“Say the third thing that comes into your head.” This is advice I heard a year or two ago in a TV interview given by the comedian Reginald D Hunter. He is from the American South but has lived in the UK for many years. When he returns to America his English style of humour… Continue reading “Say the third thing that comes into your head” (contains rude words)
Brick: it’s now a verb, as in “iOS5 upgrade bricked my iPhone 4”, which means that someone’s Apple-made mobile phone has become about as useful as a brick. I remember when mobile phones were the shape of a brick, and just as heavy, so putting “brick” and “mobile phone” into the same sentence is rather… Continue reading Word of the week: brick
“Changing Places”, the David Lodge book from the 1970s, has been on my mind a lot lately. I read it in the early 1980s and it’s the kind of book I would like to make time to read again. I mistakenly thought that it was made into a TV series in the late 1980s, but… Continue reading “Changing Places”
We had some very welcome house guests during half-term, Steve (an old work colleague and good friend), his wife and their two daughters. Steve and I worked together, on and off, for over seven years, until the middle of the last decade. We have seen many of the same things in the world of IT… Continue reading Flow Charts
When I first started working with computers, in the late 1980s, companies had “IT departments”. As I have had to explain to people under the age of 10 and people over 70 IT stands for Information Technology. Since the 1990s schools have taught ICT, which stands for Information and Communications Technology. Some companies now have… Continue reading ICT, IT, or just T
Why do people use computers? It may seem an obvious question, or a pointless question, but every now and then it’s worth asking exactly why we do the things we do. For me there have always been three big reasons why we use computers: one, to help us to work better; two, to make us… Continue reading Three reasons to use a computer
[There are over 1600 words in this post.] Writing about “What’s so funny about peace and love and understanding?” last week I described something as “A Moment”. It’s how I summarized watching Nick Lowe perform the song at Hyde Park in the summer of 2013 with my son, then aged 8. Nearly 15 years ago,… Continue reading Moments
Last month I wrote about adverbs, as a Word of the Week, and mentioned how we used to make up playful sentences ending with adverbs, such as “I haven’t read that long book by Victor Hugo,” said Les miserably. My brother asked me about it at Christmas, and the idea has played on my mind… Continue reading More about adverbs
This is a post concerning the word “concerning”. It means “about”, or “regarding”. When I last checked it did not mean “troubling”, “worrying”, or “of concern”, but increasingly that is how people use it. I find this development mildly troubling. Words change meaning. I’m fine with that. People change, technology develops, new words come along,… Continue reading Word of the week: concerning
Since the autumn I have been revisiting Narnia. Does CS Lewis’s imaginary world, first described in “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe”, count as Universal Knowledge these days, especially for the generations brought up on Harry Potter? As a child I read the seven Narnia Chronicles more than once and have been re-reading them… Continue reading Narnia and Hogwarts
The Compartments 