Yearly Archives: 2008

How computers improve life

or not: an occasional series. This entry comes from lifehacker: Calendar: Track Time Between Haircuts with Google Calendar and Spreadsheet Googler Matt Cutts uses Google Calendar and Google Spreadsheets to keep track of how long he’s gone between haircuts—a good … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Net stories | 3 Comments

Byways of modern scholarship

Looking for references to the Byron quote in the previous post, I came across two unlikely biographical sites on the net: this one seems to have taken the early Wikipedian route of lifting large chunks from out of copyright reference … Continue reading

Posted in Blather | 2 Comments

Here lies the grave of Castlereagh

Even if Phil Davison’s obit of Robert Vesco in the FT is not up to Byronic standards of brevity and eloquence it is still a fun read: Of all the adjectives used to describe him, Robert Vesco – who has … Continue reading

Posted in Journalism | Comments Off on Here lies the grave of Castlereagh

This is just silly

It is now possible to measure distances on Google Maps. The trick is fairly well hidden, under “Dig a Hole through the Earth” on the featured content sidebar, but if you find it a bewildering collection of geeky measurements become … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Net stories | Comments Off on This is just silly

Some weeks the bullets come thudding in

And this has been one of them. I just heard from one friend that she has been diagnosed with MS in her very early thirties; another writes this afternoon to say that his ex, with whom he shares the custody … Continue reading

Posted in Blather | Comments Off on Some weeks the bullets come thudding in

The things that Telegraph readers say

Perhaps by coincidence, Damian Thompson was very quiet for a couple of months after I wrote about him reproducing a neo-nazi propaganda story on his Daily Telegraph blog, though he did ring up to say he would never speak to … Continue reading

Posted in British politics, Journalism, War | 6 Comments

Against Eric Hobsbawm

It is a dangerous thing to disagree with Steven Poole, but I think his defence of Hobsbawm’s Stalinist account of Eastern European history is just plain wrong. Hobsbawm wrote, in a lecture for Amnesty, Since the life-and-death struggle of the … Continue reading

Posted in British politics | 6 Comments

Random notes

Everything seems to be running fine to judge from the error logs: a few robots complaining that they find themselves hors texte, a place that structuralists believed could not exist; I have meanwhile been running around when not writing nonsense … Continue reading

Posted in Blather, Net stories, Software | 2 Comments

Robert Harris’s “Ghost”

I read this last night in one gulp, which shows the essential virtue of his writing. The story, for American readers, concerns Adam Lang, a Labour ex-prime minister who is holed up in Martha’s Vineyard with his wife and dwindling … Continue reading

Posted in British politics, Literature | 3 Comments

Your data is safer than you think

In a story at once grotesque and astonishing, it turns out that one of the hard drives on the Columbia shuttle which blew up with the loss of the whole crew in 2003 has been treated by a data recovery … Continue reading

Posted in Net stories, nördig | 2 Comments