Yearly Archives: 2006

Slo-ooo-w progress

The rate of progress on OOo is glacial; every fortnight or so I get an update on issue 6193, about the utter uselessness of notes in Writer compared to MS Word, and that was opened in June 2002, since when … Continue reading Continue reading

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Two shorts

Interesting and thoughtful piece from Scott Rosenberg about the difference between facts and stories. He talks about the way in which newspapers need to supply both and will always rely on humans for stories even though the access to facts … Continue reading Continue reading

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A thought after a party

The world needs a support group for people like me, who have trouble with faces. Let’s call it “Prosopagnostics Anonymous”. But how will we recognise one another? Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 3 Comments

Queen Victoria would be ashamed of me

I can often type faster than I think, but that is because I am often a very slow thinker. If a good idea comes to me all in a lump, as they tend to, I write it down on the … Continue reading Continue reading

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Last pus blow to chanty

I was writing a quickie for Ariel, the BBC in house magazine, about the new Google archive news service and thought I would, you know, check how well it worked. So I typed in “Ampthill Claimant” as an example of … Continue reading Continue reading

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Time on their hands

There are currently on Cafepress 2,030 different slogans, verbal and visual, commemorating the expulsion of Pluto from the register of planets. These are available on 35,100 products. The page I am looking at (thanks, Jeremy) claims to rank them by … Continue reading Continue reading

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on not having opinions

I note that I haven’t blogged, or wanted to, about big stories for a while. In particular, the war in Iraq and the Anglican schism (which does, absurd though it seems, actually matter) have both seemed subjects actively repulsive. I … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in Journalism | 2 Comments

Google and privacy: it’s worse than that

A friend of mine, a very well-connected professor of computer sciences — he knows who he is, and so, if he’s right, do the CIA, the FBI, and so on — writes about the Google piece last week: Had only … Continue reading Continue reading

Posted in nördig | 3 Comments

Remembering Blair

Can it be that Iraq will be forgotten, and he will be remembered instead as the man who abolished the hereditary peerage and replaced it with hereditary Asbos? Continue reading

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Shorten your life by two four minutes

Beowulf: the truth that liberals tried to hide. Actually, I think this is rather sweet. It reminds me of a point that a priest friend made years ago about the people who think there are demons in nicotine etc: that … Continue reading Continue reading

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