I should confess, at this point, that I've become something of a politics junkie in recent years. Not, ironically, of british politics, but the rather more exciting american variety. I started getting into it three or four years ago, and watching The West Wing (repeatedly, in the case of the earlier seasons) really caused it to take off ( Read more... )

Terry Pratchett's just announced he's been diagnosed with "a very rare form of early onset Alzheimer's"

At least he's as upbeat about it as I suppose you can be, under the circumstances, and plans to keep writing as normal for the time being.

With various people posting TV reviews recently, I feel a need to confess my irrational love for CSI, prompted by today's arrival on my doorstep of Season 6 on DVD from Amazon ( Read more... )

I finished off my recent spate of trips abroad with a visit to Norway. Aside from having to get up at 4:30 to make it to Stansted for the morning flight (it had been moved forward so I could make it to a 2pm meeting), the flight was made very smooth by not having any baggage. So smooth in fact, that I was on the express train when I realised I had ( Read more... )

I've been in Beijing since the weekend, thanks to SIPit, the biannual interoperability event where a bunch of developers of audio/video conferencing get together and try to test against as many of each others products as possible to ensure we all play nicely together. I's previously given me the opportunity to visit New Hampshire and Antwerp, and ( Read more... )

One of the nice things about my job is that from time to time I get the chance to go to random countries for one reason or another. But this month various things are overlapping to the point where things go a bit crazy - I'm off to Athens tommorow for a three-day 'So, we just bought your company' meeting thingy with some of the new bosses, then two ( Read more... )

Was really good to see people again in Cambridge - apologies for fading towards the end of the party and not seeing people the next day, but I was feeling increasingly grotty as the night wore on. Initially thought I had drunk far more than I realised, but it continued through Saturday and Sunday - trying to get back from Cambridge to Slough while ( Read more... )

My PC rolled over and died last night - according to the beep codes the motherboard's gone, which is annoying. Still, it gave me five or so years of solid service, and the data on the hard disks should be fine (and I back everything of import up these days anyway), so it's not the end of the world. I'll need to sort out a new one at some point, but ( Read more... )

Got into the car to drive to the shops only to discover someone had broken in and stolen my CD player and the boot backboard which had a pair of built-in speakers. Given that the CD player was was actually broken (and lacking its faceplate) it wasn't much of a haul. Somehow they managed to break in without breaking a window, or apparently damaging ( Read more... )

Thank you to everyone who volunteered to help out with my psychology experiment, both in comments and by Email. The thrust of the experiment was whether people generally value advice from members of one gender more highly than another: half the participants got a vignette where the person providing advice was male, half where the person was female ( Read more... )