Archive for November 2007

Stamping Butterflies

30/11/2007

I’m not sure I’m enjoying each new book from Grimwood more than the last. The only book that really didn’t sit well was Redrobe, and perhaps the later Arabesk books (the series seemed to go a little too out there). Stamping Butterflies takes a long time to get going, you start with three [...]

Discovering New Music

25/11/2007

There’s an interesting article on the San Francisco Chronicle site about how TV adverts can launch a song, it also mentions the shrinking options for launching a new band into the limelight:
Further complicating the matter is a decline in overall band exposure. For the most part, radio has been unwilling to break the Top 40 [...]

The Government and Data Protection

21/11/2007

Only yesterday was I watching a programme featuring a story about how Customs and Revenue were doing things like assigning National Insurance numbers to people despite them already being used and sending out someone’s complete history of confidential details to the wrong person and getting outraged about their incompetence (I’ve worked for two branches of [...]

Pratchett at Waterloo

19/11/2007

Ironically, after writing a post about Terry Pratchett, I walked past someone who I believe was he today at Waterloo. I’m not positive, but he had the trademark hat and beard. I couldn’t stop and confirm (I had one minute to catch my train), besides, I don’t stop to pester celebrities, I’m British.

Pratchett on Fantasy and Sci-Fi

14/11/2007

After finishing Hogfather recently I was hunting on You Tube for clips from the Hogfather special that Sky showed last year to see whether it was worth buying it (I probably will, but a cheaper single-disc version seems to be due later this month so I’ll wait). Anyway, I stumbled across a BBC interview [...]

The UK in Space

4/11/2007

There’s was an article on BBC Online recently which had an interview with Alan Thirkettle, who is a Brit working for the European Space Agency (Esa), where he says the UK urgently needs to get into manned space flight.
I, personally, think that space developments are one of several strands of research that will [...]

High-Altitude Cooking

2/11/2007

I was reading the recipe on the back of a packet of cake mix my mum bought the other day (I was calling out the ingredients she needed) and found that it had a separate set of instructions for people living over 3,500 feet above sea-level. I thought this was odd but when I [...]