Most summers our children eat a lot of ice cream. It should probably be regarded as an occasional treat but for years it was a regular, unquestioned, daily part of our holidays. Two summers ago we decided to change this, or at least change our approach to buying it. We were on holiday in Wexford,… Continue reading “Would you like an ice cream?”
William Ewart Gladstone, British Prime Minister in the 19th century: what do you know about him? Well, “you gotta phone incha?”, so you could look him up, but before you do here’s what I know. Having studied 19th century British history I can dredge up a few facts about his career (initially Tory, then became… Continue reading What Gladstone did
For most practical skills there are three levels of competence: nothing, something, everything. (“Everything” is usually called expertise, or fluency.) Take, for example, playing a musical instrument, or speaking a foreign language. If you have never picked up a trombone or spoken a word of Mandarin you are at the first stage: nothing. That’s where… Continue reading Nothing, something, everything
“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
The Compartments 