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When can we have adults running the UK please?
Well, it looks like the Foreign Office have managed to confirm what I’ve felt about the majority of Civil Servants for some time. That is, they need to grow up, realise that they’re on a pretty cushy number in ‘public service’ and deliver the work that we pay them for. Just take a look at
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Normal Service will hopefully be resumed…soon!
Regular readers will have noticed that the last few weeks on Joe’s Jottings have been a bit patchy in terms of the frequency of posts. It’s been a perfect example of ‘life happening when you’re making other plans’ and I hope soon to be getting back to the ‘one post a day’ regime that I
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Tethering a Blackberry to a PC
This is one of those ‘good to try, might be useful’ sort of things that I’ve been intending to try for some time. First of all, a couple of caveats – some service providers don’t like you doing this, and almost all of them charge you extra for the privilege. So, regard this as an
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Crystal Reports…where did you go wrong?
Many moons ago, when you could write useful software on a computer with less processing power than my last cellphone, there was a reporting tool called Crystal Reports that was incredibly useful for those of us who spent our working lives using tools such as Visual BASIC 3 to write windows applications. It had a
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The obligatory General Election Post
Some years ago, a joke did the rounds about the first Albanian astronaut. The main thing you need to know is that at the time the joke was told Albania was a head-bangingly totalitarian Marxist state with total media control. Anyway…. Albania manages to launch an astronaut in to orbit, and Radio Tirana announces the fact with great
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Seafood Pornography
There’s a superb episode of The Simpsons where various discussions of actor ‘Troy McClure are taking place: Louie: Hey, I thought you said Troy McClure was dead. Tony: No, what I said was: “He sleeps with the fishes”. You see… ….. Homer: You know, his bizarre personal life. Those weird things they say he does
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Politically Correctly Dead
This story is desperately, tragically sad on a number of levels, and also makes me pretty angry. Read the story – unless you’ve had a very sheltered life (oh, working in the public sector or the hallowed halls of academe or parts of the media) then it’s almost certain that you’ll have come across similar
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Arrogance 2.0
Maybe I’m just old, or maybe I just don’t get some aspects of modern business – or are some people online purporting to be business experts just arrogant and opinionated folks with insufficient experience and a habit of stating the bleedin’ obvious as if they’d just discovered a Unified Field Theory? And what triggered this off? As frequently
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Apple – why 2014 could be like 1984
Back in 1984, Apple had Ridley Scott direct a very imaginative advert to launch the Macintosh computer. It ran twice – once on a small TV station late at night to get it in the running for some awards, and the second time at half time in the Superbowl American Football game on 22nd January
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A hint of mortality
Today Guy Kewney died of cancer. He’d been ill with Liver and bowel cancer for a year. For those of us who got involved in personal and home computing ‘at the start’ Guy was effectively ‘Mr Personal Computer World’. He didn’t own it, but his column was often the one we all read first. One