So, I’ve got an iPhone. I walked into the O2 shop near work the other day, and came out half an hour later with an 8 GB phone and a £30-a-month contract.
The device itself is a thing of beauty, in both hardware and software terms.
iTunes, however, is an ugly piece of dingbat’s kidneys.
Don’t [...]
These are exciting times in Hackney. Not only has my son just started secondary school today (where did those eleven years go?) but it seems that we are getting a new bookshop near the top of our road.
This is big news indeed. Our little corner of Lower Clapton is characterised more by chicken-based [...]
I just listened to The Gun Club’s first album, Fire Of Love. They’re a band that I heard of all through my student years – at least one good friend was a fan – but I somehow never managed to hear properly until now. It’s a scorchingly good album, and I’d recommend anyone [...]
I’m trying out a different theme on here for a while, along with a Wordpress Plugin called QuickPost .
Both the plugin and the theme are supposed to make WordPress be usable a bit like Tumblr. There are a number of flaws, though. The theme (Tumble-Hybrid by Tribe) is perhaps a bit too [...]
I probably don’t need anything more than the title for this one. I mean, who the hell would ever think it was a good a idea to let McDonald’s issue qualifications “equivalent to A-levels”? I’ve nothing against on-the-job training, of course: that’s a good thing. And businesses sponsoring people to study for [...]
I see that Tony Blair has become a catholic. No surprise there. But as an ex-catholic atheist myself, I’m feeling down with Nick Clegg.
In other catholic-related news, there’s a fine analysis of ‘Fairytale of New York’ on the BBC website, after the Radio 1 farrago. And I hadn’t realised that Shane McGowan’s [...]
I just heard John Bell of the Iona Community on ‘Thought for the Day’. He was talking, since it’s St Andrew’s day, about the old Scottish saying, or toast, “Here’s tae us, wha’s like us? Damn few, and they’re a’ deid.” That’s, “Here’s to us, who’s like us? Damn few, and [...]
I had a slightly weird experience with train bookings a while back. Twice I’ve booked tickets via The Trainline between London and Glasgow (once on my own, once for the whole family). On both cases the tickets arrived with the legend “No Seat” printed in the spaces for the seat details. In [...]
I flew up to Scotland the other weekend, by RyanAir. On the way back the plane was a 737-800. It was the same kind of plane as on the flight up, but the inside was dramatically different.
Flying north we had standard velour-covered (or whatever you’d call it: fuzzy cloth) seats, and standard seat-back [...]
Totally not sure about this one. Someone emails their MP and gets an accidentaly-sent response (in the MP’s name? Not sure) calling the constituent’s mother-in-law “snotty”, and saying, effectively, “don’t rush to answer this, since they don’t like the government.”
So far, so unsurprising (though your attitude towards the government should not affect the [...]