Amazon link This is book four in my attempt to read fifty books in 2005. Here’s a good rule of thumb for choosing true crime books. Anything that is endorsed on the cover by Patricia Cornwall has a very good chance of being almost unreadable. On the front cover of this book Cornwall is quoted… Continue reading Anyone You Want Me To Be by John Douglas and Steven Singular
Author: Dave Cross
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Amazon link This is book three in my attempt to read fifty books in 2005. Now this is more like it. I was getting a bit jaded after the first two books, but this is much more to my taste. Strong hints of transexuality (or is that transexualism) in the first sentence followed by incest… Continue reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Formatting Code
I like to think that I’m pretty laid back when it comes to dealing with other people’s coding practices. I really don’t care where you put your braces (as long as it’s consistant) and you can indent things as far as you want. There are, however, two non-negotiable and invarient rules of code formatting. If… Continue reading Formatting Code
Stallone Ages
Not that I’m watching Celebrity Big Brother you understand, but something interesting has come to my notice. The “official” biography of Jackie Stallone gives her age as 71 which means she was born in 1933 or 1934. IMDB shows that her son Sylvester Stallone was born in July 1946. Now it is, of course, possible… Continue reading Stallone Ages
Good Customer Service
In the past I’ve been quick to use this site to rant about bad customer service, so I’d like to take the opportunity to redress the balance slightly and mention some good customer service that I recieved yesterday. I was browsing the Jessops web site looking for information about digital cameras when I noticed that… Continue reading Good Customer Service
Soundblox
So Lloyd wrote something pointing out this piece by Jon Udell about the Lazlo Soundblox which is a Flash front-end to a server for streaming MP3s. I’m not completely convinced by Soundblox. You can either run it from the installation hosted on the author’s server (and I don’t know how stable that installation is guaranteed… Continue reading Soundblox
Open Source
And while I’m posting links from today’s Guardian, Victor Keegan is very positive about the Open Source movement. In recent months, as readers of Online will be well aware, open source has entered a new era with the arrival of a browser (Firefox) that is better and more secure than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and an… Continue reading Open Source
Chain Letters
Nice piece by Jack Schofield in today’s Guardian about the damage that pointless email chain letters do. Everyone should read it and then STOP SENDING ME CHAIN LETTERS BY EMAIL!
In The Dragon’s Den
I’ve been enjoying the BBC programme Dragon’s Den. In the show a group of entrepreneurs describe business ideas to a group of “dragons” (potential investors) in the hope that the dragons will give them some money. Most of the investment requests are in the order of £100,000. The dragons question them on the details of… Continue reading In The Dragon’s Den
Geekspotting
About half an hour ago I spotted Ben Hammersley wandering around on the fifth floor of the Guardian Unlimited building. I know he writes for the Guardian, but we don’t often get writers slumming it over this side of the road :)