Tag: Ireland
-
In search of a word
(This post is nothing to do with science and not much to do with computing, but it’s my blog, my rules…) I am from Belfast, in (being technical and not political) Northern Ireland. I left there when aged 12 and sometimes some people express surprise that I still have the accent – but the truth […]
-
Being a Latin pedant
Educated in Catholic schools, both in Ireland and England, I always thought Latin was a widely taught subject. But it is not. My qualification in it is not great – a B at ‘O’ level in 1982 – but I can see that puts me at a great advantage compared to the majority of the […]
-
This cannot be good news for Last.fm
Just logged in to Last.fm to be told that I’d have to pay a subscription for a desktop client from next Tuesday and if I lived in most countries in the world I wouldn’t be able to listen full stop. Now I generally listen to Last.fm via the website so I am not likely to […]
-
Review: John Banville’s “Doctor Copernicus”
John Banville is perhaps Ireland’s greatest living novelist, but his works often take a bit of a trudge to get though (Booker winner The Sea was worth it, but it did feel like the author was more interested in the words than the story at some points.) Well, Doctor Copernicus, now 35 years old, shows […]
-
The Oxford comma
This is not about computing but, as it has been gnawing at me for 33 years, I am not going to miss the opportunity to get it off my chest. A story has been knocking around all week in the British media about the “Oxford comma” and about a supposed threat to its existence. I […]
-
Spangles Muldoon and the micro revolution
I am meant to be revising for my forthcoming exams but any act of procrastination or displacement is preferable to writing SQL queries – so I did some more digging on “Comp Shop” – and this is what I found out: The store was set up by Chris Cary (pictured on left here) – perhaps […]
-
A Brief History of the Future
I am reading A Brief History of the Future: Origins of the Internet by John Naughton. It was recommended as some extra reading for the networking module at Birkbeck and I thought I might as well give it a try (though I had to order it from Amazon as it now seems to be too […]