When I signed up to the pledge to write something about women in technology for the first Ada Lovelace Day, it seemed simple enough: to write about a woman in tech that I admire. When my mother left school after a secondary modern education, she had little choice other than being a cook at the…
About 10 years ago when I got my first digital camera to play with at work, I considered a project documenting London’s streets. The idea was that you would stand on a street corner and take a picture in each direction, and then upload it to a database with some metadata so that we could…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq78v-mxeLI&fmt=18] From the earlier part of the week before the festival started and definitely before the sun came out. Our experience was that walking anywhere more than a couple of blocks marked you out as either a tourist or poor. Or like us, poor tourists. This happened to me a couple of years ago too…
Here’s something half-baked: In the UK, urinals in the gents (God, I can’t wait to be home and to stop having to ask for the mens room or restroom!) flush themselves on a timing mechanism so that (as long as it’s working) it gets washed out every few minutes. Here in the US, there are…
#kebab was interesting in what it brought out in people when they were given the opportunity to run something themselves. It certainly showed the appetite, particularly among the British contingent to do something different – the only problem was that everyone wanted a different sort of different. It also showed up the difference between UK…
1. This is America, we’re really in America not just a strange city in England that I’ve never been to before. And America and Americans really are different from us. 2. I am too much of a mimic, I nearly said “y’all” non-ironically and last night at dinner I asked for the “check” 3. You…
I’m in the USA for the first time – just had my first american breakfast (burp) which also included sightings of Linda Gray and Larry Hagman – you know that you’re in Texas when… Before yesterday, I hadn’t been on a plane for more than 4 hours and never been on anything bigger than an…
This is a public service request for Epsom & Ewell Borough Council and National Rail. This rat trap has come open behind the fence next to the footpath between the Ebbisham Centre and the Railway line. The bags with poison are marked as such, but that may not be obvious to smaller children or other…
I’m noticing that the general backlash against twitter and other social tools has had a boost recently, presumably in response to the positive vibe coming from those celebs who’ve found it useful: @stephenfry, @wossy, @schofe et al. Just joining some dots… Dr Aric Sigman writes in the Biologist (though I’ve not seen the full article…
My uncle, my dad’s little brother, died sometime this week. I hadn’t had much contact with him for some time, which I regret. He was christened Granville John and though in the family he was known as Granville, he preferred to be called John. Because he travelled so widely, he was only around from time…