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. [...]

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 [...]

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 that [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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