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Annual Balance Sheet
All these years of thinking ended up like this
Geotagging photos On a regular basis I go driving or cycling with a GPS in logging mode. This creates a nice big GPX file of where I was on a second-by-second basis. Whilst on such travels, I often take photos. My camera timestamps these photos, but doesn’t have a built in GPS. So, I want something that takes the [...] The more things change? “The Home Secretary’s record on private information … displays a reckless disregard for the privacy of other people’s confidential information, matched with a determination to keep Government data just as secret as he or the Government choose at any one time. The Labour party believes that the balance should be struck differently and that it [...] Endless Nameless? Under English law, what dictates that you must have a name? At first glance it seems like a stupid question: of course you have to have a name. But do you? And if so, from when? You don’t get given a name the instant you’re born, so there’s obviously some length of time during which you’re entitled [...] A crisis of identity Today, within minutes of each other, I received two emails. The first, from LoveFilm, opened: “Dear {CUSTOMER_INFO_FIRST_NAME}”. The second, from Easyjet, greeted me: “NAME: [[Firstname]] [[Surname]]”. Doesn’t anyone pay attention any more? Is a TV licence required if I only use my TV to watch DVDs? Anyone in the UK who watches TV has to pay a license fee every year. The money raised from this is used to fund the BBC. This is a matter of much controversy, made significantly worse by the tactics used by “TV Licensing” in trying to hunt down and executedeal with people who don’t pay. [...] The Boxing Croc of Humpty Doo I spent February and March on a mega roadtrip, driving the entire way around Australia. I had grand plans to maintain a daily travel blog recounting all my wondrous adventures on the way. A large number of factors conspired against that (the main one being a not-really-very-surprising-in-hindsight lack of electricity to power my laptop in [...] Around the world in 80 airports Karen thinks that Narita might be her favourite airport. Personally, I hated it. I’ve had a few bad immigration experiences before (all in the US, natch), but my arrival in Japan was definitely the worst of my round-the-world trip. If I recall correctly (and I’m willing to accept that I may have somewaht exaggerated the [...] Open as in Opendom Working, as I am, on a spreadsheet application, I often refer to the Open Formula specification which does a fairly good job of providing useful edge-case tests, and noting inconsistencies between the implementation of various functions across Excel, Gnumeric, Open Office, etc. Recently I noticed that one of their test cases seemed to have a spurious [...] Dogs Kill Kiwi Sometimes a sign is just so fantastic that, despite my inability to take photos whilst driving, I just have to stop and reverse or drive around the block again, or whatever, just to get a shot. This one just confused me on so many levels I couldn’t ignore it. At a purely grammatical level I [...] Come and Taste Te Puke I need to find a way to take photographs of road signs whilst randomly driving around the countryside. Were I to have such a skill today’s entry would be a photoblog of all the great signs I saw in and around Te Puke. Instead I’ll have to photoblog without photos instead. URLs for other people’s pictures [...] Two nations divided Usually when someone makes reference to the “two nations divided by a common language” they mean the UK and US. They could, however, just as easily substitute NZ. Dunedin is simultaneously familiar and yet strangely foreign. A significant proportion of streets, districts, parks, shops, etc are named after places in Edinburgh, which is, after all, the [...] What I?m doing on my Summer Holidays At the end of November I parted company with Socialtext. I achieved more in my first two weeks there than the subsequent 8 months, and I never managed to find the arguments that would convince the company to fund the project properly. With a new CEO and VPE in place, Socialtext is moving in [...] As easy as falling off a ledge Those of you who chose Samoa or Tonga as my final destination in Marty’s “Where Will Tony Die?” deadpool are out of luck (for now anyway). But they were good choices and either could have been a winner. Unfortunately for you (but not, of course, for me), in Samoa the insects don’t carry many diseases. If [...] Drinking in L.A.X. My tour of the Balkans came to an abrupt halt at the start of October. I had planned to spend the next couple of months working my way up the Adriatic coast through Albania, Montenegro and Croatia to Slovenia. However this plan fell apart somewhat when Socialtext appointed a new CEO and summonsed the diaspora [...] ?But I can?t read Russian!? One of the most common questions I’ve been asked about living in Macedonia was how I coped with everything being written in Cyrillic. Well, actually, more often that not. people asked me about things being written in Russian, or complained, when I wrote place names in the local language in email or IM, that they [...]
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