Another of my recent toys has appeared by way of work – a Dell M1330 laptop. My boss is very good about appropriating what is required, and even humoured me by way of fulfilling my request for a laptop. I prefer them for work – easy to cart into meetings and ensure work gets done, [...]
Author Archive
Unloved Interfaces
24 Apr 2008 at 04:02
James
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Having spent all too many hours enjoying Air New Zealand’s hospitality – in the loosest sense of the word – I remain perplexed as to the design of their entertainment system. Things have moved on a lot since I last did a long-haul trip in 2005 – while we were chuffed then to have multiple [...]
Happy snapper
14 Apr 2008 at 04:16
James
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Over the past few months I’ve acquired a number of new toys, the most popular of which is proving to be my EOS 400D (or Digital Rebel XTi if you’re so inclined). I’ve oft sworn that a DSLR was more trouble than it’s worth – yes, the pictures are nice but it’s lots of money [...]
Resurrection
Astute observers may notice that this site has been left bereft of content for some months now. The reasons for this are legion, but essentially summed up in that I didn’t have anything I wanted to write about. And once I did, I was too lazy to write about it: a fine example for all [...]
The Death of Liberal Economics
For various reasons I’m currently not filled with the enthusiasm to write anything here. Nevertheless, something has finally warmed my blood up enough for me to put a little effort in. And that’s the Bank of England, and the whining banking industry. The best thing Labour ever did was giving the Bank of England independence. [...]
Facebook (or trendy lock-in)
Another distraction has been Facebook. Very popular in London, it does draw a rather neat feed of all your friends activities. It also has a nice API that allows you to pull in external content, such as Twitter or Flickr. However, there’s no way they’re letting you pull content out easily. A good example is [...]
After that rude interruption…
I’ve been distracted from writing opinionated and ill-informed articles for a little while now. Why? The implosion of my last job through a lack of work. The discovery and joining of a new place of work. World of Warcraft. Mostly the latter. Unfortunately my work at JR dried up, thanks to a customer who ran [...]
Truth being stranger than fiction
We all love our stereotypes. Especially about crazy Americans who eat nothing but doughnuts, drive hummers and believe in bombing the rest of the world until it stops whining about the completely appropriate Guantamano. Then someone goes and demonstrates there are people who actually believe such things. There are mad people everywhere, but some are [...]
A maze of twisty passages, all disconnected
The magic of hypertext was the ability to suddenly make a glorious, if somewhat unstructured, whole from a mountain of disconnected data. And so we end up with the web, and the ability to lose hours bouncing in to Wikipedia and ending up God knows where. This is a much nicer approach than the old [...]
Bork bork bork!
About the only thing I did this weekend was attend my brother-in-law’s birthday party. His boyfriend is Swedish, and so we were introduced to something new, exciting and Swedish: Smörgåstårta. Yes, sandwich cake. It’s really rather delicious. Given the Swedish had already won a place in my heart for a chocolate bar that shares the [...]
