Imagine this: someone clamps a wooden clothes peg onto the little finger of your left hand. (Or right, if you are left-handed.) It doesn’t really hurt, and doesn’t get in your way but it’s unpleasant and you’d rather it wasn’t there. After a few minutes you are engaged in conversation and you forget (almost) that you have the peg on your finger. But every now and then you are distracted by the pain, your attention is broken, you are annoyed.
You try reading a book, eating a meal, watching a programme on TV. You get some long periods where you almost forget the peg, but it’s hard to ignore.
Then at night, when there’s nothing to draw away your attention, [click title to read more…]
It is generally observed that advances (in tech) happen incrementally. By and large the increments are small and go unnoticed. The past half century or so I’ve been like a particle in a Brownian motion experiment constantly nudged in new directions by the latest incremental impact. Out of interest, I’ve tried to recall some of the nudges I’ve felt over the years, and here’s what I’ve come up with:
Analogue to Digital
The 1970s would be when I started my tech journey, and at that time most of the stuff I was tinkering with was made of thermionic valves, resistors as thick as a pencil and chunky capacitors that I was often (rightly) wary of touching. I delved eagerly into [click title to read more…]
My small patch on planet Earth has not much climate but plenty of weather. An island subject to ocean buffeting, chills from northern icy regions and occasional heat from the nearby continent. Often on the same day. I recall being greeted by snow in the morning, beaming sunshine in the afternoon and torrential rain that evening. It has been a bit turbulent of late, two storms in two days. Winds at 100km/h, gusts even worse. And rain.
This has me a little peeved, to be honest. I like to go for a short walk now and then, clear the cobwebs out of my head, put some air in my lungs, stop staring at screens for a while. This January I [click title to read more…]
“Never judge a book by its cover.” – Mill on the Floss, George Eliot, 1860.
Many decades ago, when I was a young teen, a gentle knocking came on our front door and my mother got up to answer it. I peeked around the dining room door to see who it was. A dishevelled old man graced our doorstep, hair like that of a scarecrow, shoes with string for laces, an old jacket around his body and a cloth sack over his shoulder. He asked in almost a whisper “could I have a drop of water?”
Several beggars roamed the housing estates in those days and you’d have at least one come knocking in any given week. The smell of [click title to read more…]
It has been a long time since I dropped an article onto the public side of the fence. Assuming this will one will also be public, that makes a total of two for this year! It’s fair to say that I’ve not been active in public for a while.
In similar vein, I posted only 30 times on Twitter this year, but the chaos that started around April made me pause my account at the end of October, and then in November I deleted the app and have removed its embedding from my site. Mid-November I joined a local Mastodon instance, popped a few shillings in its pot for the upkeep, and am rather liking what I’ve seen so far. [click title to read more…]