Today the Daily Mail announces the result of its “national referendum” on holding a referendum about the new EU constitution. Almost 90% of the votes were in favour of a referendum. Given that the vast majority of the votes would have come from Daily Mail readers this can hardly be surprising. More interesting is the… Continue reading Unbiased Reporting
Phantom Jobs
This job has appeared on the UK job site JobServe like clockwork every two weeks for about the last two months. The description is always the same and it’s always the same agent (Mani Suri at Aston Carter). The job spec says “You will provide general development and testing using Perl, T-SQL and Unix Shell… Continue reading Phantom Jobs
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Massive embarassment on Saturday night. We were at a party in Birmingham. About 11:30pm I wandered outside to where people were sitting round the remains of the barbeque. Someone had brought a guitar and people were playing and singing. Most of them were people who I didn’t know. Someone I did know said “Oh, Dave… Continue reading While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Devil Gate Drive
I was flicking randomly through some music channels this morning when I came across what I suppose is the video to Sinead Quinn’s new single. In my opinion Quinn is one of a very small number (maybe two!) people to emerge from the recent plague of reality TV music shows with any kind of credibility.… Continue reading Devil Gate Drive
Electoral Observers
The Guardian sent a group of electoral observers to monitor how well the Daily Mail‘s “referendum” was being conducted. [one of the observers] said: “I think the phrase ‘totally flawed’ comes to mind.” I asked him if he had ever pronounced an election “totally flawed” before. “Only one,” he said. “The 2001 Kyrgyzstan presidential elections.”… Continue reading Electoral Observers
Little Englanders
Excuse me why my blood boils for a minute. The Daily Mail is (as I’ve discussed before) the newspaper that panders to the “little englander” mentality in the UK. It’s read by people who are intensely xenophobic. These people are extremely distressed by the possibility that the UK could at some point replace sterling with… Continue reading Little Englanders
Mortality
We’ve been thinking about wills. Which leads to some very strange conversations. “So what happens if there’s a huge explosion at a wedding and we both die at the same time as all of our beneficiaries?” “How likely is that?” “It happened in Dynasty” (OK, well it didn’t go quite like that, but you get… Continue reading Mortality
The Matrix
So this weekend was Matrix weekend. On Saturday I rewatched The Matrix and watched The Animatrix on DVD and yesterday I went to see The Matrix Reloaded. Overrated. It’s all horribly overrated.
Cool Photos
Julian Cash is a very cool photographer who, for the past few years has set up a temporary studio at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention where he takes lots of photos that make everyone look really cool and interesting. He’s just put online a set of his photos from OSCON 2002. A number of Open… Continue reading Cool Photos
A New Pleasure
A generally disappointing day was turn around completely on getting to London Bridge station and finding that Vanilla Coke has finally made it to the UK. Yes. I’m easily pleased.