As promised a couple of days ago, here are my favourite posts from this year. I’ve chosen one from each month and they are listed chronologically.
Colossal Caving Adventure
A piece about my experiences trying out “adventure caving” in Cheddar Gorge. I really didn’t enjoy it very much.
This Film is Not Yet Rated
I enjoyed the film “This Film is Not Yet Rated”, but I thought that some of the participants were a bit naive and that it missed the real problem with the US cinema rating system.
Nadine Dorries is Confused Again
Nadine Dorries is always a ripe seam to mine for nonsense. In March she presented as fact a well-known (and completely debunked) story about a foetus interacting with a surgeon during an operation.
Apple Shopping
Probably my favourite post of the year. In this entry I described exactly why I dislike shopping in the Apple Shop so much.
Pointless Battles for Geeks
Explaining why geeks shouldn’t waste time complaining when people top-post or sent HTML mail. Yes, it’s annoying; yes, it’s stupid. But it’s the way that most people expect email to work. Complaining is just a waste of time and energy.
Food Chain
A description of our cat’s attempts to work out his position in the local food chain. I think he’s worked it out now and he continues to bring us dead mice and (occasionally) pigeons. Not sure if he’s given up on rats or whether he’s killed all the local population.
James Cross, Lifeboatman
Something a bit more personal than is usual for this blog. This was a post about my great, great grandfather, James Cross, who drowned whilst involved in a rescue on the Clacton Life Boat. This post was indicative of my revived interest in my family history.
Why Corporates Hate Perl
Only a small entry on this blog, but it was a pointer to a longer article on my O’Reilly blog. It seems that this piece struck a chord with a lot of people. It generated the most email of everything that I’ve written this year.
Their Own Worst Enemy
A post about why the GNU project’s insistance on staying away from de-facto standards like Flash video means that most people won’t see their videos. Over at the Digital Citizen, J.B. Nicholson-Owens objected quite strongly to my post (but he didn’t bother to actually tell me about his response – I just found it through Google’s blogsearch).
Non-Magic Bus
A description of the astonishing (and very heartening) success of the Atheist Bus Campaign.
“Selling” Photos
I was trying to think through the best way to license the photos which I upload to Flickr in order to maximise the exposure they get but without allowing just anyone to use them without paying me.
Twitter and Passwords
I’ve wirtten a number ot articles over the last few years about the cavalier approach that most people have towards their passwords. In this post, I tried to explain exactly why it’s a bad idea to give your password to third-party Twitter utilities like Twitterfeed.
There you have it. The best of davblog for 2008, in my opinion. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading this blog over the last year and I hope you continue to read it next year.
Happy New Year everyone.