Nothing makes you an expert on modern/contemporary art like becoming an international traveller.  There’s something about art galleries which is a bit of a draw – a combination of being able to see one-of-a-kind works by humankind’s revered creative minds, having one’s mind expanded by trying to work out what it all might mean, and the ability to critically view a work and discover one’s own boundaries.
Or, sometimes, they just represent a light, airy room that isn’t too expensive to get into for a while and where it’ll be anice …

The beauty of having a special pen that scans your handwriting as you go is that you can jot down stuff anywhere, as you think of it. Provided anyone can decipher your terrible handwriting…

Is it time for a Birthday Retrospective?  Y’know, one of those “what were you doing 1, 2, 5, 10, 15 etc. years ago?” things?  I think so.  Game on!
1 year ago – 2010 (34) – Hannah, Paul, Kathryn & I went for a frightfully civilised dinner at The Athaeneum on Piccadilly, quite a lavish hotel with a quite extensive whisky selection.  As it happened, the people working that night didn’t know their whisky-arses from their whisky-elbows, so that part of the evening was a shambles.  But the rest was lovely. …

Here’s a quick update of what I’ve been up to for the past few weeks – work have sent me over to the USA, and though I’m nominally in “New York”, I’m not situated in an office block on the corner of 42nd and Madison, or anything.  Despite not being in the thick of it though, I’ve had a little bit of opportunity to get in there & have a look around.
So, for starters…

I’m in White Plains NY, not New York City.  It’s not really “upstate New York” – the …

My biggest kodak moment
Originally uploaded by *ice

What happens when you combine the occurrence of the Aurora Borealis with an erupting volcano, and manage to be in the right place at the right time? Flickr user *ice managed to get what can only be described as “a fucking startlingly good photo”, based on these 3 ingredients.
Click on the image, or this link, for larger version on Flickr.  Then stare at it for 20 minutes or so, like I just have been.

I’ve been doing some work on the website for my new co-venture, WhiskySquad – a monthly whisky tasting exercise designed to give enthusiastic amateurs a chance to get their palates around some interesting stuff – and the problem that needed solving in this instance was that of easily setting up a way for people to register their interest in the strictly limited number of spaces for that month.
My initial thought was, “Ah, there are services that do this!” – Meetup.com and Eventbrite.com both provide systems to set up events and …

It’d be fair to say that I know a fairly mobile bunch of people – many of my friends from growing up don’t live in the ol’ neighbourhood any more, though having moved to different parts of Australia, or the world.  I’m going to assume this is pretty normal going by the number of places I’ve been on holiday where I’ve heard an Australian accent pipe up in the background (that is to say – EVERYwhere I’ve been, with possibly the exception of Mississippi).
Every now and again, however, I hear …

We have an arrangement set up here in our office so that in order to work from home we connect to the corporate network using the Cisco VPN (Virtual Private Network) Client – a little bit of software that burrows through the Intertubes and joins up to some servers in the rack/farm so that our home computer now appears to be a node on the corporate network.  The way we set this up is to install the Cisco VPN Client on the machine, then run a little application which sets …

Magnificent, isn’t it?

After a long day out & demanding evening, it’s possible – thanks to the wonders of modern domestic science – to enjoy a healthy and balanced pouch of nutrients, and though the diagram on the front looks terrifyingly wholesome, the preparation method is actually a lot simpler than you might initially suspect!

What could be easier?  There’s no need for junky takeaways any more now that we have the life-giving Orange Pouch – simply squeeze, tear a small hole, then put in the microwave for 2 minutes (or, as …

Was making a coffee in the kitchen at work just now, and for some reason the following sentence popped into my head:
You put snot on the ball?
Stopped me dead in my tracks, that did.  What relevance does that have to anything?  After a moment’s pause, it occurred to me that it was a quote from the 1989 baseball comedy Major League, starring Charlie Sheen, a very non-buff Wesley Snipes, Rene Russo, and Dennis Haysbert back when he was still doing TV bit parts and probably never envisaged playing the President …