Joe's Jottings

  • The Bus Book – w/c 31st March – Libra

    Don DeLillo’s Libra takes on the great rift in the American psyche; that which opened up on 22nd November 1963 when Kennedy was assasinated.  Whatever the nature of the man, one thing became true form that point on – that bad things can indeed happen to and in the Home of the Free. This is

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  • The guilty pleasure that is H P Lovecraft

    Over the last couple of days I’ve taken a break from Don DeLillo’s ‘Libra’ and have returned to one of my all time favourite horror / science fiction writers, H P Lovecraft.  In particular, I’m re-reading his novella ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ – an everyday tale of international grave robbing, ghoulish possession and

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  • The Bus Book – w/c 24th March – The Social Entrepreneur: Making Communities Work

    Andrew Mawson (now a Cross Bencher in the House of Lords) has written a very important book with this work.  It chronicles his experiences in Bromley-by-Bow, an impoverished area of East London, from his arrival there as a United Reform Church Vicar in 1984 through his driving of the the development of social enterprises, health centres and

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  • Will no one think about the children…

    I’m a big fan of ‘The Simpsons’ and in one episode there is a morally outraged female character who keeps screaming the expression ‘Will no one think about the children’ whenever something crops up. I was reminded of this sort of ineffective moral indignation when I encountered this article in The Sunday Times about the

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  • Reluctantly joining Facebook….

    Sigh….. That it should come to this.  Unfortunately a group I belong to is going to be using Facebook, and given that I’m supposed to be the IT guy, I am expected to know how it works. So, I’ve registered and am working out how little I need to put up there whilst still making

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  • A great site – www.thisisawar.com

    Earlier on today I was looking for the text of the ‘vision thing’ speech from the start of Jerry Maguire.  As to why I was looking for it – let’s just say I needed some motivation.  For those of you who’ve not encountered it, I include it here for your consideration. And by some strange

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  • The Bus Book – w/c 17th March – On Civil Disobedience

    As the copy I have of ‘On Walden pond’ also includes this essay, it seemed churlish to not feature it here. Thoreau spent a night in prison during his time at Walden, because he neglected to pay a local tax.  Whether he would have spent longer in prison than a single night had the tax

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  • Arthur C Clarke – RIP

    Bugger. Like a lot of things, I guess that in my heart of hearts I knew that eventually all the venerable old writers of science fiction, the folks who I grew up with, would all pass away.  When it starts happening it’s a strange experience.  The world has enough obituaries for ACC – here I

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  • Installing PEAR packages on WAMP

    Well, after getting caught out recently with PEAR on a client installation, I thought it a good move to write a short tutorial for anyone who needs to install PEAR packages on their WAMP installation. To start with, for the purposes of this blog, PEAR is a framework for implementing code libraries in PHP.  In other

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  • Firefox slacker than IE? Surely some mistake…

    I’m currently working with some other developers creating a PHP / SQL Server 2005 based site.  The division of work is along the lines of I do PHP and SQL, and they take my less than beautiful code and pretty it up.  This has worked very well, and because I tend to run IE6 on

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