Making yourself go to the gym: tips for building will power
on Nov 13, 2009 in fiction ...

1986 Raleigh Record Sprint – My new bike
on Nov 8, 2009 in other I’ve been a keen cyclist ever since I was a child. I started with a little red BMX, then went on to a GT Interceptor that I thrashed around the neighbourhood on – skidding the tyres to ribbons and slipping across frozen rivers (this was s...

Father and Son – a book recommendation
on Oct 28, 2009 in Reading/Writing I’m reading Father and Son by Edmund Gosse, and want to recommend it to you. Father and Son is an autobiography that records a boy’s upbringing in a puritanical household. The father, Philip Gosse, was one of the blindly faithful, a sombr...

Cavedad: How Fatherhood Made Me Regress
on Oct 28, 2009 in other Having a baby has done something funny to me. Fatherhood has made me regress – all I can think about is providing. I’m the hunter-gatherer. I’m driven to provide, able to think of little else. And I used to be so enlightened.

Bad Packaging: Caffé Nero Waste Everything We Have Left
on Jun 16, 2009 in activism environment Dear Caffé Nero, Can you please explain this?: Why does a single biscuit need so much packaging? When people talk about environmental responsibility, social responsibility, global warming, carbon neutrality, peak oil, the melting of the polar ice ca...

Fiction is a Waste of Time
on Jun 11, 2009 in fiction I’ve been struggling to write fiction for a while now. Since peak production in 2001, I’ve lacked inspiration. The bigger problem - bigger than the lack of inspiration - is my feeling that there’s no need for me to write. What does...

Nyouse: Your News, Direct to Journalists (via Twitter)
on Mar 18, 2009 in Politics/Republic Reading/Writing journalism journalist news newspapers press release social media twitter Short version Myself and Jonathan Markwell - the industrious and philanthropic mastermind behind Inuda, the Skiff and SocialPlume - have created Nyouse (pronounced “news”). Nyouse is a system that allows ordinary people to alert the press...

War on Drugs: FAILURE
on Mar 9, 2009 in Politics/Republic drugs politics prohibition From the Guardian this morning: “We consider the war on drugs a failure because the objectives have never been achieved,” said César Gaviria, Colombia’s former president and co-chair of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and De...

Music I Have Recently Enjoyed
on Feb 19, 2009 in music spotify web applications I recently discovered the delights of Spotify, a web application that lets you listen to music for free. The catch is that occasional ads interrupt the music. The ads are infrequent enough to be tolerable, but if you’re really fussy you can pay.

Hero! (Sacked for Warning of Impending Disaster)
on Feb 17, 2009 in celebrating intelligence economy intelligence Paul Moore recession Paul Moore is another hero - a man who perceived that the banks’ irresponsible lending would lead to disaster. Unfortunately, when Paul Moore spoke up, and tried to warn his bosses of what he could see was inevitable, he was sacked. What kind o.