Those New Year music lists, in brief.
TWENTY ALBUMS OF 2008
The What?
Yeah, Right.
Oh, That… I Remember That Coming Out…
No, They’re Making These Up.
Ah, Now I Was Actually Thinking Of Getting This One.
They Were On Later, Weren’t They? Didn’t Think Much Of Them.
Bloody Hell, Are They Still Going?
Ah, No, These Are The Ones Who Were On [...]
Here’s a new song. I was feeling particularly low the other day, and felt like getting a song out of it. A proper, serious, song is on the way (it’ll be called Come to grief, probably) but this will do to be going on with; I find its sheer callousness quite cheering. Really sad songs [...]
One last column, from right back in 1998. I had actually worked in IT until a couple of years before; I think my sympathies are clear.
BUSINESS MANAGERS are never short of advice these days. Any large bookshop has several yards of books devoted to Self Help for Managers: Feel the Stress and Do it Anyway; [...]
Another from 1999, this time from Ned Ludd’s column in NTexplorer. Bill Gates’s book Business @ the speed of thought had just come out. (No, I don’t remember anything about it either.)
SINCE THE SUCCESS of my first book, the Superhighway Less Travelled, rumours of a sequel have been rife. I’m happy to say that ‘Ludd [...]
After all those columns from 1999, here’s one from last month. (And then I’ll get back to proper blogging, probably.) They say you should write about what you know; what I knew, that particular weekend, was beer. ‘Dave Bitzer’ doesn’t represent anyone in particular. Years ago I invented a consultancy called Gargle Bitzer Helipad, and [...]
More from the last century. This one had a wider audience than many of my columns, as it appeared in Computing. I wrote five of these columns for the paper in the first half of 1999, working on a rota with four or five other writers, after which they had a big reorganisation and dropped [...]
As a sort of companion-piece to the last one, here’s a column from September 1999.
THIS MONTH this page is given over to an interview with a pioneering futurologist: Michel de Nostredame. De Nostredame – more widely known as ‘Nostradamus’ – has had a huge influence on the very course of life on this planet itself, [...]
This one’s from March 2000. I should say that I took Y2K very seriously indeed; we even stockpiled. (Well, we had a box.) I vividly remembered being a programmer in 1987, and having to argue long and hard before my project leader would allow me to use eight-digit dates. Multiply that out across the country, [...]
One more back number. This one is a bit older than the other two and requires some introduction.
For three years, I edited a magazine called NEWS/400.uk; it’s still going, albeit under another name, and I’ve gone on writing a regular column for it ever since. The mag’s appeal is and always has been fairly specialised, [...]
More about blogging from iSeries NEWS UK (or System i News UK as it now is), this time from April this year. (Reverse chronological order?)
SINCE BLOGGING exploded onto the national consciousness about a year ago, around the time that I first wrote about it, the phenomenon has grown exponentially. It is now estimated that, out [...]
A propos of not very much, here’s a magazine column about blogging. Regular readers of iSeries NEWS UK may recognise it, as it appeared in that estimable magazine last year.
BLOGGING – it’s the new thing! Everyone’s blogging these days – at least, everyone except you! But what is blogging all about? What are the do’s [...]
I got my first PC in 1986; it was the upmarket model with the colour screen and the 40 MB hard disk (which I could only access as a single drive by running a non-standard version of DOS). I couldn’t get a PC that took the old floppies as well as the 3.5″ kind, [...]
Inconsequentially: it occurred to me the other day that I’m firmly convinced that some kinds of food and drink are good for you. In most cases this belief doesn’t appear to have any rational basis – although in some cases it’s probably based on experience, which is almost as good. Anyone else have a similar [...]
It seems to be compulsory for reviewers of Charlotte Gainsbourg’s 5.55 to get in a couple of references to her father. This is unfortunate; the fact that the singer is the daughter of the more famous Serge is certainly an angle, but it’s not one that tells us a lot about this album.
So forget Serge; [...]
From the memoirs of Sir Frederick William Jefferson Bodine.
I’ll never forget Judy Garland. So few artistes have the compassion that she so often showed. That poor man, I remember she said to me once – he’s been cleaning all those windows and now he’s leaning on a lamp post at the corner of the street, [...]
Printed in iSeries NEWS UK, February 2006
Everybody’s talking about Web 2.0! Web 2.0 offers a whole new way of looking at the Web, a whole new way of developing applications and a whole new way of making enough money to retire on for some irritating bunch of American students who dream up applications you can’t [...]
Now that Nick has read the last rites for Web 2.0, perhaps it’s safe to return to a question that’s never quite been resolved.
To wit: what is Web 2.0? (We’ve established that it’s not a snail.) Over at What I wrote, I’ve just put up a March 2003 article called “In Godzilla’s footprint“. In it, [...]
As a brief postscript to the local elections, here are some tips for successful canvassing.
1. Do introduce yourself, even if you’re a local MP – or rather, especially if you’re a local MP. Do give the person on the doorstep (hereafter ‘the punter’) a chance to tell you they’re not interested. Don’t just launch into [...]
On the subject of broadcast vs broadband, Tom writes:
There’s nothing rapid about this transition at all. It’s been happening in the background for fifteen years. So let me rephrase it in ways that I understand. Shock revelation! A new set of technologies has started to displace older technologies and will continue to do so at [...]
Just to clarify, I’m not saying Johann Hari is crazy.
Language is weird – weird and treacherous. It gives thought a medium and a structure, and yet it has its own properties – both formal regularities like verb forms, and arbitrary quirks like puns – which cut across whatever it is you’re trying to say. (With [...]
