You thought Con Coughlin was bad, but did you know he was this bad? The race for Britain’s Most Disgusting Journalist is a tough one, but rather like Roger Federer, the great champions are always in with a chance against the young’uns.
Read More a hard, hard game to pickOK. So you want to be part of Total Defence of the NHS. You want to join the 10,000. To be the first of the few. If you’re in any of the London boroughs in the title, here’s your chance. You have until the 15th July, Saturday, to apply on this web page. There’s a…
Read More Barnet, Camden, Enfield, Haringey, Islington CCGs: Applications Open NowThis is rather good, even if there is something close to a rick-roll embedded in it: BBC Radio 1 & 1Xtra Hackney Weekend Mix by Dj Emily Rawson on Mixcloud
Read More MusicRed Brick would like you to know that you have a month to respond to the Government’s consultation on homelessness.
Read More Action momentYouGov: Best chancellor in last 30 years – Brown 20%, Lawson 10%, Clarke 7%, Major 6%, Howe 4%, Darling 3%, Lamont 2%, Osborne 1%. Well, the usual response to any poll like this is to point out that most people answering it can only name one or two cabinet ministers, and therefore name recognition explains…
Read More chancellorsSomething that came out of the Netroots UK proceedings, and also out of the Crooked Timber open data seminar. One of the sessions chalked up in the open space process was titled “How can we restore democratic participation, and should we?” Well, I thought, quite the headline: TUC Gives Up on 1832 Reform Act, Says…
Read More Reach vs. engagementOther stuff from Netroots UK. Having chugged through my official Brown Bag Lunch (which actually included Ribena, in a disturbingly infantilising touch), I went to the open space group on the Leveson inquiry. This ended up merging with the one on the LIBOR scandal. I was able to contribute by knowing how the LIBOR panel…
Read More Netroots UK catchupAn unexpectedly scary experience. I had to give a presentation at Telco 2.0’s conference this week, the first time I’ve done this, and the first time I did it at all since OpenTech 2008 (audio, slides). This, quite unexpectedly, flipped me into hellish stage fright, which I had always assumed to be basically a load…
Read More Scared.OK, first week really working with the X200s ThinkPad and Ubuntu (12.04, but really the development branch as the installer was broken in 12.04LTS). Two days of event note taking – this is great! 6 hours battery life, eye-kind matt screen, wonderful IBM keyboard. Really snappy. Import some of my data, slurp down and index…
Read More Ubuntu optimisationRecently, preparing a case study for a client, I was struck by the idea of a “lurking technology”. (The history of technology is the trade secret of IT consulting, or something.) That’s one that isn’t necessarily obviously linked to the end user, has broad influence, and causes changes to happen. You can make a case…
Read More Lurking technology