Greetings to anyone reading these words thousands of miles from West London, where they have been drafted. Over the last few days this Blog has had 23 Page Views in the Falkland Islands. I have no information about the people (or maybe it’s just one person) reading these pages, just the fact there have been… Continue reading Greetings to readers in Nepal, Palau, the Falkland Islands and other distant places
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
My cousin Eamonn is a great joke-teller. He also knows the words to hundreds of songs. My brother shares these traits. As I have noted more than once, starting with this piece, there seems to be a link between people’s ability to tell jokes and their ability to remember the lyrics to songs. Many years… Continue reading A numerical joke, and its relevance here
Back in January I wrote a couple of pieces under the heading of “Technology Sucks” (you can read the first one here, and the follow-up is here). Maybe, to avoid tempting fate, they should have been titled “Sometimes Technology Sucks”, or “Technology Woes”, like this piece. At the start of the year we were counting… Continue reading Technology Woes
The Compartments 