- Blog
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Arrivederci
Buongiorno is the UK subsidiary of an Italian firm of the same name. On July 9 2003, the company’s Finance Director and Company Secretary, David Kearns (a man with some letters after his name to show that he’s a Chartered Management Accountant) agreed with me to buy the domain name buongiorno.co.uk from another.com for €4,000.…
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Piratic instincts
I’ve just levered an 80GB drive out of the near-legendary Kitchen Cube (it’s a Cube and we keep it in the kitchen…) to replace it with a larger one (media inflation runs riot in our house). I’ll put the drive on ebay, I guess – maybe 30 or 40 quid – but the machine is our…
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Holiday diversions, part 2
A beautiful Summer evening spent at Carter’s gorgeous Steam Fair. Original, often steam-powered fairground rides, lovely painted horses, a proper coconut shy, test your strength, ring toss… and not a video game in sight. They’re from Berkshire but they tour the whole South of England in the Summer. Marvelous. (click the small pics for bigger…
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6 megapixels and no digital camera…
If you go into one of those Kodak one-hour photo concessions in just about every High Street you can get your film scanned onto a CD for a few extra quid per roll. My local franchisee let me in on a secret. If you ask nicely, your outlet can turn the scanning resolution up from…
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Secret codes in packaging design
If you want to tell Kodak to cut your Kodachrome film into strips instead of putting the slides into little plastic mounts you have to snip the corner off the processing envelope at the dotted line. This is not explained on the packaging (or anywhere else, for that matter). The only way to find this…
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A lake in West Cork
Loch Hyne (pronounced ‘Loch Ine’) was Europe’s first marine nature reserve, a strange and beautiful square kilometre of partly tidal inland lake about as far South and West as you can go in Ireland – ‘the next parish is Brooklyn’, they say. It’s also about a mile from my parents’ house (over a steep, wooded…
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Indestructible brands
Donald McRae on the struggle for survival outside the Premiership. Excellent business journalism by a very good sports writer. “Eleven clubs have been through the mill of administration this year, staggering and lurching from one catastrophe to another. Four remain locked in either administration or receivership. Isolated from the Premiership millions, and devastated by the…
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Somebody’s listening
I’m pleased to be able to tell you that, a few short months after I suggested it, Craig’s List has arrived in London. Danny wrote about it back in June. Incidentally, I think Craig’s List is such an unqualified public good that Ken Livingstone ought to underwrite it in some way – perhaps supporting the…
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Ugliness
Isabel Hilton in The Guardian (I do read some other newspapers, it’s just that none of them let me link to their stuff properly!) reminds us how much the current White House looks like the eminently unlovable Reagan White House (and shockingly unlike the one in The West Wing). This ugly continuity across the decades…
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Carter, got
He’s in post, seems to know roughly what’s going on (260 duties on his to do list), writes nicely (or at least his press office does) and he has a fair wind (few new regulators can have been so well received and Ofcom’s parliamentary birth could hardly have been easier). Stephen Carter, first Chief Executive…