Category: life

I’ve been playing with a BMI calculator. At my current weight and height, my BMI is 30.4 which is (just) in the obese range. The good news tho’ is that I only need to be an inch taller to move into the overweight range. And if I can gain eight inches, my BMI will be… Continue reading Body Mass Index

It seems that Milton Keynes may well expand massively over the next 20 years. My wife lived in Milton Keynes when I met her. I’ve been there many times. An expanded Millton Keynes is a very fightening prospect.

I’ve got two articles to write this week and a number of other important things to do (not least of which is to find a new job) but while reading an Observer article I found a link to www.1837online.com and now it looks increasingly unlikely that I’ll achieve anything useful today.

Usual stuff. Lose weight, get fit (as Bob Mills once said “like most fat blokes, I’d do anything to lose weight – with the obvious exceptions of eating less or doing exercise”). Write more – not just here and not just technical stuff. I’d like to finish the NaNoWriMo novel that crashed and burned in… Continue reading New Years Resolutions

Been a while since I wrote, so here’s a quick catch-up. I left Guardian Unlimited just before christmas. In my last week there I re-engineered their RSS software so that they can easily produce an RSS feed for just about any page on their site. This seemed to get many people rather excited, so maybe… Continue reading Catching Up

Do you ever get into a discussion where something seems perfectly obvious to you, but other people in the group can’t see it? I saw a good example of this recently. I was in a pub with a group of friends when one of them showed us a “card trick”. This trick involved taking an… Continue reading Logical Thought

When did the meaning of the word “acronym” get changed? As I understand it, an acronym is an abbreviation which can be pronounced as a word. Like “scuba”, “nato” or “radar”. But many people seem to use “acronym” when they actually mean “abbreviation”. There’s already a perfectly usable word for abbreviations. It’s “abbreviation”. Why not… Continue reading Pedantry

Early December and I’m already deep in “bah humbug” mode. I really hate Christmas. I can’t understand how some many people who don’t follow a religion can get so excited about one of that religion’s festivals. And I also don’t understand why people who do follow that religion get so excited as it’s obvious that… Continue reading Bah Humbug

Two days running without any progress on NaNoWriMo and I’m out with london.pm tonight so I won’t get any done today either. Looks like there will be a lot of catching up to do over the weekend :( Last night I found lots of things to do on this web site that were far more… Continue reading Procrastination

There’s an article in today’s Guardian which asks some interesting questions about copyright and historical documents. Simon Waldman (the Guardian’s head of digital publishing) found an old 1938 edition of Homes and Gardens which contained an article about Hitler’s home. The article tells how he published scans of the article on his web site and… Continue reading Homes and Gardens and Hitler