China’s neo-con blogging fever-swamp, via (of course) Jamie K. For instance, Gao Yi, a well-known music critic, tweeted: “Compared with a war, US$7 billion is much more worthwhile. Right now, we lack the off-shore staging capacity for a mid-intensity war. A well-known music critic? Now that’s special. You don’t get detailed comment on the Royal…
Read More as for the Mahler, I think it could do with a helipadJamie Zawinski and Charlie Stross pitch in to the poisonous row about Google + and its “real names policy”. Now G+ seemed like a good idea to me because of this instant-classic paper, which demonstrated that a) people hate creepy targeted-advertising schemes even if you pay them to put up with it, b) we manage…
Read More A little story about Google MailThe Obscurer has possibly the first intelligent article on the whole “turn off their Facebook! that’ll learn em!” furore. Notably, they interviewed one-man UK mobile industry institution Mike Short. Go, read, and up your clue. I especially liked that the piece provided some facts about the 7th July 2005 terrorist incident and the mobile networks.…
Read More your call could not be connected – please check the number and try againOver at Stable & Principled, I’ve been blogging about running out of policemen and how the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to have any thoughts at all that weren’t adequate-ish newspaper columns from about 2004. But how did we get to the stage of using up the Met and most of the wider police forces’ reserves…
Read More technique of generalised mayhem without any particular directionOver at Stable & Principled, I’ve been blogging about running out of policemen and how the Prime Minister doesn’t seem to have any thoughts at all that weren’t adequate-ish newspaper columns from about 2004. But how did we get to the stage of using up the Met and most of the wider police forces’ reserves…
Read More technique of generalised mayhem without any particular directionOK, I’m completely sick of paying far too much to my shitty boutique ISP and BT for crackly steam voice and ADSL2+ that regularly provides between 400 and 600 Kbps downlink and 30-100 up. Right here in London. The SNR margin, attenuation, etc look normal and the modem trains to over 10Mbps, but there is…
Read More ISPSo how do you get from Shoreditch to the South Bank? Well, as Tom from Boris Watch pointed out, you take a number 243 bus. Or you wait 15 years – one way or another. Or you practice, baby. Or you get a haircut. Anyway, so much for taking the opportunity to reuse what I…
Read More a few thoughts on the exciting world of social mediaThe National Rail website has borrowed the sensible URIs from traintimes.org.uk. Although it does seem a bit of a miss that there’s no shortener like – say – tra.in, as those are by definition quite long strings. The website that identifies the satellite a dish is pointing at, or tells you where to point the…
Read More Links(Alt. title: Look, it’s like a society but smaller!) OK, so you may remember the case of Startupbritain.org, a well-publicised eye-catching initiative that turned out to be little better than spam paid for with a government grant to some whose-kid-are-you types. It seems that the whole pointless wankabout was kicked off when one of the…
Read More Acid Helvetica titles do not make you a decent personDaniel Davies is notorious for making more than full use of a joke once he gets hold of it. I think this is the original source (perhaps even the Urquell) of his line that Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb must be furious at what Hollywood did to his book in development. Well, I watched…
Read More three lessons on risks: a movie