I've gone to maybe three or four yoga classes in my life. When I went, I didn't really know what to expect, except that my kickboxing instructor said that it would probably help me keep an upright posture during some of our kicks (I have a bit of a tendency …
more ...This week I've been asked to write about "waste". I'm a bit tempted to just repost Meditations on the Garbage Bin, which I wrote after smoking Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp, but I think writing something fresh jibes better with spirit of the endeavour that is the Alphabet Supremacy.
Instead …
more ...I'm writing this on a train that's gently rolling in toward London from the country-side. It's two-thirty and for a mercy it's a clear day. The green and orange and red leaves catch the syrupy golden autumn light of a bright but distant sun.
Days like these are still strange …
more ...As it happens, I went driving today.
I don't normally go driving, but we're having guests over for dinner tomorrow evening and so needed to do an unusually large grocery run to pick up milk and such things. Also, I had some awkwardly sized computer bits that I needed to …
more ...When I was at university, a lot of people were talking about something they called "ubiquitous computing". Computers would be everywhere, they said, and we must figure out what that means, they hastened to add.
For some reason, they seemed to fixate on fridges. Every fridge would have a computer …
more ...There are heaps of things I like that I don't feel get the recognition that they deserve: checklists, peanut butter & banana on toast and The Godfather: Part III all leap immediately to mind. I am aware that perhaps they aren't to everyone's taste, but would argue that – rightly understood – their …
more ...I like keyboards. I like them a lot. I've been using them day in and day out for over twenty years, both as the primary instrument with which I make things and also a significant part of how I interact with human beings. Over those decades, I have perhaps become …
more ...Somewhat fewer books this quarter, mostly due to wading through Europe, a massive single-volume tome on Europe's history.
[Warning: contains fictional depictions of supernatural violence]
Another day, another deadline. You'd think that a world-spanning company would have figured out a way to its employees get out the door before midnight. As it is, I've barely made it for the last tube.
It's oddly quiet. Normally at Holborn there'd …
more ...We don't have to read A Canticle for Leibowitz for long before we get to the fallout shelter.
Warning: spoilers follow. A Canticle for Leibowitz is a great book, and it would be a great pity if you were to read this little essay without reading the book first. I …
more ...I'm hijacking this week's carefully chosen word to talk about changes to the way I'm serving my blogs, but before I get there, have some random musings.
It's a funny old word, 'serve'. We use it to talk about another computer, a server, that does things for your computer, a …
more ...The most visceral memory I have of our trip to New York a couple of weeks ago was on a walk Jolie & I took along the Hudson River.
Jolie's friends recommended a bunch of places for us to go see. We were just coming from one of them, a downtown …
more ..."Yes, but things are different in the real world."
It's perhaps not the most patronizing thing you can say to someone, but it's close to being the most patronizing thing anyone has said to me. (And I am deeply aware, gentle reader, that it is a privilege for me to …
more ...Sometimes I wonder how The Flash can stand it. Not only does he have to struggle through life wearing the world's most ridiculous hat, but he must spend subjective aeons of time forced to watch the rest of us faff.
Imagine you're Barry Allen, aka The Flash, and you've got …
more ...There's really no way to say this without offending some folk, so I'm going to go ahead and say it straight. Pasta is the Coldplay of the food world: bland, over-played filler squarely aimed at deluding the bourgeoisie into thinking they've got an creative edge.
I'll admit there are very …
more ...Last week, I mentioned that I'm on a roster at Christ Church Mayfair. This week, although "protect" too grandiose a word for it, I'd like to share a bit about what it is actually do, and why.
Roughly speaking, my job is to keep people out of church, and to …
more ...Phoning this one in, I'm afraid, since today has been that rarest of occasions: a Sunday almost entirely to myself.
My normal Sunday consists of me getting up at around 9am and heading to St Johns church, picking up a coffee on the way. St Johns is an extremely casual …
more ...The day starts with the sound of the ocean gently, steadily and, alas, digitally getting louder and louder until I can do the sums required to turn it off. It's followed by a lot of hot water, a few cuts to the face, a walk past a church cum Indian …
more ...Even more books this time.