Empire Avenue

So I need to get from Lafayette to New Orleans tomorrow (Sunday).  I thought I had a ride, but it looks like it's fallen through. I'm sure there's a bus but it looks like it takes forever. This trip's a great exercise in expecting the unexpected and accepting whatever comes along.  That means not labelling things…

I'm reading Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, as #llobo's tend to do. Actually I'd avoided reading it till now because I didn't want it to unduly influence my thinking about my own wanderings.  Which it now is, of course, but that's another story. There's a point though where one of the characters reads from Karl Marx's…

It’s just ridiculous, I come back to it every year, this numbering, this ever increasing number that is attached to me.  This morning it was suddenly 47.  What does it mean?  Everything and nothing it appears. It does *feel* like a shift, I suppose it means “late forties” rather than “mid-forties” but still.  Anyway. I’m just…

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/21871782 w=640&h=360] People have asked me how different train travel is in the USA from the UK and Europe.  In this clip you get a flavo(u)r of it by way of the announcements made pre-trip by Nancy our coach car service attendant and the responses from some of my fellow passengers.  I shot this…

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…

I applied for a job a week or so ago (I know!) As part of that I had to update my CV.  I’ve become a bit stupid about that, thinking I somehow didn’t need a CV, that my Linked-in profile was good enough, given I’m a forward-thinking social web geezer. Stupid, not only because you…