As titles go that’s an odd one, but stay with me. I’ve written before about my Citroen C6 : Before Christmas a warning message popped up saying something was wrong with the hydro-pneumatic suspension which give the big Citroens their wonderful ride. A visit to the garage confirmed the problem was real...

First rule of blogging. Don’t blog when angry. I’ve been through a time consuming process which could be called educational – in the sense of “Well ! That taught me a lesson”. My drug regime has been mentioned before in my posts, and this is one of those times when the drugs don’t seem to be working...

Someone at work (no names, no packdrill) keeps telling me I’m set in my ways, and I keep disagreeing, since I’ve always thought it’s one of my personality traits to challenge the status quo (see Apparatchik vs Autistic ). But I’ve been forced to confront my own conservatism when it comes to phones. I...

Back in the middle of October I started writing about couple of big events so-called “world of social media”. One was the reaction to a piece which appeared in Daily Mail about the death of Stephen Gately. On Twitter Stephen Fry showed 140 characters is no bar to a devastating response. “ I gather a...

A little over a year ago I mentioned I had taken delivery of a big Citroen. It’s my seventh, I’ve likened it to driving a church – not as a criticism but because of the sense of serenity inside, due in no small part to Citroen’s clever HydroPneumatic suspension. Last night as I was leaving work a warning...

When I was at school my father gave me a copy of an article he’d seen at work. I remember nothing of the article itself, but the title has stayed with me: “You can’t be a 20th century man without maths”. I think even then “You can’t be a [time] [person] without [skill]”  was a  Snowclone -...

I’ve described some of my activities over recent weekends as the biggest hunt for a Vulcan since Star Trek III - The Search For Spock . The Vulcan I’m after isn’t the pointy eared kind but XH558, the only flying example left of the V Bomber. It’s very easy to talk a lot of tosh about beautiful machines...

As I mentioned recently I have bought a new Camera – the Pentax K7 : as a proper photographer I’m bothered more by lenses than camera bodies and last year I acquired Pentax’s beautiful 77mm Limited series. All those 7s and a new version of Windows... So I thought I’d grab a photo , so I picked up my...

I’ve just bought a new digital SLR camera. Being a dyed in the wool Pentax person, I’ve upgraded to their new K7. Being fairly serious about (some of) my photography I shoot quite a lot in RAW format.(In case you didn’t know higher end digital cameras can save the data as it comes off their sensor without...

What some people refer to as “Life’s rich tapestry” has had more knots and twists in it than usual for me of late. The biggest of which was the plane crash. We’re used to the sounds of aircraft: if you extend  the runway line of the former RAF Abingdon it passes through our village, which meant...

The first F1 season I remember properly is 1976: James Hunt being champion, winning the British Grand Prix (I was at the Benson and Hedges cup final – Kent vs Gloucestershire – that day), then having the win taken away as my first memory of the governing body being pro Ferrari.  Niki Lauda nearly...

Working for Microsoft, and holding views on privacy which border on paranoia, you might expect me to to be doing a gleeful little dance at the news that Privacy International have lodged a complaint with the Office of the Information Commissioner about Google’s Street view, and the villagers of Broughton...

First to explain the title “Imminent death of X predicted” is a snowclone , and its entry* in the Hacker’s dictionary sticks in my mind Hugh Macleod proposed “ All online social networks eventually turn into a swampy mush of spam." as Hugh's law , and a few weeks ago an article entitled "Can Twitter...

First , a geeky joke which my wife told me after hearing it on BBC Radio 2. “I bought a book called 1001 things to do with binary. But when I got it home it only had nine in it”. While we’re with all things Geeky, I always thought that proper developers, guys like Mike Ormond , looked down on PowerShell...

Everyone uses different bits of office. There’s a core piece that everyone uses and then we all have our personal 10%. I like the OCR feature of One-Note. For example on the way to the BETT show a few days back I saw an advert on the tube that’s a grander variation on “How do you pronounce Ghoti ?” ...

It’s a constant puzzle to people from the US and Europe that Britain seems to be split brained about weights and measures. We buy our petrol in Litres, but our beer in Pints. My French car gives me a read-out of fuel consumption in Miles per Gallon, but is taxed in Grams of CO2 per Kilometre. Yet our...

I did the keynote for the virtualization unplugged tour recently, and I tried to draw several themes together in it. Virtualization is good for making IT more dynamic (and what that means and why it is good thing) and Virtualization is good for saving money, space and carbon emissions. But I’ve been...

I’ve talked about brand values and somewhere along the line I sure I said that I choose to shop at Waitrose instead of Tesco or Sainsbury’s. Since Waitrose is part of the John Lewis partnership I have had one of their credit cards for a while (my local Waitrose was one of the first where you could scan...

I’ve had a busy few days: after Tech.ed we had some internal training in Barcelona over the weekend, and I  flew back from Tech-ed to a concert in London on Sunday night. I have quoted a line or two of Anne Clark’s on this blog: I saw her in a TV programme about a book called “Hard lines”, and they...

I’ve been “on Holiday” for a few days. My mother-in-law hasn’t been enjoying the best of health so we took took the family off to visit her over the half term week. To a rented house with Satellite TV – because it is in a DVB deadspot – but no broadband, and no 3G reception. It’s been a lesson in just...

I was presenting at a session on Virtualization on Friday, and the Organizer had collated all the slides together into one deck. And he had “corrected” my spelling of Virtualization because one of the other presenters used Virtualisation with an S. Every so often people tell me that using Z is a nasty...

In past posts I've talked about a mythical Microsoft product named "Basingstoke". Microsoft's legal folks recommend that if you have to come up with a codename for something Geographical is good - they're fairly safe from a trademark point of view, and I recall in the mists of time one product...

Yesterday Microsoft UK had its company conference in Brighton, and I always have mixed feelings about these affairs. We transported 1000 people 100 miles and told and with no sense of irony whatsoever we told them about what the company was doing about the environment, showed them a video of the office...

I started typing this blog post at 07:21. Outlook has already received the first 50 items of the day. Most of which were from night-owls in the US, a few from Asia/Pacific, and only a couple from European insomniacs. Yesterday it pulled down at least 426. I know this because yesterday I set up 3 new...

Setting up some demo servers recently Steve and I tripped over the Windows 2008's default password policy: it needed to be relaxed to get to easy password we use in demos. Steve advocates pass-phrases "IHateChangingmyPasswordEvery30Days" is better than "o^1bKK%19#" However I read...