This week I went along to help out at a couple of sessions at Birmingham City University. It was a lot of fun. One of the teams of online journalism students are going to be doing a prison related project and I spoke to their editor about online sources. I thought it might be useful [...]

At the end of March I will be taking voluntary redundancy from Birmingham City Council – and Digital Birmingham – and moving on to work for myself. Well, for as long as I can stand the boss I will, anyway. I joined Digital Birmingham a little under four years ago from Aston Pride. There I’d [...]

The BBC’s coverage of our recent civil disturbances has been a bit woeful at times. I’ve felt that they have blithered on about the pernicious influence of social media without questioning whether their own coverage of events has any kind of influence on them. Tonight it all went a bit silly when they chose to [...]

Yesterday there was a fair bit of comment on Twitter about how 2011 is the sum of 11 consecutive prime numbers. Which was nice. © Copyright Walter Baxter and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

Photo, Santacon 2009 – Astoria, Queens NYC by kstraw2 on Flickr A friend texted me today and asked what the chances are of a group of seven people picking names in their office Secret Santa without anybody choosing themselves. A clean draw, so to speak. Now, there are a number of ways that you can [...]

Some years ago I spent a lovely week with some friends on a tour around Transylvania. Our guide, Ramona, told us on a number of occasions that the scenery we were seeing was lovely, but that her favourite place to go walking was Maramureş. So this year I decided to spend a week there. I got [...]

After writing about how many Panini stickers collectors should expect to buy to fill a book  I’ve had a fair few comments about it.  Greg Newman brought John Crace’s article in The Guardian to my attention where he talks about “the four-yearly great Panini conspiracy theory.”  The conspiracy being that Panini don’t distribute the stickers [...]

Yesterday I was over at my sister’s, and her lad was excited because he had the new South Africa World Cup 2010 Panini sticker book. He had also bought four packets, each with five stickers in them, and I had the important job of unpeeling them so that he could put them in the album. [...]

var osMap; function init() { osMap = new OpenSpace.Map(‘map’);osMap.setCenter(new OpenSpace.MapPoint(407621, 283112), 10);var markers = new OpenLayers.Layer.Markers(“Markers”);osMap.addLayer(markers);var pos = new OpenSpace.MapPoint(407621, 283112);var marker = new OpenLayers.Marker(pos);markers.addMarker(marker); } The government responded to the snappily titled Policy options for geographic information from Ordnance Survey consultation last week. One of the results of this is the opening up of [...]

University Challenge is a great British institution, only improved by picking a side to support each week. Some people get a bit tribal about football, but I’m a bit more up my own arse and cheer on academics instead. So anyway, this is my flowchart for who I support on University Challenge each week.