Is this really to the public good?
A couple of weeks ago I came acrossthis article in the Guardian(not my normal read, but their online media pages are useful) referring to the publication by the Wikileaks organisationof an archive of…
RATM vs X-Factor - Corporate Music Win!
There's a lovely comment in the movie 'Con Air' in which the character Garland Greene, a psychopath played by Steve Buscemi, watches the inmates on a prison transport plane celebrate their take over o…
After the Goldrush
There's a song by Neil Young called 'After the Goldrush', which he wrote in the 1970s. There's a couple of lines in there which for the last 20 years have sounded increasingly like a warning: "We got…
A Modest Proposal to focus Climate Negotiator's Minds.
In the last few minutes of the final episode of the TV series 'Blackadder Goes Forth', Blackadder and his Company are poised to go 'over the top' from their trench to charge the German lines. In the …
Twitter hacked - not the end of the world, no surprise, and a badge of honour.
There's a scene in the movie 'Blazing Saddles' where the Waco Kid, being asked why he's ended up in prison for drunkenness, bewails the fact that when he was the well known gun-slinger everyone wanted…
Iframes in phpBB
I am currently tinkering with a phpBB3 installation for a forum I ran until the summer of this year – Coffeehouse Chat. I shut the site down in the summer, but am now contemplating opening it up again…
The Dr Johnson License....
I appreciate that this is likely to be one of those posts that will annoy some folks, but, here we go. A couple of days ago I was invited by two or three separate people to join Facebook Groups and si…
In Praise of Drummers
There's an old joke amongst musicians – 'What do you call someone who hangs around on stage with musicians?' The punchline? 'A drummer.' Well, I like drummers – most of them, anyway. I think that the …
Playing the game of War
One of my 'guilty secret' films is the 1982 John Badham movie 'War Games', in which a teenager inadvertently starts the countdown to World War 3 by hacking in to a military computer system. He thinks …
I think that I shall never see...
...a thing as lovely as a tree, goes the poem. We've been blessed this year by squirrels in our garden. We live in a suburb of Sheffield with lots of trees which give a great playground for the squi…