up. For example, using this: “parent directory ” MP3 -xxx -html -htm -php -shtml -opendivx -md5 -md5sums and this: ?intitle:index.of? mp3 Brings up all sorts of interesting stuff. The University of Buffalo’s mouth and throat singing archive is wonderful. Compare and contrast this Tuvan classic (Borbannadir…
He’s gone for the irony hat trick…! Boingboing reports on this article is about a man who has asked his daughter’s school to take Fahrenheit 451 off the curriculum because of its use of “bad language” and (for extra irony points) smoking, amongst other things. The incident is wonderful not least for the fact that he chose to lodge the complaint last week – which just happend to be the American Library’s Banned Books Week as well! I checked to see…
… Webtorque has gone Pink for National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I know it’s American, but breasts know no frontiers. …
Welcome to a new Webtorque – now running WordPress. Drupal had fallen victim to the vagaries of software versions. For the geeks: I was running Webtorque on Drupal 4.4.2 (the current version is 4.7.3). This web server runs Red Hat Enterprse v3.2, which has PHP 4.2.2. Red Hat will not move RHEL 3 to a higher version of PHP, and versions of Drupal later than 4.5.8 won’t run on anything lower than PHP 4.2.3. So – clang! I’d hit the upgrade buffers. …
One of the less wonderful things about working as a permanent employee for a company larger than a certain size, is that you have appraisals every six months. And every six months both you, your line manager, and anyone you care to talk to about the appraisal system agree wholeheartedly that the experience is awful. Having passed through several companies, each with their own interpretation of what makes a good appraisal, I have the somewhat dubi…
… After years of trying to remember to give Technorati a go, I’ve finally now remembered. They make you put a link to them on your blog in order to get your blog listed. And so, while trying to ignore the snobbishness of all this, I hereby post my Technorati Profile. …
I made some online music purchases today from AllofMP3.com. This was mainly because if the USA has its way, then the site may be taken down in preparation for Russia’s entry into the WTO. If you’ve not been there before, AllofMP3 is everything you ever wanted from Internet age commerce: dirt cheap goods sold legally (according to Russian jurisdiction), massive choice and as a finishing touch, stunning typos. Not surprisingly, a whole album for a …
As previously observed here, David Byrne and Brian Eno have not only recently re-released their My Life In the Bush of Ghosts album, but have also made all of the multitracks of two of the songs on the album free for re-mixing under a Creative Commons licence. Things are getting really interesting in this area. Eno and Byrne are the first artists of significant stature to do this as far as I know. This is what I think it might lead to at some poi…
… An announcement from the management: I’m getting so much comment spam now I’m going to have to turn off the anonymous posting or I’ll start missing the real posts. If you want to post, please create an account. I’m pretty sure this won’t matter since so few people read this blog anyway, and for those lovely people who have accounts – let me take this opportunity to say thanks. …
… Thanks 1:48:35 – that’s a pretty miraculous time; without the beard it may have been even less! And six months is three months longer than you originally predicted – just make sure you keep that CD I lent you safe… Jonathan (above comment thread got mushed in the migration from Drupal to Wordpress, sorry)…
Music is like drugs – if you have a relationship with it at all it tends to be at its most intense when you’re young. But in common with most people of my age, I suppose I’ve drifted away from music as a passion to it being merely an occasional pastime. A CD on a Sunday afternoon, some backing music to a kids party… I feel this does most of what I like a huge injustice (and Axel’s friends must be amongst very few toddlers who have played pass the…
I heard today that somebody I knew at Oyster Partners died a couple of weeks ago. I didn’t really know him, but I’d like to write something about him. I don’t know if this is the done thing or not – I hope his family and friends will excuse me. His name was Barnes Tilney. I spoke to Barns a number of times, and was present when he spoke to others. He struck me as an amusing, sharp and thoughtful person. I don’t know how long he had had lukemia, b…
… if it was made with real cat skin then it shouldn’t have been of cheap quality…
