November 4th, 2009
The recent Think and a Drink (@TaaD) covered the wide ranging topic of Social Networking. There was much to take in and some genuinely useful tips and tricks for ‘upping’ your game with regards to social networking from an internet perspective.
However, one presentation tried to tackle the immensely challenging science of networking and attempted to explain the academic difference between complex and complicated. Whilst the explanation of ‘complicated’ was good, ‘complex’ was almost just left as being ‘not like complicated’ – the explanation didn’t really explore the concept due, most likely, to a lack of time. I’m going to try to touch on it here.
(Update: This is about complexity theory, rather than the normal English use of the words. Sorry for any confusion!)
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Tags: Complexity TaaD
Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »
August 2nd, 2009
BAA is British Airports Authority. They ‘run’ the main airports around London which include Heathrow, Gatwick and Standsted. Unfortunately, Heathrow T5 is the centre of operations for British Airways. I say ‘unfortunately’ because travelling through T5 is a thoroughly unpleasant experience and blights British Airways and Britian’s supposedly premiere airport. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Life, Travel
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June 1st, 2009
I was thinking today about my favourite anecdote about my Dad, who is very much alive. My Dad, who is now in his seventies, is very into the outdoor life, exercise and generally being healthy. I think that this has something to do with his early career in the Army.
My Dad lives in Ontario, Canada, and is retired. He has always enjoyed anything to do with water having been a keen sailor in the past, and has two windsurfers which he uses on Lake Ontario during the summer. During the winter he tends to X-country ski, snow-shoe and generally keep very active.
About two years ago I got an email out of the blue which said that he was thinking of buying a canoe and described the ‘Indian’ style canoe that he was thinking of getting. I thought, ‘oh, the windsurfing must be getting a bit much’ and emailed back a gentle question to that effect. I got the following reply:
“No, on some days it isn’t windy.”
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May 15th, 2009
The Thinking Digital Conference kicked off to a great start on it’s second (and last) day. The comedy of Tom Scott was a fabulous tonic to the rest of the first session which kicked off with an exploration od “Digital Darwin”, climbed considerable heights with data visualisation through an Internet connected presentation by Professor Hans Rosling, had a little dip with a spotlight on segmenting the US population for the recent Presidential elections, and finished with the Tom. Oh, and I almost forgot that there was a great digital piano solo that started the session by Rob Colling.
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Tags: linkedin, TDC
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May 14th, 2009
The picture says it all. (Had a twitter failure, this was supposed to be a twitpic …)
making cleaning windows interesting?
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March 19th, 2009
Interesting post by Rob Wier about year and date problems in Excel. I’m using OpenOffice instead. They’ve hopefully fixed the problem in Excel by now though?
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March 19th, 2009
… has probably been the best thing that has happened to me on my desktop. It started after an update on Intrepid 8.20 which broke Liferea and stopped it from running. The effect has been to stop me reading endless amounts of crap and (along with my new Tracks interest) is helping me to focus on doing things that are important! Expect to see a slightly higher output of blog posts amongst other things!
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August 6th, 2008
A, sadly, unsurprising interview that I read at derStandard.at, but alerted from the Boycott Novell blog. de Icaza has been lampooned in the past for his unpopular views on Microsoft, .net, and C#, but this interview really takes the biscuit. The guy comes across as extremely naive, foolish, and also, because of his position, frankly quite dangerous for Free Software.
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Tags: Free Software, Linux, Microsoft
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August 6th, 2008
This blog post is one of the best reasons why my data isn’t in the cloud:
Suddenly, Nick can’t access his Gmail account, can’t open Google Talk (our office IM app), can’t open Picasa where his family pictures are, can’t use his Google Docs, and oh by the way, he paid for additional storage. So, this is a paying customer with no access to the Google empire.
Nope, my data is safely locked up in my own mail server, my own web-server, my own backups, etc. I’ve always felt slightly uneasy about using Gmail for all my mail. Now I know why.
Tags: Cloud
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August 4th, 2008
A couple of weeks ago my wife, Helen, had a business trip to Bristol. So, rather than driving or taking the train, the quickest option was to travel by EasyJet from Newcastle to Bristol. She had to take her passport to be able to get on the plane. It set me thinking; why did she need a passport to travel inside the UK?
After all, you don’t need a passport to take the train to Bristol. Or a coach, for that matter. And I’ve never needed a passport to drive my car to Bristol. This is inside this country. These are internal flights. Next time you travel inside the country and have to show your passport, ask yourself why?
PS I know people are going to say “Because they mix International and Internal passengers.” I don’t care about that; they also check your boarding card and passport at the gate before you get on the plane.
Tags: Liberty, Life
Posted in Life | 2 Comments »
