Bowblog

Steve Bowbrick
Steve Bowbrick
@bowbrick@bowblog.com
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  • The only good idea in this entry is right down at the bottom

    Today (Sunday) I’ve deleted about 130 spam comments from this weblog (with the aid of the redoubtable MT-Blacklist). Yesterday was about the same. Likewise Friday, Thursday and so on. I’m really fed up with it. In case you haven’t got up to speed on blogspam yet, the thing to remember is that the spammers aren’t…

  • I made a place!

    Forums are places, I suppose. IRC channels, MUDs and chat rooms too. But blog entries? Not really. Here’s an exception. Ages ago I blogged a special ‘flowchart issue’ of Mizz, the teen mag and, since then, my top search term has been ‘mizz magazine’. Every day, dozens (sometimes hundreds) of teens find themselves – thanks…

  • Retail Tech reading

    Nice special report on technology in retail from Business Week.

  • Snow on polling

    Buried at the back of Andrew Rawnsley’s excellent Sunday evening Westminster Hour is a consistently fascinating 15-minute segment called The Sunday Supplement. In this slot they’re currently running a short series from Peter “Swing-o-meter” Snow about the turmoil in opinion polling. This week’s is about the new kid on the block – Internet polling (click…

  • What are they on about?

    Fat Cat is a cartoon character with an uncertain grasp of the English language. I think he comes from China, although this notebook and pencil (which come with a pencil case, ruler, pencil sharpener, eraser and a sort of clip thing) was bought in Spain and carries some words in Dutch too. If you click…

  • Wisdom

    Driving the kids home from an afternoon out – in the rain – we’re listening to Bob Dylan singing A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall… (“I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’. I saw a white ladder all covered with water. I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken. I…

  • Rednecks

    So I’m reading all the fuss about The Guardian and Operation Clark County and Charlie Brooker out there in Nastyland and it’s all very interesting and then it dawns on me: I write for The Guardian (sometimes, anyway). So now they’re attacking my paper. In fact, they’re attacking me! Lousy rednecks.

  • Remembering Peel

    When you were a kid, did you record the Peel show? I did. Dozens and dozens of cassettes, all made – at least to begin with – by Sellotaping the crappy microphone from my cassette recorder to the crappy speaker of my Sanyo transistor radio. Of course, those cassettes are long gone (this is 25…

  • To space…

    Why is this video from SpaceShipOne’s Winning X Prize Mission so impressive (I mean, apart from the fact that this guy just flew an aeroplane about the size of a double bed to space and back)? Is it because of the team’s unlimited American self-confidence? Or because of the acres of competence and sophistication on…

  • Buy some old printers

    Somebody out there needs five – count them! – five lovely Apple printers (4 Stylewriter inkjets and a twenty year-old Imagewriter dot-matrix). I think you should probably buy these just to make some sort of art installation (are you listening Ivan?). With these printers, an old Mac (or a new Mac and an adapter) and…