So the iTunes Store seems to be getting into the whole Red Nose Day support, and already have a compilation of clips from the night available. However the real treats can be found if you take a look at the Best of Comic Relief Volume 1 which contains Blackadder: The Cavalier Years, Doctor Who and [...]

I’m certainly not the biggest fan of Christian Voice, but their press release discussing the Richard Dawkins backed plan to put an advertisement for atheism (although from the wording of the advert I’d say it was more agnostic) has produced probably the most amusing quote, one which the BBC are highlighting on their news story:
Bendy-buses, [...]

New kids on the block Cuil might poor scorn on their algorithms, but the way Google floats popular pages up the rankings can still tell you a lot. For example, say you were looking for Texas Attorney Mark Brewer, the fact that, at this point in time, there are six references to his dealings with Dave [...]

Hat tip to David Keen for giving a name to the phenomenon of an attempt to silence or censor information backfires – much as Mark Brewer’s efforts to silence the SPCK story are currently – it is apparently known as the Streisand Effect.

I’m sure Mark Brewer thought it was a good idea, threaten a little cartoonists blog to get some troublesome posts removed… However, I really don’t think he considered the reaction, as nobody likes a bully, especially not when they are bullying a genuinely nice bloke like Dave Walker. Thanks to the wonders of the Google [...]

From time to time, I wonder why some Churches struggle for numbers – then I read stories like this. Sure, noisy children in services can be annoying if you’re not expecting it, which is why we provide alternatives when we host family services. Equally, I know there is quite often a perception that a wedding [...]

Amongst other things, on Saturday both Chris and Howard were raving about the Roomba. Chris has had one for a long while, and Howard and Lindsay had just picked up one of the latest generation and were saying how good it was too. After a bit of talking about it, Beth and I thought it [...]

Amongst the sites I’ve been using on my iPod Touch quite frequently has been Yahoo! Go Flickr, a nice AJAX interface to Flickr that is distinctly superior to the normal Flickr mobile site, and nicely formatted for the portrait screen on the iPod. However when I tried to access it a couple of days ago, [...]

The ReadWriteWeb blog has posted a couple of interesting articles looking at Generation Y (classified as current 13 to 31 year-olds) and their connections with and use of technology. The first, “Why Generation Y is Going to Change the Web� looks at how the group uses the internet and what changes that might bring, whereas [...]

We’ve just watched the Lost season four finale. I’ll write something a bit more later in the week, but from my point of view, it was a pretty good episode, certainly an improvement over the end of season three. Perhaps the only moment that didn’t surprise me which was intended to was the final big [...]

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but if you’ve got a Flickr account, Photojojo is running a great little free service called Photo Time Capsule. The concept is pretty simple, you configure it for a predefined time period, from one month up to two years (mine is set to the default of one [...]

I’m thinking that electricity company engineers are a bit like dentists and doctors when they say “it won’t hurt” before doing something that really does. The reason I say that is that our local electricity company is currently doing quite a bit of work around Finchampstead, as a result they have several generators stationed at [...]

I’ve had some unintentional and rather drastic spring cleaning on the blog this weekend. I decided that I really should upgrade the site to the latest version as it was still running version 2.1.3 of Wordpress, and the main release has just hit 2.5.1. The upgrade of the main software went fine, it was K2, [...]

One of the aspects of putting in a planning application is that a public notice is placed giving details of the application to allow other interested parties to comment, including on the council web site. We seem to have found another side effect of that though – we’ve started getting a selection of unsolicited junk [...]

Reading through the newly published Sonning Parish Profile includes one thing I didn’t know – the church owns the local pub! I wonder if that means the Vicar and Churchwardens get free drinks?

We don’t usually watch Family Guy, but having seen the reviews, and having spotted that the episode was being shown last night, we watched Blue Harvest last night on BBC3. Having not seen the rest of the series, we probably missed quite a few jokes, but there were plenty of Star Wars jokes to keep [...]

I’ve blogged from time to time about politics within the Church, but every so often, even at a local level, village politics and St James come into contact. In the past it’s been in relation to things like the villages memorial oaks being on church, rather than public land, and occasionally the Parish Council will [...]

So this morning we got confirmation that our application to “erect a garden shed for purposes ancillary to dwellingâ€? had been received. If at this point you are puzzled by why we need planning permission for a garden shed, according to the duty planning officer it’s because by virtue of the fact we back onto [...]

Sometimes I despair of how clueless politicians can be when it comes to technology. This morning we had a great pronouncement that the government will protect children by requiring sex offenders to give them their e-mail address. Quite apart from the fact that many of the companies are based outside UK jurisdiction, how difficult [...]

If you think the problems at Terminal 5 are anything new, Jeff Atwood has a great article highlighting a rather similar scenario at Denver in 1994. The similarities are uncanny, even down to all the over-hyping that proves to be spectacularly misplaced once problems hit the system, in the case of T5 being staff who [...]