Year: 2008
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Doctors. Don’t talk to me about doctors
I’ve not been well. Two weeks laid low by a mystery virus. My doctor disagrees: I’m in perfect health, he says, refusing me medication. He’s pursuing some kind of Californian…
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Hiding amongst the Penguins
At the weekend I watched my older two kids do something fascinating. They played hide-and-seek. They’re nine and eight so they play hide-and-seek all the time. This time, though, they…
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Wikipedia’s self-awareness
UPDATE April 2022. A 14 year-old blog post, here to remind us that Wikipedia has been a big, useful and thoroughly mature institution for a long time. Wikipedia: The Missing…
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Comedy voicemail service prospers
Spinvox, the service that translates your voicemails into text messages, has raised a wheelbarrow-load of money from various top-drawer sources for international expansion. I like Spinvox and the company’s continued…
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Pledging allegiance
I like the pledge of allegiance idea. I know it’s a bit uncool and as a ‘liberal’ I should reject the idea as jingoistic or backward but I think Helena…
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Buy my old records!
I thought it was easy to sell vintage records on eBay. Evidently no one wants a 1985 Run DMC 12″, a White Vinyl Dollar single or a 1982 Grandmaster Flash…
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iPlayer’s economics
iPlayer‘s a huge success. Ashley Highfield says so. The first ‘iPlayer hits’ are emerging (Dr Who, Top Gear). iPlayer audiences are typically 10% of the broadcast numbers, sometimes 500,000 in…
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A new way to watch the telly
The experiment that produced Speechification – which is a sort of diagonal slice through the output of Radio 4 and various other speech radio stations delivered as a podcast –…
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The organic backlash starts here
Delia’s on the money. Let’s dump the backward, unproductive organic bullshit and get back to growth and progress. On daytime TV and down on the farm, the food and agriculture…
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Symmetry violated
Saw this book yesterday. Struck me straight away that the positioning of those three characters is odd. The spacing, I mean. I’m going to make a small bet that the…