Jamie’s Weblog

I’ve often thought that it would be a good idea to give each person a carbon quota — in the vain hope that they’d possibly gain some awareness of what their 4-litre SUV is doing to the environment. The only problem I thought was that the rich would just buy spare credit from the [...]

As read yesterday, for the first time in my life, in two rather different places: The Algebraist (p22) and Proxicommunication: ICT and the Local Public Realm (p12 of the full report).
Weird.

Have you read the one about the alien buffer over-flow signal?
Apparently, we should be vary of the SETI signals from outer space — in case the aliens are trying to hack our computers. Now that’s a movie plot threat if ever I heard one. Perhaps they’re getting back back at us for Jeff Goldblum’s [...]

Instead of a Heckler & Koch perhaps I should think about carrying an red-hot ineptitude brand — there are some people that really need “inept” burned onto their forehead. It would be less fatal than a bullet although, in some cases, I’m not sure that’s a good thing. If you know who I’m [...]

You can get UK-English dictionaries for OpenOffice but, as yet, there’s no UK thesaurus. However, you can make use of the US thesaurus with a little ingenuity. I’m assuming youve already installed the GB dictionaries (using “File-Wizards-Install New Dictionaries…”) and are on Windows.

Close all OpenOffice documents and exit the quickstarter in the tasktray
Open [...]

Yep, that’s right, fear the birds! Although perhaps not in quite the same way as Hitchhock would have us believe.
According to the Guardian, a poor sparrow had the misfortune to disturb a world-record domino attempt and has been executed for his sins. He knocked over one of the 23,000 dominos which had [...]

Increasingly, many of the judgements that politicians are required to make are on technological issues but they’re not necessarily well-equipped to do so.
In the UK, there’s a debate about whether terrorist suspects (which I guess includes cantankerous old men and pedesrians on cycle paths) can be held without charge for 90 days. [...]

Elizabethtown is not a bad as everyone makes out but you have to accept that it’s one of those stories without a strong plot. I went in depressed, and left happy and depressed — but any bit of happiness has got to be worth something. It’s quite similar to Garden State but not [...]

I’m writing this post while I wait for the Ibuprofen to kick in and remove the chisel from the side of my head. I’ve tried lying down and doing nothing but that only makes the pain worse. So now I’m going to try and occupy myself out of this migraine by writing this [...]

I’ve just unsubscribed from all my weblog feeds.
Frankly, there’s too much news out there and, whilst it’s often interesting, it’s also usually completely irrelevant to my life. I’m also going to make email an occasional activity — probably no more than once a day. Hopefully this will remove most of the [...]