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What would George say?
One of the useful spin-offs from the recent (and ongoing purge and tidy) at Pritchard Towers is that every now and again something floats up that makes you think “Whoa, yes, relevant with a capital ‘R'”. The most recent relevant thing to catch my attention was a copy of Bernard Crick’s excellent biography of George
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Garden Party…
I’ve always been one of the world’s great hoarders…one of those folks who hangs on to things because they may one day be useful, one who starts something and then has to sweat cobs to get it finished. I guess it’s when I noticed I had 3 pages of accounts, user names and passwords that
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The end of an era…
Well, the end of a personal era for me. A number of years ago – I think 2003 or thereabouts – I needed a new phone. I honestly can’t remember what I had before the trusty Nokia shown on the left. I think it was a Motorola of some sort – similar sort of functionality,
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Wolfram Alpha – how not to make friends and influence people!
Hmmm…this is becoming WA corner recently – take a look at my previous piece here. I was less than impressed with the technology and considered it either over-hyped or released too early in to the world. However, I did hope that as time progressed there might be improvements in the results set returned and, more
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Book Review – ‘Mere Christianity’
When I used to commute between work and office I used to do a regular(ish) item on here called ‘The Bus Book’ in which I reveiwed the book I’d been reading whilst on the commute. One book I intended to review as part of that series, but never managed it because the commuting finished, was
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Google and ‘The Dead Past’
Earlier this year we saw the launch of Google’s Street View system – here – and with it came a plethora of complaints about the invasion of privacy implications. I was one of the happy complainants – Google had a view right through my house, showing people in the house. To be honest, their reaction
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Death of a celebrity
This weekend the singer Stephen Gately died at his residence in Majorca. At the time of writing, the cause of death is unknown but suicide, foul play and drugs abuse are not being suggested. I was provoked in to making this post by the reaction to the death that I noticed from various friends and
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Meanwhile, back in June…..
Originally a Facebook Note, June 8th 2009, after the EU Elections…. The problem with democracy is that sometimes it allows people to vote for folks that you personally don’t want to gain any sort of power. Unfortunatley, that’s democracy for you. She can be a total bitch. FWIW, I voted for the Socialist Party inspired
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Wolfram Alpha – too early released or over-hyped?
In case you’re saying, “Wolfram what?”, here’s a little reading: http://www.wolframalpha.com/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/technology/2009/05/does_wolfram_work.html http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8052798.stm http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2009/may/18/wolfram-review-test-google-search http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/dziuba_wolfram/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/03/17/wolfram_alpha/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/18/wolfram_alpha/ OK – I’ll start by announcing a vested interest here. I occasionally write software that attempts to make sense out of straight English questions and phrases, and then by cunning trickery makes the response from the program
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Are such things done on Albion’s shore?
I don’t often have much to say in favour of Phillip Pullman, but this is a fantastic article, IMO. He encapsulates so much of how I feel about the gradual erosion of our rights in the UK. Now…and disturbingly…this piece was ‘vanished’ from the Times’ website for a while – no explanation, no reason. It