29 Jul 2025

Nearly half a bicycle

The atomic theory in Kilburn — This place (on Kilburn High Road) has been morphing steadily from dry cleaner’s to bike shop over the last few years. I remember being surprised one morning to see a few kids’ bikes lined up for sale outside but I’d say the shop is now approaching 50% bike shop. […]

13 Jan 2025

Where is my patriotism?

Come, love of country, fill my heart… — I do love Britain. I guess I love England more. London most of all. I hope that in my life I’ve honoured the place I live and not disgraced it or undermined it (I support England and GB in sporting events – I fly a little flag […]

6 Sep 2024

Some bullet-points about regulation

In case you’d got the wrong idea about how the ’regulatory state‘ is supposed to work — UPDATED 23 May 2025. I could update this thing daily. Regulation is always a news story in the UK (Search any news service for ‘regulation‘ right now and you’ll get a long list of current news stories about […]


  • Spend your money here

    Mind blowing sale at Christies: ‘The Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking & Telecommunications’. Over 200 important documents from the history of computing, mathematics and…

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  • Best spam this week

    From: “Richard” (qyield@yahoo.com.cn) Date: 28 January 2005 05:13:30 GMT To: steve@bowbrick.com Subject: tent Reply-To: sales@jxtrade.cn To Whom It May Concern, We have learned from the Internet that you are interested…

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  • Think I need a new lawyer

    So Mark Lloyd, an otherwise respectable lawyer (and a bit of an expert on tech and Internet lawyering in general) calls me yesterday and asks how my blogging business is…

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  • My favourite business card by about a mile

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  • My idea of heaven

    Spending a really golden morning with my 5 year-old daughter Billie (she’s off school recovering from something called Winter Vomiting Virus – nice), reading stories, playing snakes & ladders, making…

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  • A lot of ifs

    If people of good will turn out to vote in large numbers. If courageous officials and volunteers can see election day through without chaos or fraud or a bloodbath. If…

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  • Not following nofollow

    Ben Hammersley reckons Google’s rel=”nofollow” thingie is a bad thing and won’t work anyway. I’m not sure I agree, at least not with the economics part. email spam is hard…

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  • Xmas toys: good and bad. Number 4 – The Rainbow Art Set

    Now this is rubbish. You had toys

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  • How to throw away a natural advantage

    The UK cable TV business is a uniquely dysfunctional family, managing to marry epic individual clumsiness with the kind of domestic chaos that continually threatens to bring the whole family…

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  • More divas

    Now I feel bad. I forgot to mention that, in the last few weeks we lost two of the most important Old School opera goddesses of all time: Victoria de…

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  • Xmas toys: good and bad. number 3 – The Incredimobile RC car

    This one looked unpromising. I don’t need to tell you that 90% of movie tie-in toys are depressing play-once-and-discard rubbish and I found it difficult to believe that a plastic…

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  • Divas

    From the tenuous links dept. (Singers, women, National heroines…). Lovely, long, quite slow-paced and admiring portrait of Mali’s Oumou Sangare from fan and world music expert Lucy Duran on Radio…

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