Category Archives: Thoughts on the World
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Design Lessons: Hotel Rooms
A humble (or not so humble) hotel room may succeed in delivering a satisfactory service to the user, but it may also fail dramatically to do so. These failures suggest that the “designer” either hasn’t thought about the user at Continue reading
That’s an Understatement!
We thought there "might be a bit of a wasps’ nest" in the loft. At first glance, I thought it might be behind a bundle of insulation, but no, it is the "bundle of insulation". For scale, the electric valve Continue reading
From the Ministry of Strange Coincidences…
We’ve been getting through lockdown at least in part by working through Richard Coyle’s back catalogue. As well as things we hadn’t seen before, like the excellent Five Days of War, I tracked down a copy of The Whistleblowers from Continue reading
Demolition Man
A great piece of futurology, remarkably prescient for this year The other night we re-watched the highly entertaining Demolition Man, starring Sylvester Stallone, Sandra Bullock and Wesley Snipes (and let’s not forget Sir Nigel Hawthorne, who famously did it mainly Continue reading
Hungry Birds!
Enormous excitement chez nous. We have a bird box, installed in the courtyard many years ago, which has been systematically ignored most years. But not this year. A couple of weeks ago we realised that a couple of blue tits Continue reading
Channel Hopping Mad!
Why are digital radio and TV such exemplars of a bad user experience? In the good old days of a small number of analogue broadcast channels, watching TV or listening to the radio was a rewardingly simple process. To watch, Continue reading
A Ray of Sunshine
For about ten minutes at the end of each evening the sunlight lights up our newest sculpture through the Chinese circle. I thought it would be nice to share this: it’s a pretty image in it’s own right, I’d like Continue reading
Small is Beautiful
Here are a couple more of my shots from the Tutankhamun exhibition. The sarcophagus is a particular delight, as the full-sized items did not travel from Egypt, but this 6″ version did. In real life it’s tiny – if you Continue reading
Wonderful Things
Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Golden Pharaoh Ahead of the opening of the new museum at Giza dedicated entirely to Tutankhamun, some of the treasures from his tomb have been doing a last "world tour", including London’s Saatchi Gallery. They will Continue reading
A European Visitor’s Guide to Hawaii
Sunbathing, service, costs and chickens! Hawaii is a great place to visit, but based on our recent experience some things may come as a surprise to European visitors, used to comparable destinations in Europe, the Caribbean or mainland USA. For Continue reading
Death of an Alien
An Upgrade Too Far, OR: Don’t Count Your Aliens Before They Explode Out Of Your Thorax! Prior to 2009, I regularly upgraded our desktop PC / server, changing the entire hardware and/or rebuilding from scratch every year or two. There Continue reading
Pearl Harbor
Day 16 Today we have another long-awaited organised tour: Pearl Harbor. Preparations are complicated by an additional security directive since we tried to arrange the same trip in 2016 – you are allowed no bags of any form, quite a Continue reading
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