Blimey. You take your eye of your blog and what happens? More than a month goes by and you’ve not done a thing with it. I had an excuse: a pathetic new year’s resolution to only blog about positive things. And lo, I could think of nothing. But I’m not going to completely throw that out with the Christmas tree, because one of the undoubtedly good things that’s happend recently is Framfab’s blog. Framfab, you may recall, is the company I work for. …
The holidays now over, and even the first week at work done, I can now return to some good ol’ blogging now that we’ve bought a new car, almost tidied up our files (well, my files anyway – Kumi still just chucks all her papers under her desk and mumbles shoganai…) and packed up the plastic Xmas tree. My new year’s resolution (on my blog at any rate) is to think about more positive things. Too many of last year’s posts were cynical, negative rants…
Well I finally did it. I had no particular stimulus other than me being on holiday and saw a Slashdot post about a recent review of Linux distros for the desktop. They’d rated Ubuntu highest, so I went along to distrowatch.com and did some reading up. After downloading and burning the (single) ISO, I’m now running it. I always find descriptions of Windows to Linux migrations pretty boring, so I’ll lay off the details about how I got my printer wo…
Coming home from work seems to be a time when I can think slightly creatively. This is a pity, since I’m paid to do that while I’m at work, but the sheer cacophony and chaos of the office I work in kills that stone dead about 20 mins after the morning coffee. Today, for instance, somebody’s PC fan started running in emergency cooling mode. This, combined with the telephones, keyboard tapping, seemingly constant car alarms and the (yes) children’s…
In an effort to make a visual change around here, I thought I’d start a collection of links to stuff in my new “Links” section on the right hand side. In true 1995 style, I’ve just saved the images out of a couple of sites. So say konnichiwa to Magnatune (and while you’re at it Brad Sucks), as well as the blog of my mate Kaoru – without whom none of this would be possible (probably). Update: I’m now being a little more sophisticated, having just …
“Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!” Right on! I have a gun, I’m wearing a beret, and my daddy’s the richest man in America! After having a dig at crap on TV in my last blog post, I found myself watching the box for “Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst” on Monday night. I’d been vaguely aware of the Patty Hearst story, but this documentary really pulled me in close to the details and I found it fascinating. It w…
… Here come the replies! This is fun. 20 replies so far! From the completely fished-in “Can you post your plans somewhere?” to (my favourite so far) advice about a “Licence to Crenellate” and “Face it, you just want to get away from the wife, don’t you?” Even something in… celtic? …
I’ve been fiddling with computers recently. It all started when my wife bought a video camera (Sony PC-110) with a DV output. Then I got a Firewire card. Then I tried to burn DVDs of my sister’s wedding. Then I f****ing tore my hair out and gave up. That was over a year ago, but time heals all things, and I returned to the quest to burn a DVD that could play on our DVD player in the living room. This time with film of my sister’s daughter’s chris…
This post is political – no apologies. Look away now. All my life the forces of evil have been embodied by “terrorists.” The IRA, Abu Nidal, Tigers, FARC, Al Quaida, the list is endless. All my life, the foreign policy of governments have been ranged around the war against terror, supported by the war against drugs and “organised crime.” It just goes round and round and round. It’s reached the status of a culture of our times and it’s making me s…
… They didn’t see this …
… One must wonder what’s worse – Blogging about the fairly banal incidents of day-to-day life, or blogging about whether or not one should blog such incidents. Particularly if one describes the incident in detail in the course of doing so. …
… This is apparently helping to finish somebody’s PhD, but it was mainly out of curiosity that I filled it in. He doesn’t give you the option of listing Trillian as your IM client, so he’s obviously a bit stuck up in his ivory tower. The results page is down at the time of writing, but it promises to be quite interesting. …
… This article about making silver bullets is interesting, and mentions in passing that silver tarnishing is a relatively modern phenomenon brought about by sulfur pollution from power plants. Wow. …
