If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Oh dear. My PC is starting to show its age. I’ve had it a while, lovingly applying little upgrades and fixes, building it from scratch about four years ago, nursing it back to life the day it exploded and […]

I’ve spent almost the whole day working on the book. Research, rather than writing, but I’ve made a lot of good progress and things are slotting into place very nicely.
The more I research the back story, though, the more that feels like a story of its own, and the whole thing is starting to feel […]

It’s had good reviews, so ten of us; Trevor, Jon, Paul and I, a couple of other Pauls, a Bryce and a misellaneous couple of others, met up outside the Odeon to watch Brokeback Mountain.
Hmmm.
Considering it was set almost exclusively in the Wyoming Countryside I really do think the actual cinematography was seriously lacking. There […]

This was a surprisingly entertaining find. We Plussed it off Sky (if that’s what you should call recording something on your Sky+ box) a couple of weeks ago and are making a determined effort to watch everything so we can defrag the disk and claim back the mysterious block of unrecordable space showing up on […]

iTunes was updated last night. I downloaded it this morning and found it had a brand new feature: it suggests songs you might like to buy from the iTunes Music Store on the basis of the track currently selected in your Library.
Now Apple is well known for its love of France and the French, or […]

The second Tuesday after Christmas is always a late night at work, as it’s traditionally the day when Apple announces its new products for the first half of the year.
As anyone who’s been following the stories online (see www.macuser.co.uk) will know, it has successfully dumped the PowerPC chip from its PowerBook and iMac ranges, so […]

Hunting through the Royal Mint web site for something totally unconnected, I happened across a table of all the legal British coins in circulation.
It makes for fascinating - if somewhat geeky - reading, particularly when you add up the total value of them all.
It goes like this. As of the end of 2004, we had […]

You can’t help but laugh. After expecting a horrendous journey in this morning, I got straight off the train and onto a tube with no trouble at all. Only a couple of dozen stations on a network of close to 300 were closed, and apart from the Northern, all the lines seemed to be running […]

Well, it looks like the latest tube strike has kicked in (see BBC News), so getting to work tomorrow morning is going to mean a long walk from Liverpool Street to the office.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who is sick of the unions. We had strikes last summer and they got their way. […]

It soon became clear we were watching the lesser-known Sky Plus special edition of Brad Pitt epic Troy.

Actually, we were watching the real thing; the EPG was just horribly confused. It was a disappointment, though. I think this is the post-Lord of the Rings syndrome, where everything is compared to the defining trilogy of modern-day […]