Monthly Archives: August 2005

To Serve and Protect

What was the inspiration for Sir Ian Blair (the Metropolitan Police Comissioner’s) allegedly covered-up shoot to kill policy? I suggest that he is modeling the new London police-force on the characters from this “Police Vs Bad Guyz” playset that I … Continue reading

Posted in Photos, Words & Pictures | Leave a comment

Gallerycrashing: Interventionist Art, Causes for Alarm and Excuses for Failure

The term gallerycrashing is a clumsy neologism I have coined to refer to the act of placing an unsolicited artwork in a private or public exhibition. Specialised circuits were constructed for the sole purpose of gallerycrashing and a family of … Continue reading

Posted in Art | Leave a comment

Resonance FM @ The Serpentine Gallery

This week is your last chance to see the Rirkrit Tiravanija exhibition at London’s Serpentine Gallery, and in particular the Resonance FM studio-type thing at the very centre of the building. In just over a week’s time, the entire inner … Continue reading

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“CIOs don’t get fired for using Microsoft products”

Treo 650 owners like myself will at least sympathise with this: It’s obvious that Palm 5 is the “swan song” for this once mighty and ubiquitous handheld operating system. I confidently predict that there will never be another Palm OS … Continue reading

Posted in Gadget Reviews, Operating Systems | Leave a comment

Nikon, Apple – Get a grip!

Why is it my photos all look a wee bit wonky? The colours are not quite right. Yes, you can blame my incompetence as a photographer but please save some of that blame for Nikon (the company that makes my … Continue reading

Posted in Computing | Leave a comment

FedEx fails to heed the “Barbra Streisand Effect”

We learn from today’s Slashdot that Fedex sent legal ‘nastygrams’ to a young artist whose latest project was to make items of household furniture from redundant FedEx shipping containers. These shipping containers are given away free, and were obtained legally, … Continue reading

Posted in media, voffle | Leave a comment

Why DRM is good for you, or how I learned to stop worrying and love Microsoft

Actually you must have me confused with Christopher Baus. I think DRM is the most boneheaded and harmful idea to have come to the whacky world of online-media (and this is the industry that gave us Boo.com and the dot-com … Continue reading

Posted in Computing, Interesting, media | 2 Comments

The Immense Duck-Pond

Could this be the immense duck-pond that Dobson wrote about in his celebrated (but sadly out of print) “Immense Duck-Pond Pamphlet“? More information can be found on Frank Key’s Hooting Yard website.

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SourceForge to Offer Subversion Service

I remember when SourceForge was new, it was revolutionary. Sourceforge gave poor developers the means to host an open source project in public. SourceForge did for free what might be otherwise costly to set up. It gave users a version … Continue reading

Posted in Development | Leave a comment

Community Leaders

Whenever a minority group is outraged or perhaps contains elements responsible for an outrage, who do the media turn to for a sound-bite? Why of course to the “Community Leaders”. These self appointed spokesmen have become the voice of minorities, … Continue reading

Posted in Politics | Leave a comment