Ah, Japan: land of individually-wrapped bananas and toilets that squirt warm water up your bum. Ten days in Nagano (Ena City) with the in-laws followed by visits to other relatives and friends. The food! The technology! Even the interminable shopping trips for kids clothes were interesting. Japan qualified for the world cup against North Korea in a match that nobody could attend (so they did the whole thing on video screens by proxy), Takanohana …
… A holiday for three weeks in Japan, starting tomorrow! It’s been a while since I last went – the sushi, the traffic, the in-laws and the partial lack of understanding of what’s going on. I’m looking forward to all these things and more, starting with airline food (Korean Airlines! A kimchi wagon in the sky!). …
Observers of the date stamp will note that I’ve not posted for… weeks! This is not for lack of subject matter, of which I hope to expand at some point, but due to the fact that I’ve been working on a project with deadlines which anyone would be excused for thinking were some kind of Guinness Book attempt: two people writing a 200-page specification in three days and nine (nine!) other deliverables over three further, not to mention numerous updat…
It’s been a while since I had a foray in the genre that I call “half-formed ideas,” but here’s a good one that I’ve been brewing for a while. For no good reason I can recall, I was reading this essay about spontaneous use of chiasmus in contemporary English and it got me thinking. Not so much about chiasmus, which is of course fascinating in its own right, but about language and communication in general. Life has always been a crisis of communica…
My uncle Julian, Bagpipe Maker to the Stars (Warning: sound samples are not work safe) wrote me a letter the other day. It struck me that people writing to me by hand is now an immensely rare event, and that I myself have not written a letter to anyone in about fifteen years. The last may have been during my gap year in Japan. So, I’ve decided to write back to him. I have an old letter pad I found in the attic (“Elco of Switzerland”, green, 50 sh…
For some reason last night I decided to post a rather late April fool to uk.legal. It was a bit rough around the edges, but only took about fifteen minutes to do (and spookily time-stamped at exactly 00:00hrs). I’m quite proud that it seems to have at least partially hooked one person in, while producing some pretty good replies from others. Nobody picked up on the the first line about “giving me a steer” though. (The better replies are on the “n…
… Ah he ha ha. …
It’s obviously a by-product of collaborative websites like Slashdot and Kuro5hin that April 1st generates so many fake stories. One or two might be funny, but there were about ten on Slashdot yesterday: EU to ban Macs, UN to outlaw Internet, Opera inventing a new P2P system called “SoundWave” etc. etc. The best one this year for my money was BoingBoing’s. It got me fished in for a while… but I got it in the end. I’m still not sure if this is a fo…
After almost two days off line while we made the changeover from Plusnet, we’re now with Homechoice. It’s TV, phone and broadband down your phone line, so no dishes or cable laying. You get a nice brushed aluminum STB which looks very much like a Mac Mini only it has a large soft blue light on the front – very large. A bit too large. There’s also a disconcerting lag between hitting a button on the remote and the interface responding, which makes …
We’ve decided to move from our current ADSL provider (PlusNet) to Homechoice, the London-only provider of broadband, TV and telephone packages. They do all this via the little copper wire that runs from the BT telephone exchange to your house – impressive. The main reason for switching to them is not the tech though (oh no, read on about that), but the fact that out TV reception has been awful since the Arts Depot was built up the road from us. T…
I sold my old bike on eBay this evening – £320. That’s more than I thought I’d get. I can’t help feeling a little sad to see it go. 45 people had it in their watch lists, which was a bit like having a crowd of anonymous mourners at a funeral: a mark of some respect I hope. It’s been a part of me for almost a third of my life; longer than I’ve known my wife and many of my friends, and I’ve ridden every single one of those 30,619 miles. It may have…
… At last I’ve got round to doing something about that lame home page with the spinning pipes on it. It is now no more – and the blog page is king of the castle. Well, as far as I can tell, anyway. It was actually quite tricky to do in the end (I had to learn what ^ and $ mean) and pedants will note that things that link to “home” now link here. Hmm. …
