Repealing the Blasphemy Laws

Tomorrow in Parliament, Dr Evan Harris MP will introduce an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill which will seek to repeal the outdated and ridiculous UK blasphemy laws. To best explain why this is necessary I can only quote the letter that appears in today’s Telegraph: Sir – In the light of the… Continue reading Repealing the Blasphemy Laws

RSS in Firefox

Firefox (and, I assume, most other modern browsers) does some clever magic when viewing RSS feeds. It doesn’t show the raw XML, but instead shows a neatly formatted version of the page along with a button allowing you to subscribe to the feed in your favourite feed reader. That, at least, is how it’s supposed… Continue reading RSS in Firefox

Hating Computers

Right now I’m hating all computers with a fierce intensity. You all know about the server disk crash. I’m still dealing with the fallout from that. In addition to that, on New Year’s Day I upgraded my main desktop machine to Fedora 8 – with the result that the wireless network (which is how that… Continue reading Hating Computers

Good Customer Service

One thing I’ve often written about is the decline of customer service. I don’t often get the chance to praise good customer service so I’m going to grab the opportunity that I got yesterday. Yesterday morning I got up to find two mail messages from Ebay in my inbox confirming that my items had been… Continue reading Good Customer Service

Colossal Caving Adventure

About nine years ago I was on holiday in Somerset with my wife and stepdaughter. As part of that holiday we visited Cheddar Gorge and, in particular, the caves there. Whilst wandering round the show caves is all very interesting, my stepdaughter’s attention was grabbed by the fact that they also ran “adventure caving” trips… Continue reading Colossal Caving Adventure

Quoting Illiterates (Update)

An email has flooded in about my previous post confirming that I was being too harsh. My correspondent points out that the mother was illiterate, she was just using “txtspk” which, whilst not being a dialect that many people enjoy reading, is still becoming an acceptable language amongst the young. I don’t agree with this… Continue reading Quoting Illiterates (Update)

Quoting Illiterates

The BBC have an interesting report on the baby who was mauled to death by the family rottweiler. The story talks about the child’s mother’s reaction to the death. It’s interesting because of the way that they report what she says. The quotations from the mother in the story obviously come from two sources –… Continue reading Quoting Illiterates

Kevin Greening RIP

I’m shocked to hear of the death of Kevin Greening at the ludicrously young age of 44. I wasn’t listening to the Radio One Breakfast Show when he was presenting that with Zoe Ball but before that, back in 1991, he introduced the Breakfast Show on the sadly-missed Greater London Radio – one of the… Continue reading Kevin Greening RIP