Identity crisis

One widespread criticism of Woolworths was that its stores were in bad nick. There’s no question that a lot of buildings were old and hadn’t really been looked after properly. The labyrinthine stockrooms of the Leith store had to be seen to be believed! But I never saw Woolworths stores as particularly drab. What perhaps […]

What Kezia Dugdale’s retirement says about blogging

I was sorry to read that Kezia Dugdale has ‘retired’ from blogging. Jeff has the full details and an interview with Kezia herself about the matter. It’s a blow to the Scottish political blogosphere for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Kezia was a great blogger in her own right. But perhaps more significantly […]

Why is technology news not news?

Hello. I’ve been wondering a bit about the way technology news is still ghettoised. I don’t mean news about the latest rubbish web 2.0 start-up with a ridiculous name. I mean quite important stuff. Security problems and the like. Take what happened last week. A patch to fix a major flaw in the DNS was […]

Hang on, didn’t Jamie Stone have a point?

“Xenophobic” is certainly the wrong word. Xenophobia is the hatred of foreigners, and I am certain that SNP members as a whole do not hate all foreigners. A more accurate word might be, well, nationalist. Hardly a slur, to some. But as I said a couple of weeks ago, I do find slightly distasteful an […]

The smoking ban: nice, but it’s gone too far

In that post I wrote about blogging a couple of weeks ago I said that I’d never gone out and investigated anything in my life. Well I’ve turned over a new leaf because that all changed today. To investigate the effects of the smoking ban I went to the pub. Of course, I could have […]

Live Boosh

I hope the new colour scheme isn’t putting anybody off? I’ve not been blogging very much recently. Mostly cos I couldn’t be arsed. But yesterday I was away to see The Mighty Boosh in Edinburgh. It’s the first time I’ve gone outside for almost four years. Why don’t I do it more often?! Anyway, the […]

Don’t you see I have important things to do like listen to music?

Somebody has designed a smart little sticker for the iPod Shuffle that signifies whether or not you’re prepared to have a conversation! This design is a visual interpretation of one aspect from my current study about Acoustical Privacy: the iPod as a potential indicator for “non-communication”. Through a playful approach the sticker either strengthens the […]

INFLUENCE!

Just over a week after I complained about a story on Good Morning Scotland about a service station just outside Glasgow, this morning in exactly the same slot they did a story about something which feels quite local to me (we just need somebody from Aberdeen to complain about its irrelevance now). It was about […]

Votes at Xteen

I haven’t bothered reading very much about the Power Inquiry because I’ve heard from some that it’s pretty much predictable stuff (“a bit like a reformers greatest hits album”) and from others that it’s not actually that good. Besideswhich, there have been several reports that have made obvious common sense suggestions for electoral reform which […]