… I’ve just looked at my Slashdot profile and I have three fans! Maybe I should move my blog there. Better for the ego at least. …
… “It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all nations of the earth.” The Times, about the invention of the telegraph, 1858. …
Amazing. I get in to work on Friday, and the senior PM comes in to say that the client has decided to go for an ecommerce deployment so that £250,000 they’ve just given us to redesign their site along non-ecommerce lines (because originally they weren’t up for that) is canned. Well, maybe about 20% of it can be salvaged for re-use, but all the work I’ve been doing for the last three months (along with two other IA’s, some graphic designers and a …
… Should have got this for Christmas. Maybe next year… …
Just thought I’d check Slashdot after one last brandy and a mince pie (made by me: Ainsly Harriot BBC Top 100 recipe, the one with the grated orange peel in the pastry). I love Slashdot. Not that I understand half of what gets talked about there, but the responses to this Christmas day story are wonderfully heart-warming. From my RSS feed: phreakuencies writes “Worried since the recent post about the MN4 2004 asteroid, I added a bookmark to it’s …
I got one of those actually rather nice “pass-this-round” emails from a friend the other day. I thought I’d blog it. In fact in one of those “when-I-ever-get-the-time” thoughts, a little web app to do this would be an interesting project… > > WHAT BOOK ARE YOU READING? I don’t read books. I read one a few months ago but it was geeky and too embarrassing to mention in public (“The Humane Interface” by Jef Raskin – see?) > > WHAT’S ON YOUR MOUSE PA…
I was playing with Axel this afternoon while we listened to what I used to think was a rather boring album that seems to have grown on me even though I’ve not listened to it for about three years: The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld. I was surprised by how many “rather British” samples there are in it. Churchbells, leather on willow, lawnmowers, that kind of thing. But for some reason I got thinking about what to do with that dusty old PC …
… Of course the birthday script is not without its own defects… It STILL says its your birthday, and it will probably continue to do so for another 2 days (if my equally un-observed birthday announcement was anything to go by). …
In my continuing adventures through the looking glass that is eBay, I have made a profit on a mobile phone sale. This is getting pretty weird. Who are these eBay buyers who are willing to pay so much? Kumi wanted a new phone to replace her really old one. “Get one of them 3Pay ones – they look like a good deal” I said. So we did. Brought it home, put the SIM in, put it on charge, then looked at the 3Pay tariff sheet. The minimum credit you can bu…
Well, I bought a Yamaha YP125 Majesty on eBay, picked it up in a van, got it serviced and am now waiting for the insurance to come through on it. I still can’t quite work out if I did the right thing or not, but it was fun. You only live once, etc. etc. For those interested in the details, read on. After a 10-day listing, I put an £813 proxy on it. The bidding closed at £561.00. The following weekend, I hired a van for the weekend. The plan was t…
That bike crash has shaken me up. I’ve been riding my trusty Honda CB250N for over 12 years and it failed the MOT last year, and it’s going to have to have some repairs as well this time. So, I getting new wheels. This time I’m going scooter. Bought my copy of What Bike? on Saturday morning, shortlisted a few, then hit eBay. By Sunday morning I’d taken a £500 punt on a 2003 Yamaha Majesty 125. It’s only got 2,500mi on the clock, but it’s had some…
I fell off my motorbike last week going in to work. I’ve done it before: pottering along at about 30mph you come up behind some stationary traffic. If you then use the bus lane, you stay relatively safe but run the gauntlet of the cameras (I’ve had two fines for that in the last five years), so I usually try to squeeze down the outside against the oncoming traffic and risk it. And no, you can’t stay in lane and wait with the cars. On a motorbike …
The performance of Bill Drummond’s “Seventeen” went flawlessly last night. Although Kumi and Axel couldn’t stay for my actual performance (way past bedtime), the place was standing room only as we mooed and whooped our way through the “score.” Mercifully, it was only a few minutes this time, although I could see one woman’s toes visibly curling as we sang. The Seventeen sang about an hour and a half into Drummond’s thing, and I’d almost forgotten…
… Ah – the archives Who cares what Julie Burchill thinks….
