Archive: 2011
Chūgoku
How did Yahoo come to render the name of the Chugoku Expressway (a motorway in western Japan) into English as China Road?
Merry October!
Hearing that the Christmas decorations have already gone up in Oxford Street has given me an idea for how we could resist the annual months-long assault on taste and decency. It’s a very simple idea.
Banking is hard
I recently signed up for email notification of my credit card bill. I received my first ‘Payment Due’ email a few days ago, and—well, let’s just say that it’s not entirely accurate:
Working for the Man
Tomorrow is the start of my second week at my new job, working for the Government. Working for the Man. Maybe we are the Man. It’s probably different from what you might expect: I still don’t wear a suit to go to work, for example. So far, I’m really enjoying it.
Recreating Club-Mate
I first tried Club-Mate at Metalab in Vienna in 2006, but I hadn’t drunk it again until I was in Berlin last month for Euruko 2011, where it was freely available. Over the course of a weekend, I grew to like it. It’s a German soft drink brewed from yerba mate, and it’s popular with hacker types in Germany. There is a UK importer who sells it by mail order, but as it’s a bit expensive and inconvenient, I thought I’d attempt to recreate the drink.
Lie down with Adobe, get up with a broken cross-platform strategy
I’ve said in the past that I think the BBC’s approach to cross-platform support is flawed. In summary, instead of using non-preferential open standards and protocols1, it relies heavily on a single supplier—Adobe—to support multiple platforms. It turns out that relying on Adobe for cross-platform support is not a very sensible thing to do.
The Daily Express is racist
One can imagine that one of the tasks of sub-editors at the Daily Express is to go through the copy and change all references to darkies to ethnics or non-whites instead, in the mistaken belief that that somehow makes the whole thing not racist. Perhaps it’s even an automated computerised process.
Vote YES to AV
Tomorrow is the last chance for electoral reform in our lifetimes.
Japanese elections STFU!
Japanese elections are a remarkably noisy affair: trucks drive around playing recorded exhortations to vote for a particular candidate for weeks beforehand. Candidates stand in public areas and drone on through microphones. It can be quite tiresome. But here’s how not to deal with it:
Crisis? What crisis?
Repeat after me: I will not let your lack of planning become my crisis. Keith Mitchell at PIPEX taught me this.——Bill Thompson
Said.fm hack weekend: RadioBox
Using RVM with tcsh
A website is not a ship
How much for a favicon?
Web development work (Logo and fonts £2,317.50, Favicon £585, E-newsletter £1,080)——Costs of new ICO corporate identity as at 21 July 2010
Irkafirka’d
Library cards are useful
I just found out that my library card gives me online access to a whole range of reference material. Maybe you knew that already; maybe I’m the very last person in the UK to find out.
