A few months ago I wrote, in this piece, about readers in places like Nepal, Palau and the Falkland Islands, thousands of miles from West London where these words are being drafted. I noted that more than half of the countries in the world appear in the basic statistical information provided by WordPress about Visitors… Continue reading More about readers in distant places, and population
Feel free to leave a comment. Occasionally people do. Comments await approval before they are displayed on this Blog, so it might be a day or two before they appear. My most diligent readers email me directly about pieces, and tens of thousands of words have been drafted and sent in private email conversations. All… Continue reading Comments, and a selection of recent Spam
Every now and then I post an update about how many words there are on this Blog. The last such piece was in January 2018, when the word count for all Blog Posts and Menu Items had just passed 300,000. Thanks to some additions made yesterday to this piece about ITV quiz show “Tenable”, the… Continue reading Another milestone: 500,000 words
I have a touch of writer’s cramp. I have just typed that sentence, and am typing this one too, because the Speech Recognition feature of Windows 10 has interpreted the phrase “I have writer’s cramp” in the following ways: I have written square Only when writer’s cramp I can wreck it’s a I her writings… Continue reading Writer’s Cramp, and more about Voice Recognition
Last Sunday this Blog celebrated its third birthday. Or rather, it didn’t. As on most Sundays in recent months I didn’t draft, review or finalize anything on the day in question. Although I’m generally okay with dates and anniversaries I think of 4 December as the date this Blog was created, but it was two… Continue reading Into a fourth year
We live in an era of Big Data. More information is being recorded and stored in more ways than ever before. I am reminded of a phrase that a friend uses, light-heartedly, about the super-rich: they have “more money than a million people could count in a million years”. That phrase, and the way he… Continue reading Big Data and small data
This Blog now contains over 300,000 words. Most of them are in Blog Posts, like this one. Around 24,000 words are contained in Menu Items, which you can find at the top of this page. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” according to a quote attributed to Lao Tzu. I… Continue reading 300,000 words and counting: 25 months of The Compartments
Wednesday is usually my busiest day for drafting and finalizing Blog Posts. I aim to post a certain amount of words each week and if I haven’t managed them by Wednesday I will often get up early enough, and stay up late enough, to do so. I was up just after 5.30am this morning to… Continue reading Anthony Trollope never had this trouble
I have injured my left hand. Nothing serious, no broken bones, just some “soft tissue trauma”, in medical parlance. It means that I am resting it as much as possible, wearing a splint for the first time, and typing these words one-handed. Usually I touch-type, both hands resting on the home keys, and don’t even… Continue reading Typing one-handed
Back in February I wrote this piece about Breakonium, a non-existent element described by Nicholas Lezard in the New Statesman as “the most fragile substance on Earth”. I noted that a search for the word on The World’s Most Popular Search Engine yielded “about 19 results”. At the time the World’s Most Popular Search Engine… Continue reading More about Breakonium, and Search Engines
