Only 20?

Cool. I'm clearly not as old as I sometimes fear, when I first came to t'web, Netscape was ubiquitous and I never even saw Mosaic in live use. (mid 90's, BT, and you had to get written permission to "surf the net")

Pleased to note that that first ever website I looked at is still alive too: http://www.doggiesnot.com

sed -i 's/Cork/Glasgow/'

Third biggest city in the UK (pop. about 650K IIRC) and you can fly to London or to bangin' party town destinations. Usually with Ryanair.

We kept getting told we're a "premier league" European destination, but not with connections like these. Glasgow airport is probably the handiest airport in Europe for access from the city centre, and what do our fearless leaders do? Axe the proposed rail link. Sigh, it could have been so good.

[Edit] Actually I just checked and it's not quite that bad anymore. Paris and Berlin have now appeared on a list that previously had Amsterdam as the sole European capital.

Office 365

Is being heavily plugged on the Glasgow underground too, the only underground railway system in Europe which is 100% underground. I'll be impressed if this works.

They forgot the most improtant feature.

i.e. the big red button marked "Off"

At last, an affordable, practical, decent looking e-car. WOOT

*click*

404: Not Found.

LOL. No.

Simple solution.

Keep a rape alarm handily near your phone. Effective and satisfying.

Arf.

As if iPhone users know what flavour of browser they're using.

I dunno about the Universal Credit

...But their Universal Jobmatch thing was an utter abortion. As an unemployed web-and-DB guy at the time, that was kind of hard to take.

Woah, woah woah.

What about minidisc?

Right.

"all your hardware should work right out of the box."

But doesn't. Put me right off my last casual flirtation with linux. I mean, I could, but who can be arsed?

If it doesn't move...

... or doesn't connect, and it should: WD40.

If it moves or connects or needlessly spies on you, and it shouldn't: Gaffer tape.

Wrong application of technology.

There is a place for electric cars, but it's not in any sort of grand tourer or anything to cover long distances. It's for taxi runs in an urban environment.

Scatter a few high power charge points about your city - relatively easy to do, since a lot of the infrastructure - or at least the containment - is there already. Next, design your electric car so it can reliably cover the distance between, say, Heathrow and central London, reliably, a few times a day, in any conditions and carrying 5 adults plus luggage.

Make sure those charge points have a reasonable amount of medium term parking space. When your taxi driver begins running low on charge, he parks it up, plugs it in and gets in a freshly charged motor and drives away. Eliminates hanging around for an hour with the car off the road. (An HOUR, btw? Fuck that.) The next driver similarly parks up the clapped out one and gets into the new one - ad infinitum.

I know the argument that electric cars don't cut down pollution, they simply shift it elsewhere. Shifting it out of city centres is absolutely fine by me.

No option though.

If you're looking for a job, telling a recruitment type you're not on Linkedin is akin to saying you don't want the job. I don't get linkedin at all, I don't really want it, but I'm out of contract in 6 weeks, so... bullet bitten.

No, No, No No.

As a man who used to run a cafe:

First, you need a teapot. Decent tea can't be made in a cup. Second, you need a teacosy for that pot. Your Gran didn't get to be that old without learning a few things y'know.

The correct ratio is 3 teabags to 750ml of water - i.e approx 1 per mug. Many teabags are acceptable - Nambarrie for me, however Yorkshire, 99, co-op own brand or, in a pinch, Scottish blend are OK. The only thing that's not really acceptable is Tetley's.

The water should be poured into the (warmed!) pot at boiling point, so a little splashes out onto your hands. Anything worth having requires a little sacrifice. Also, the pot should contain the very dregs of the last brew - a useful technique here is to drain the pot, then squeeze the dregs out of the discarded teabags back in.

Leave it for at least 5 minutes - this is where that teacosy comes in. In the meantime, fill your mug with boiling water to get it nice and hot. Discard before serving, obviously.

The tea should be poured onto the veriest dribble of milk - I define the amount as "slightly more than no point." (QI moment - the reason for the British tradition of "milk in first" is because the delicate china cups they had back then would shatter if you poured the hot tea in first.)

This is for teabags. As for loose tea - an Indian colleague of mine once brought me back a paper bag of tea leaves that made the weakest, palest looking tea imaginable. I piled more and more in until it was a decent colour and basically gave off gamma rays for a week.

Please excuse any mispelings in this post, because I'm drinking red wine.

Nice one

I genuinely teared up a bit when Columbia was lost. I remember staying up late to watch the first launch on TV with my Gran, then in her 60s and as fascinated with space flight as any 8 year old boy. RIP Columbia ,never forgotten.

I disagree.

There are clearly 5 forces at work. Social, Mobile, Cloud, Information and Powerpoint.

But on the plus side...

Feeling brave one year , I bought the missus a birthday present from Agent Provocateur. Haven't quite got around to unsubscribing from that one yet.

Whoah, cool the commentardery.

First: No-one's quite sure where graphene research might go or if it might even go anywhere. If there was a glimmer of a route to market, you can bet VC cash would be all over it by now - meaning, these days, US or possibly Chinese money. This here is what's known as first-stage research, i.e. a complete punt, without any guarantee of return. Commerce won't touch it. It's exactly what the RC's are supposed to be doing, and aren't you glad at least someone is?

Second: In the grand scheme of things, 20mil is chump change. What we're paying for here is a few bright bods to remain here in the UK instead of buggering off to [US/China/Elbonia]. If this particular research fails, we still have the bright guys around.

Third: You get government investment in project such as this, you also sign up to a pretty heavy regulatory framework, which includes having someone parachuted onto your project board to make sure you're spending the taxpayer's money properly. I know this, I am one of those parachutees.

We do alright here in the UK for investing in unproven ideas. What we are admittedly shit at is profiting from the unproven ideas that make it.

Cheers.

That was entertaining, but how bloody old do I feel now?