Too few experiments in school science
I'm a science geek - always have been, always will be. When I was a kid I had microscopes, telescopes, chemistry sets - anything that allowed me to do experiments. By the time I went to secondary sc…
The 'father' of home computers dies...
A few days ago one of the pioneers of the home computer revolution of the 1970s died. Ed Roberts), an MD in Georgia, died after a long battle with Pneumonia. Back in the 1970s his company, MITS, move…
Dr Who - lazy writing or social engineering?
And so the new incarnation of Dr Who has his first adventure on BBC One, with 27 year old Matt Smith as the latest actor to portray the eponymous Time Lord. The one thing about Doctors these days is …
A millstone around their necks
Easter is the holiest time of the year for Christians - this year has been special for all the wrong reasons as well, though. The recent stories around what appears to be institutionalised failings i…
And there's one more thing...
My guilty secret for today - I love 'Columbo'. No, not Colombo, capital city of Sri Lanka, but Columbo, dishevelled Los Angeles murder squad detective in the 1970sTV detective series of the same name…
Social Search...waste of time?
I'm a big user of search engines. Despite my grumblings and pontifications on here about Google, I still use them the most because they're still the best out there. I hope that Bing - despite the da…
Happy Customers - banks should have us stuffed and mounted!
It's 1943 and we're in Stalag Luft XXIIIb, a prison camp for allied prisoners of war, somewhere in the centre of Germany. In the centre of a hut, allied prisoners sit around a table which has a reaso…
Social Media and the mob
One of my favourite films is 'The Fisher King')- one of the most haunting scenes in it is where Radio 'Shock Jock' Jack Lucas repeats the words 'Forgive me' from a TV script he is hoping to star in, w…
A quick guide to blog spam...
I'll soon be hitting a landmark on Joe's jottings - 10,000 spam posts caught by the Akismet spam trapping plug-in for Wordpress. Not at all bad going - I would advise anyone who runs a Wordpress Blog…
Why are some Open Source support people so damn rude?
Don't get me wrong - I love Open Source software and have used some of it fairly widely in various development projects that I've done. I'm also aware of the fact that people involved in the develop…