Sod it. Vote whichever way you want tomorrow, but make sure it’s a decision based on facts rather than which endorsement you prefer. Public services are stretched because George Osborne keeps cutting the funding, not because of immigration. I know there’s a long list of factory closures doing the rounds, each with “…with EU grant” tacked on the end ( Read more... )

I was going to post something about the pros and cons about the EU, examining the issues and explaining why we’re better off staying. However, after the murder of Jo Cox MP, I want to address the festering undercurrent of xenophobia and right wing nationalism that has had tragic consequences. Whether or not the attacker shouted “Britain First” or ( Read more... )

7th July 2005. I was at work when I heard the news. A “power surge” on a Tube train is not implausible, but my heart sank when I heard about the explosion on the bus because you don’t get power surges on those. One of the people on it was Giles Hart. I didn’t know him personally but he also worked for BT. He was also a Humanist, and chairman and ( Read more... )

Back in 1997 when I started at uni it was quite exciting to see the difference between a small hippyish market town and a big city. Hebden Bridge wasn’t particularly cosmopolitan so moving to Manchester with lots of different cultures was quite a change. I liked being able to look around and find out more about what was going on. I’d lived in ( Read more... )

Three years of bike training finally came to an end last week with me passing module 2 of the test. My last blog post about this was just after I resumed training after winter but now it’s all done. I did the theory test last year, which was pretty straightforward thanks to lots of practice from a DVD with questions and their own version of hazard ( Read more... )

Now that work has calmed down a bit, the weather has got better and I’ve got some spare cash, I’ve restarted my bike training. The motorbike licence classes changed just over a year ago so there are now four different ones:

• AM - lets you ride a moped with a top speed of 45 kph (for people 16+)
• A1 - 125cc with max power of 11 kW and power/weight ( Read more... )

Rather scarily I worked out last week that I’ve been using “curly brace” languages for 20 years. I started off with Borland Turbo C++ when I was still at school in 1994 and I’ve gone through Perl, PHP and most recently C# which I use for enterprise grade stuff at work. Before that I played with BBC Basic in the 80s on an Acorn Electron and later ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Been a while since I last mentioned anything about bikes (or posted at all!). That was at the end of August when I’d just got the new bike. Since then I’ve done about 1500 km over various rides including the A62 to Manchester and the A64 to York. I’m still on a provisional licence so motorways are still out, but the dualled bits of the A64 between ( Read more... )

There was a young lady called Gorringe
Who swallowed too much Haliborange
She had only one wish
To not smell of fish
But she turned a strange shade of orange

Originally published at Houlden.org. You can comment here or there.