… Just run another spam report. Things are about the same as they were three months ago. Odd how the two addresses get quite different amounts and show such separate patterns. Not sure what to make of that. …
Well that was interesting. Last night I became one of North Finchley’s “Seventeen” at the soon-to-open Arts Depot. This is part of Bill Drummond’s latest project entitled “How To Be An Artist” and involved seventeen men (well, it was actually fourteen I think) recording an improvised vocal performance accompanied by the sound of Bill’s Land Rover engine and a C minor chord. Bill Drummond doesn’t come across as the scary maverick I was expecting –…
… This has been worrying me for a while: why does fruit get juicer as it ripens? If it’s off the tree, then it’s not got any source of water, so why doesn’t it just dry up? Why does it appear to have less water in when it’s not ripe? Hmmm. Ahmmmmm. …
Axel’s been showing quite an aptitude for making cubic structures. While most of his peers are content to pile up bricks repetitively, perhaps with the occasional asymmetric flourish, he prefers to create a base, then build Guadi-like cathedrals using the properties and shapes of the materials rather architecturally. Last week Kumi showed me something he’d made that was actually a little spooky in its complexity (remember, Axel is only just four)…
… Now that Bluetooth can liberate my lo-res snaps from the confines of my phone to the wasteland of my blog, I thought I’d celebrate by puttin’ some up: …
I watched the DVD of Hayao Miyazaki’s anime epic today with Axel, who was (almost) glued to it throughout. It’s a spooky film, and I was worried he’d get nightmares, but he seems OK. I didn’t realise the film was made twenty years ago. The first thing that struck me was how much The Matrix (and in particular Reloaded) plundered it for ideas: the sentinels are in it (well, as huge insects) and some scenes are extremely similar. There’s even a bit …
The fact that millions of pounds a year are lost to credit card fraud makes the whole “chip and PIN” thing more mysterious by the day. When’s it happening? Why did it happen years ago? How will it be introduced? There seems to be a veil of confusion over it all, but most people seem either not to know nor care about it. Hmm. Well, maybe it’ll all be OK. But I began to worry when I got a flyer from Barclaycard entitled “Answering your questions ab…
I am not, and never have been, a smoker, but sometimes I find myself thinking things are far worse than I thought. This week was one of those times. In an echo of a flabbergasting report frome the BMA that tobacco should be made illegal, there comes a survey that shows that a large proportion of people in Britain think it should be banned as well. This opinion says more about misplaced belief in the rule of law than it does attitudes to smoking, …
… Outlook Express repair I must admit to being more impressed for Outlook Express repair. I’ve even recommended it to all my friends….
I note that Google indexes Flash (I’m probably the last to know this), which is interesting. I wonder how long it will take Googlerank to treat Flash movies in the same way as text, PDF and those other formats it indexes as well? Just re-read Clay Shirky’s demolition of the semantic web. This has got to be one of the best critiques of anything that’s come out in the last couple of years on the subject. Wonderful teenage philosophising on Slashdot…
A lazy afternoon this Saturday, playing with Axel and listening The Prodigy’s new album “Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned.” The Prodge are sounding simpler in their old age I think, and some rather obvious similarities with other stuff is showing through too much for my liking. Liam Howlett’s been going all Jah Wobble and listening to Middle Eastern music, which is nice, but one track (The Way It) has the bass sound off Michael Jackson’s “Thri…
Axel James Andoh Baker-Bates was four years old today. This post is a copy of the mail sent to all the noble subscribers to the Net Parent News mailing list, and for the edification of my blog. Selfish as his father is. Whether or not Axel fully understood the significance of the occasion today is hard to say, as he wasn’t letting much conversation get in the way of him and his Thunderbirds Tracy Island present. Zwoosh! Ba bada baa! But looking b…
Blogging from abroad is sooo trendy. But I forgot to pack my camera so no piccies I’m afraid. We’re doing user testing (I facilitated the sessions in London, and sitting in on the ones in Milan – more about that later). It’s hot, but the testing suite is air-conditoned. Funny how net access is like drugs – we all have to fight for it as there’s no wi-fi here and some people’s GPRS is patchy. We found an ethernet cable and have been were passing i…
… I’ve been totting up the amount of spam I get per day on my two email addresses over the last few months. It’s pretty depressing really. An average of about 120 a day on each address. Odd how one address gets quite different numbers from the other one. Luckily, I only ever see about three or four a day, as I’m using Spamassassin, but the thought of all the junk pinging around the email system… …
… Guinea pigs are highly allergic to egg white. How I bumped into this is a complete mystery, but it’s one of those things I like about the web – bumping into things. …
… Interesting – and timely – article on the Register today Seems I’m not only in danger of annoying everyone (although that’s as good a reason to blog as any) but the related article at the bottom of the page says I’m a saddo too. Nice. …
… Standard issue first blog post: It’s taken me about six months longer than I thought – but I’ve finally got this site up and running. I had some rather grander plans for it before, but after much reflection, I’ve decided to start small and just blog. Thanks Kaoru – you gave me that advice, so I took it. I’ll be expanding Webtorque according to my Secret Master Plan… later. Meanwhile, have a look at the Articles link. …