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Steve Bowbrick
Steve Bowbrick
@bowbrick@bowblog.com
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  • Gordon Brown Nein Danke

    Damn. Since I last posted here things have gone from bad to worse. Britain is now officially governed by what I think the kids call a ‘flake’. My early impression of Gordon Brown as Labour’s dreadnought, a politically impregnable battleship of prudence and good judgment, has all but evaporated. Who’s writing his script? Yesterday he…

  • A Speechification player you can embed

    Hey. Look over there! In the right-hand nav. Yes, it’s a Speechification player. You can now listen to top speech radio picks from the Speechification crew right here at Bowblog.com. The player is a clever blend of RSS and Yahoo Pipes or something. We got the idea from Giles who did it first and Roo…

  • Mapping the Obsolescence Space

    This weekend I threw away (I mean really threw away, like into a skip): three Apple inkjet printers (obsolete interface, Appletalk), an Apple 40MB (that’s MB, not GB) hard disk drive (obsolete interface, SCSI), five modems, from 9.6K to 56K (obsolete interface and totally obsolete, pre-broadband model of cyberspace, obviously). Dozens of SCSI leads and…

  • I heart shopfronts

    Got a little project going over at flickr. It’s called The Global Shopfront Library (grand, huh?). I love shopfronts, you see. Good ones are like vivid, friendly paintings. Walking down an interesting street with a real variety of shops on either side (current favourite: St Albans Road, Watford) is like watching a movie about the…

  • Welcome to the Darwinian Disco

    I was down among the hairies and the smooths in Brighton today, at Ivan’s Widgety Goodness. I was test marketing my new catchphrase: ‘the Darwinian disco’. It went over large and I expect a book deal within the month. Anyway, a few people (well, two), asked for the words I read out, so here they…

  • Is Gordon Brown depressed?

    I think he’s depressed. I suspect he’s been depressed for his whole adult life, mind you. But he’s just moved to a big new job and that’s triggered a crisis. Everything about his behaviour shouts depression. He’s turned in on himself. His instinct when things get tough has always been to retreat – hide out,…

  • Cynical? Moi?

    Parties to the Middle East talks in Annapolis fall into two groups: those who frankly don’t care if the ‘Palestine problem’ is resolved and those whose lives and livelihoods depend on it. Unfortunately the former group includes all the nations with the power to do anything about it and the latter only the utterly powerless.…

  • Data abuse thoughts

    The child benefit data cock-up highlights all sorts of public data issues, most of which are missed totally by both participants and observers. Data literacy in Britain is non-existent. Here are a few points that have come to mind over the last couple of days of coverage (please add your own in the comments if…

  • I’ve got a Child Benefit question

    Update: it turns out the answer to my question (‘why does the National Audit Office need my National Insurance number?’ below) is ‘they don’t’. I feel like a bit of a jerk climbing onto the lost Child Benefit data bandwagon but I do want to ask a little question: one I haven’t seen answered anywhere…

  • “My wife wants a Kindle. She’s dead to me now…”

    I’m feeling a bit guilty about yesterday’s Kindle post, which was sarcastic. But since then I’ve been tracking ‘Kindle’ on twitter and I’ve seen no more than two or three positive opinions of the gadget amongst hundreds and hundreds of Kindle-related tweets (my favourite: “my wife wants a Kindle. She’s dead to me now”). And…