Why are these places empty?

OK, so my head is full of cold but I thought I could wander out into Twitter and ask something that was puzzling me, but it seems I might have asked it at the wrong time or the wrong place.  I got back answers that made me think people didn't understand the question. So there's…

Well not quite, but this time next week I’ll have been back in London for 24 hours. So it’s probably time to start counting backwards from then and getting some ideas of things to do between now and Thursday in place. My flight from New York leaves at 7.30pm so I’ll need to be at…

I'm going to post these little jottings that I've been making while on the road – no order, structure yet, they're the bones of what I'll be writing about later.  Advisory: may contain platitudes, truisms and inanity. Unexpected joys The joy comes mostly when you realise how it's all been leading up to this, how…

The structure of documents and the difficulty of representing them in computing. How can electronic documents improve on paper, rather than how simply to imitate it. The History of computing – three dumb downs and a betrayal, Fire in the Valley, Freiburger especially the last chapter (Citizen Nelson) The betrayal of Personal Computing – should…

Getting to Lafayette I've planned a few days rest near Lafayette LA before moving onto New Orleans – it's a kind of mid-point decompression after SXSW.  I'd really like to be there as long as I can – Thursday thru Sunday.  I misread the Amtrak timetable and thought I could leave Austin on Wednesday night…

I just accidentally read an article in the Daily Mirror about George Osborne failing to pull off a funny at the GQ awards last night.  I was sitting in a cafe and it happened to be open next to me (that’s my excuse). My first question was “how could he be awarded Politician of the…