Author Archives: Andrew
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Taking the Long View
I’m aware that I’m a slightly lazy photographer. I’m not a great one for pre-dawn starts or rushing out the minute the weather changes, and I do tend to walk around with a single zoom lens on my camera making … Continue reading
Just Get On the Train!, Updated
Regular readers may remember that I classify films and plays according to whether they are about talking about getting on a train (i.e. deep and meaningful journeys into the soul), or actually getting on the train (/boat, /plane, /nuclear power … Continue reading
Form vs Function – a Tail :) of Three Mice
Just in case you think some of my recent posts have been a bit anti-Microsoft, here’s one in which (spoiler alert!) they win! Call me old-fashioned, but I very much prefer using a mouse to a trackpad or its relatives, … Continue reading
The One Man
Overall this is a cracking WWII thriller, set around the concept of an Allies break in into Auschwitz to rescue a specific prisoner who holds information vital to the Manhattan Project. Andrew Gross has done a great job of capturing … Continue reading
The Colour Nazis
Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a movement obsessed with removing colour, especially those whose skin colour or religious preference was different to their own. This went to great extremes, caused the greatest of all wars, … Continue reading
Microsoft : Busy Fixing What Ain’t Broke
There’s an interesting, but intensely annoying, behaviour by the big software companies, which as far as I’m aware has no parallel in other areas of production for consumer consumption. We’ve all been used, since the mid-20th century, to the concept … Continue reading
Conversion Challenges
I have an interesting challenge, as one of the projects I am working on want to stop their environments to save costs, but I need ongoing access to the data. I have a dump from an Oracle database, but I … Continue reading
A Bit Stretched!
Apologies if there hasn’t been much activity on the blog lately. I’m deep into the invention of the expert system I wrote about previously, and that’s filling the relatively small brain of this bear, and not leaving much space for … Continue reading
Fashion Makes Doing IT Harder
I’m about to start building an expert system. Or maybe I might call it a "knowledge base", or a "rule based system". It’s not an "AI", as at least in its early life it won’t have any self-learning capability, but … Continue reading
Does Your Broadband Beat a Carrier Pigeon?
There’s a famous quote "never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes bowling down a highway". Musing on this I decided to try and estimate the bandwidth of a carrier pigeon, given modern storage technology. According to … Continue reading
Going Greener!
After talking about it for over a year, I decided that my transport needed to be “greener”, and finally bit the bullet on the respray. This is “Vivianite Green”, actually an official Mercedes colour in the late 90s, but for … Continue reading
All Tide Up
Like it’s predecessor, Man Up!, this is a knock-about farce based around the capable but somewhat cursed sports agent, Patrick Flynn. This time the key protegé is a nymphomaniac Russian tennis player, but otherwise the cast of gangsters, hit-men (& … Continue reading
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