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- SunSeptember 22 2009
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- ChangeSeptember 22 2009
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I’m in the mood for change lately. I suspect it has much to do with my new job; leaving Microsoft where, with retrospect, I think I generally felt like a square peg, starting afresh and enjoying myself. A lot.
Such that I’m planning to relegate the blog back a level and build a classic homepage under which it will continue to exist. This will allow me to more accurately position myself rather than simply being seen as the owner of a once popular but now effectively dormant blog. It’ll also allow me the chance to reconnect with photography once more, something that suffered a similar interest trajectory to the blog in recent years.
When I set this blog up nine years ago, blogging was the catch-all bucket for more a more socially interactive and approachable evolution on personal homepages, providing a platform for news, communities and all. But blogging has long since matured and some of its original uses have become largely redundant with the advent of Twitter and Facebook et al, and therefore my blog only represents a part of my personal place and existence on the web whereas back in 2001-2002 it was all of it.
I fully intend to keep the blog and all the (remaining) 2,200 or so posts intact. While I don’t read them at all often, the archives are something that I find quite amusing when I browse back through and read things I’ve written and have little or no recollection of doing so.
My early thirties self apparently had quite a diffe
- Beware Facebook ‘Mugging Story’ FraudAugust 28 2009
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I got an email this evening from a trusted source in the US who asked a couple of his UK contacts to try to help a stranded friend in London. Turned out a genuine friend of my contact had their Facebook account compromised and the perp used Facebook’s chat facility to raise the fake distress call. I duly extended an offer of assistance to the supposed victim and after a couple of odd email exchanges, my inbuilt fraud sensor tripped and I decided to toy with the fraudster for a while.
A transcript of the email conversation is here, click it if your browser shrinks images.
- AuditionAugust 15 2009
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We’re heading back home to Scotland for a few days. One of the highlights of the trip will be seeing U2 play in Glasgow. They’re known for occasionally inviting members of the audience up on stage to play along. So Bono, here’s my rough’n'ready audition…
PS. Deconstructed excerpt.
- Geek SmackdownAugust 12 2009
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I flew back from New Zealand yesterday, via San Francisco. Not long into the SFO to London flight, the person sitting behind me revealed himself to be an intermittent foot tapper – on the rear leg of my seat.
I let it go the first few times, hoping it was a flying nerves thing that might pass as we settled in.
After dinner had been served and the lights went down, I settled down into watching an in-flight movie and the tapping started again.
I carefully considered my options; get a flight attendant to do my dirty work, endure the kerfuffle of disconnecting my headphones, unfastening my seatbelt and giving up my position of relative comfort to lean over the top of my seat and have a word with the offender, or do something less confrontational and physically onerous.
After a while I concluded that the LED Banner app on my iPhone presented me with the best solution affording low physical effort and maximum efficacy.
So, I duly set it up with a message which read, “Hello, I wonder if I could ask you to stop tapping your foot against my seat?” – I prefaced the main request with a typically British linguistic mitigation to enable him to get used to the notion of what was happening before presenting him with the actual request, I thought that just “Stop tapping your foot against my seat” would risk the most of the import of message being lost due to the shock of the medium –
