Not stepping on the lines in the infant playground. Girls drawing hopscotch numbers on the paving stones and singing “who stole my watch and chain”. Wondering why the girls never wanted to play war. Lining up when the whistle went before classes. The day The Whistle was replaced by The Bell. Learning the golden rule: [...]

Modern mobile devices (phones, PDAs, laptops, etc) could deter theft by all but the most hardened criminal, and it would only require the simplest of modifications to the firmware in many of the devices already on sale.

Today at lunchtime I was alerted by a colleague, to an uncommon sight: a uniformed officer of the law, smoking. A smoking plod is probably just as likely as a smoking anybody, but I can’t remember ever seeing an officer smoking in uniform. This one wore little blue epaulettes and a bright yellow arm band [...]

I’m buying donuts for software engineers to enjoy. Tests prove that donuts increase productivity in geeks by up to 3.147 percent. If you know a computing professional, buy them donuts today and enjoy better software tomorrow.

Imagine a scene in the not-too distant future… after a frenzied period of leaks, rumours, claims and counter-claims, interspersed with no-comments, denials, and increasingly reliable and suggestive evidence emerging from component and sub-assembly manufacturers, Apple Inc announce the imminent release of The Perfect Gadget. The mainstream press attend press conferences and briefings where Apple proclaim [...]

I couldn’t help but marvel at the efficiency of our local station café recently, as I watched the staff pipeline their customer orders. The busy morning rush was so great that they’d streamlined the operations; one person greeted customers, took orders from several of us at once, and processed the payments. This freed the second [...]

On a recent train journey I overheard a conversation about someone who’d enjoyed the first class wine so much on a recent intercity journey that they had difficulty staying awake so as not to miss their destination. Staying awake is a problem for many commuters and for those whose destination is not the terminating station, [...]

A quick hat-tip to Matt Mullenweg whose Akismet service has just caught it’s one millionth comment spam message.

Break out your hankerchiefs, put on your best woollen knitwear and prepare to sob like a baby. We are about to witness the demise of a British institution. On Jan 1st 2006 the UK postal market will be opened up to European competition. If that competition has any kind of a clue regarding customer service, [...]

I’m just playing with the Flock developer preview, and have exactly 5 minutes to look at it and knock out some thoughts.

At 11:44:51 today this site served it’s 100,000th page. That’s 100,000 pages served to real people. In fact, many more pages have actually been served, but the recipients of this additional output are search engine spiders and spam merchants.

The Metropolitan Police just confirmed six explosions this morning. This is being treated as a major incident and police have have asked that people do not use the telephone service, and use broadcast media to keep abreast of the situation.

I’m well known for enjoying tea in superhuman quantities. When working at home I often nip to the kitchen and make a pot of tea, then add milk and sugar directly to the pot, before snugly refitting the tea-cosy and resuming work: this gives me approximately 120 minutes of mind-focusing brain juice. This is one [...]

Does the potential for human reanimation render the death penalty impotent?

BBC News just reported that Richard Whiteley, the presenter of Countdown*, has died of a heart attack at the age of 61.

During the storms of Friday AM, Portsmouth got off very lightly. The only damage I’m aware of is in my house. My network failed at precisely the moment that we had an overhead flash and bang. So now, having those nice fitted carpets, and the fitted and recessed cable, is a real pain. Wireless would [...]

We just had 3 jet aircraft, each around the size of an 80 seater commercial airliner, flying over our house, very low, probably below the 2000ft floor, flying due west.

Britain is once again graced by three months of watching self obsessed people making themselves look stupid merely by their very existence, with little hope of achieving anything other than profit for the production and broadcast companies involved. Why is Big Brother such a terribly wasted opportunity?

There are some things in life that are just plain cool. Totally bonkers, but cool.

If you fancy having a butler for the day, or your house needs painting, or if you require a gorilla; read on!

Richard Gross at JPL has modeled the coseismic effect on the Earth’s rotation of the December 26 earthquake in Indonesia by using the PREM model for the elastic properties of the Earth and the Harvard centroid-moment tensor solution for the source properties of the earthquake.

I just learned that Bebe’s husband, Mike, passed away last week.

What kind of pirate am I?

Following a largely unscientific, but rather amusing test it has been decided that my life has a BBFC rating of 12A.

rdfx (the x being the same x as in x rays – i.e. unknown) may be going down the road shelly and danny discuss. for the uninitiated, it was born out of an attempt to use rdf as part of a larger ubiquitous information service browser which would combine data retrieved from disparate sources.

i’ve coded on many systems over many years, starting on the ZX81 in 1981. it’s surprising how over the last 10 years or so, code highlighting has become the norm – i take it for for granted. times have changed since those days on the sinclair and acorn machines where blocky white capitals glared fuzzily [...]

This little fellow is Benjy Mouse.

You have stumbled across the Words section. This is rather new and shall be a place for idle rambling. You, the reader, are invited to partake in these ramblings through the use of the comment feature.

This is a post. You can expect to find a dog on a piece of string tied to it very shortly.

please use the pictures category

Getting the website and sponsorship links up and running.

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

This short notice is intended to convey the fact that the boakes.org website is currently undergoing some running maintenance to keep everything ship-shape. When necessary, the date of this particular story is adjusted so that it appears at the top of the site whilst work is in progress and then once everything is back to [...]