Listening to Leonard

Over the last week, I’ve re-listened to all of Leonard Cohen’s albums in chronological order. And, most importantly, I’ve rated them. Recent Songs (1979) Sorry, but this is the one that I really didn’t get. In “Humbled in Love” it contains one of my favourite Leonard Cohen songs, but the rest of the collection really… Continue reading Listening to Leonard

Brexit

I was awake soon after 5:30 yesterday morning. As I got to my computer, the EU referendum results weren’t confirmed, but it was looking certain that the country had voted (narrowly, but decisively) to leave the European Union. My thoughts during the day are nicely summed up by my tweets and retweets. My initial reaction… Continue reading Brexit

Twitter’s Early Adopters

just setting up my twttr — jack (@jack) March 21, 2006 You’ll be seeing that tweet a lot over the next few days. It’s the first ever public tweet that was posted to the service we now know as Twitter. And it was sent ten years ago by Jack Dorsey, one of Twitter’s founders. Today,… Continue reading Twitter’s Early Adopters

My Family in 1939

Here in the UK, a census has been taken almost every ten years since 1841. There were a few censuses before that, but before 1841 they only counted people – they didn’t include lists of names. These census records are released 100 years after the date of the census and this data is of great… Continue reading My Family in 1939

2015 in Gigs

Chvrches at the launch night for their second album.

As has become traditional round these parts, it’s time for my annual review of the gigs I saw last year. I saw 48 gigs in 2015. That’s up on 2014’s 45, but still short of my all time high of 60 in 2013. I saw Chvrches, Stealing Sheep and Paper Aeroplanes twice. I was supposed… Continue reading 2015 in Gigs

Eighteen Classic Albums

A couple of months ago, I wrote a post about a process I had developed for producing ebooks. While dabbling in a few projects (none of which are anywhere near being finished) I established that the process worked and I was able to produce ebooks in various different formats. But what I really needed was… Continue reading Eighteen Classic Albums

How To Travel From London To Paris

Imagine that you want to travel from London to Paris. Ok, so that’s probably not too hard to imagine. But also imagine that you have absolutely no idea how to do that and neither does anyone that you know. In that situation you would probably go to Amazon and look for a book on the… Continue reading How To Travel From London To Paris

Writing Books (The Easy Bit)

Last night I spoke at a London Perl Mongers meeting. As part of the talk I spoke about a toolchain that I have been using for creating ebooks. In this article I’ll go into a little more detail about the process. Basically, we’re talking about a process that takes one or more files in some… Continue reading Writing Books (The Easy Bit)