open source? Microsoft?!
Microsoft announced recently that it has developed *its own* distribution of Linux. Having followed the IT industry since around the time MS-DOS came out, this is hard to digest and gives rise to some complicated feelings.…
eulogy for LiveJournal
For 15 years near the start of this century, I had a kind of blog called a LiveJournal. It was like public blogs crossed with Facebook...…
memoir
I find the sound of a heavily-laden freight train comforting: as an infant, waking in the night, I would often hear the diesel locos labouring along the line across the fields, hauling thirty heaped wagons of coal from colliery to power station…
mirrors should reflect
Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir davantage.…
a lake
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature…
more of the same
To mark this blog's fourth anniversary, I gave it a bit of a refresh, both visual and technical.…
the map of Whorlton
OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a work in progress, and always will be. All maps that try to keep up with the world as it changes are.…
nightbirds
The Night Bird: cross-border train tracking through the darkened Alps, stars defining the mountain peaks, a chain of moonlit cameos coasting back along the line…
patriotism and habitus
After a decade of living in the midlands, I realised that I didn't like it there and missed living in the North, the part of England that I come from. After a second decade, I was starting to feel desperate…
passing by chance
I only chose to visit Morioka because it's on the shinkansen line, around half-way between where I was the day before and where I was going the next day…
LGBT+ for beginners
The language around sexual orientation has changed quite a lot over my lifetime. I regularly hear people around me, and in the media, use terms around gender and sexuality carelessly or wrongly…
technology answers
A final tranche of questions I've answered on Quora, these ones being IT stuff not covered in my post on Java questions…