Skip to main content

Writing

  1. Their first movies

    Quotes from ‘My First Movie’ on how driven (or otherwise) first-time directors have to be.

  2. Back when 1KB was more than enough

    A photo of my family gathered around the roaring flicker of a ZX81’s black and white display.

  3. Bah, kids today…

    The excitement and thrills of living in London, where you too could get knocked off your bike by a gang of aimless teenagers!

  4. Weblogs, unexplained

    Watching the word “weblog” appear in the press with gradually decreasing amounts of explanation.

  5. Pepys TrackBack: fixing the problems and a new layout

    I had to write some tools to manage the duplicated TrackBacks at Pepys’ Diary, but it meant I could then create a whole new (un-TrackBack-like) layout for the TrackBack listings.

  6. TrackBack problems at Pepys’ Diary

    Sending several dozen pings from a Movable Type entry sometimes seems to make things go a bit wonky.

  7. The Poetics of Space

    I was unexpectedly disappointed by Gaston Bachelard’s book, so I’d love to know why it’s so highly rated. Enlighten me!

  8. National Theatre vs Burning Man

    How did Denis Tricot’s fire scuplture at the National Theatre compare to Burning Man? Well, they had poi…

  9. This year’s non-resolutions

    Things I hope to do more of in 2004 that really aren’t resolutions at all, oh no.

  10. And then the bar code reader breaks

    ‘Seinfeld’s Newman on the mail.

  11. The Sky at Night

    Three old white-haired men in bow ties! On TV! It’s crazy!

  12. Bolero, Houston, R&B, The Office and Pop Idol

    Stumbling across great radio and TV, and ending up in tears.

  13. Richard Herring on his new watch

    The [Timex Ironman digital watch] comes with a box about the size of a pack of playing cards that…

  14. Jame Oliver’s new site

    I just helped set up Jamie Oliver’s new-look weblog, er, I mean diary. It has a fantastic cookery question and answer section.

  15. Its true

    Greil Marcus quoting John Humphrys in the Sunday Times quoting Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots…

  16. Ideas Bazaar redesign

    I’ve just done a redesign and build of the company’s website, which I found enormously satisfying.

  17. Vito, Michael and Henry

    In ‘The Believer’s September 2003 issue, Jim Shepard compared the “honourable” morality of the gangsters in Coppola’s ‘Godfather’ films with the destructive selfishness of those in Scorcese’s ‘GoodFellas’, and, all too briefly, likened the latter to the world of Enron and Bush’s government.

  18. Statement of a Photographic Man

    An excerpt from Henry Mayhew’s 19th century ‘London Labour and the London Poor’, in which a photographer describes one of the many scams he pulls on people with this new technology.

  19. Marching

    Yesterday’s Anti-Bush march, and thinking of ways to make such protests have a larger impact on those who don’t take part.

  20. Action Energy

    I spent a couple of weeks copying and pasting text into the redesigned site. Even though it has a content management system.

  21. Extendaword

    The project I’ve been working on recently, a word game for the Financial Times, is finally launching.

  22. Semi-public events

    Wondering how to create a distributed calendar system for inviting friends along to events without showering them with emails.

  23. Moneydance

    A personal finance application for the Mac (and Windows and Linux) that seems to work. Yeah! Rock’n’roll!

  24. T610 calendar having problems with winter

    The Sony Ericsson seems to screw up appointment times in its Calendar once British Summer Time ends…

  25. A question

    If you insure your CDs, what is it you’re actually insuring?