July 16, 2006

Enjoy responsibly

Top tip for the day - if you're in charge of one of the world's largest breweries, and in a position where it's your responsibility to promote the responsible use of alcohol, it's probably best not to lose your licence for drink-driving.

And while you're there, Peter, what were you guys thinking with the lager slush-puppies?

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May 26, 2006

More valuable advice

If you're going to be giving a computer to someone else, either for repair, or because you're selling it to them, it might be prudent not to have any personal or embarrassing data on the hard drive. See, for instance, the kiddie porn types who get caught when they take their machines to PC World for a checkup.

Or better yet, this guy who sold a broken laptop on ebay. What an interesting life he seems to lead...

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November 18, 2005

Esprit de l'escalier

The wit of the staircase. We've all done it, but Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) does it best.

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November 11, 2005

Duelling Davids

He pledged England-only votes in the House of Commons - but ruled out a separate English Parliament. "Only English MPs could vote, let's say, on English education policies or English health policies," he said.

I agree with Mr Davis, given that MPs have no influence on Scottish education policy (which is decided by MSPs), that representatives of the Scottish electorate should equivalently not have influence over English education policy. However, I have to wonder about Davis's reasons for supporting this — after all, it's not as if his party currently has any Scottish MPs...

Asked that most intimate of sartorial questions - what kind of underpants they prefer - David Davis and David Cameron revealed a crucial difference.

It's always nice to see the serious issues being addressed in these campaigns. Don't worry about the legalisation of ecstasy, or constitutional reform, let's ask them about their favourite bands and underwear preferences.

(Incidentally, both Davids said they like Coldplay more than the Scissor Sisters, which I think proves that Coldplay are pants, as I've said all along.)

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February 04, 2005

Did you ever hear...

... about the two men arrested for telling jokes in a courthouse?

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January 12, 2005

Subscibe!!

Yesterday, Dave Winer pointed out the problem caused by more and more online RSS aggregators advising sites to include "Subscribe with $aggregator!!" icons on their sites (see my "Sub | Bloglines" and "LJ Friend" icons on the right) to get more subscribers — there comes a point when you just can't sensibly include that many buttons.

Luckily, Aquarion (of ESF fame) has first designed and then gone and coded a solution. The result is called SubscribeMe, and this is my SubscribeMe link

Do let me know how it works with your favourite aggregator!

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December 25, 2004

A Rubbish Christmas

According to BBC News, people here in the UK will generate an awful lot of extra rubbish this christmas, including 24 million extra glass jars from all the cranberry sauce and mincemeat, 6 million christmas trees weighing 9000 tonnes, 83 km2 of wrapping paper, and over 4000 tonnes of aluminium foil.

Just recycling all the glass jars would save enough energy, apparently, to make 60 million cups of tea. Now, I make that one each. So if you do your bit for recycling this christmas, I reckon you deserve a cup of tea in return. Go on, treat yourself. Mine's a decaff coffee, it seems...

I'm less sure about christmas trees, though. I'm not convinced most people bin them, these days — tips tend to have a garden waste section which is just as easily accessible as the general rubbish bit, and they certainly don't fit in most dustbins. Anyway, surely we should be encouraging people to grow fast-growing trees in large numbers, and bury/compost them at the end of the year; surely this locks up carbon in the ground, taking some CO2 out of the atmosphere... Any passing environmental science gurus want to comment on that one?

Anyway, back to watching trash on TV and digesting copious turkey. :-)

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Critical Festive Thinking

I do hope you're all enjoying Christmas; while I don't have any religious reason to celebrate it, I can join in the orgy of consumerism and time off from work with everyone else anyway, right? Meanwhile, the always-excellent Church of Critical Thinking offers this excellent seasonal poem

Unrelatedly, I've now enabled moderation of comments, to foil those pesky spammers. You can bypass the moderation, though, if you have a TypeKey account, by signing in via the link in the comment interface. I'll try process the moderation queue pretty regularly, anyway.

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