Walking in a technology wonderland

One of the advantages of living near a race track is that sometimes you get to attend some interesting events. So it was yesterday when I went to see a new brand new Motorsport go through it's initial testing before hitting the world stage. Formula E   is a new FIA single-seater championship. The unique selling point however is that this is the first championship where the cars will be totally electric powered. When it was announced that they would be holding free test days at my local circuit, Donington Park,  I thought I would go and have a look and see what all the fuss is about. The first thing that hits you as you enter the park is the amount of money spent on new Formula E facilities. Donington has been chosen as the official headquarters for the teams and in a relatively short period, new buildings have sprung up to house not only administration buildings, but also sites for the formula E teams. After the debacle of Donington parks attempt to host F1 , ...

Recently I had a phone call from someone I knew. After a few pleasantries they hit me with a bombshell. They accused me of stealing work that was to form part of a new book. Basically I was being accused of being a copyright thief! Now I'm a guy who prides himself on being a pretty moral person, with a good idea of right and wrong, so this took me back a bit and it took a while to work out what had happened. A few months ago I became interested in finding out some more information on a memorial for German P.O.W's in the local cemetery. I asked a friend, who put me in contact with someone in the local museum. They sent me a single page word document which contained the name of the soldiers plus a small paragraph on the causes of their death. I decided it would be a good project to test if I could use social media tools such as blogging to gather any more information on the persons involved (Getting information on German 1st world war soldiers is especially difficult b...

This is a story about the worlds greatest failure. The story is true, the people in it are real, just some of the facts may not be right. If you are someone who thinks that facts are more important than the story then by all means write your own version. Once upon a time (as all good stories should begin) There were some people called mathematicians who were attempting to solve some particularly difficult problems. These problems were far more difficult than the numeracy problems you may get at school such as what is 7 x 9 or 169 x 27. In fact they were so difficult, mathematician's would find them very hard to describe even to other mathematician's. One day two mathematicians called Alfred Whitehead and Bertrand Russell decided that one of the reasons that the problems were so difficult was that no one really understood why mathematics worked at all. They often did things like this because as well as being very good at numbers, they were both something we call philosophers...

Recently I decided I would transfer my extensive collection of audio tapes to a brand spanking new digital format. Now I was never a vinyl record sort of guy, partly because we didn't really have a decent record player at home (I do remember having the wind up type with a darning needle for the pick up. Great for 78's but not for much else). Also when I started listening to music (I was a bit of a late developer in this) Walkman's were in vogue and the possibilities of portable music were too much to resist. I was also late in getting into CD's and kept buying tapes far later than I really should of done. The result is I really have a lot of tapes gathered over a lot of years. Over the years however they got played less and less and ended up cluttering the dining room where occasionally I would trip over them. Eventually they got relegated to to that last resting ground of the unwanted, the loft, together with the tape player. But it was always my intention to do some...

A letter to the 16 year old version of me... Hi, Sorry it's taken so long to get back to you, but the trans-lunar express was late and my jet pack is in for a service. Anyway I guess your wondering how it is going in 2013. Well I don't want to give away too many spoilers but things are going pretty well, especially now I've got my new cybernetic legs. But I still couldn't pass up this opportunity to drop a few words of advice to help you better prepare for the future. I do however understand if you want to ignore my words of wisdom from some old bloke. Believe me I would of done the same at your age. Anyway my first piece advice is cheer up. You may think standing around morose in some corner at a party makes you look deep and philosophical, but it actually just makes you look like somebody nobody wants to spend time with. Lighten up, you'll enjoy life and you'll find people will want to hang around with you more While were at it, the coolest people ...

There was an article in the Guardian recently that if you want an opening ceremony done right give it to a totalitarian dictatorship. It has a point. Those countries often have a point to make about how perfect life is in their country, how great are their achievements, etc. Basically we are XXXX, hear us roar. In the unlikely event that Pyongyang ever gets the Olympics I have no doubt that we would have a perfect mass coordinated opening ceremony dazzling in its immensity, probably followed by the atmospheric explosion of a couple of small nuclear devices. Just to make the point. The point is that the opening ceremony of an Olympics should show the host countries core values to the rest of the world. Also hide its imperfections under the mass of synchronised pyrotechnics and orchestrated participation. Beijing for example produced a ceremony which was all about the greatness of new China, and no mention of Tiananmen square or the Mao pogroms. So what statement did the London 2012 op...

10 years ago today I was in the test room at my work at Ericsson Intracom based in Leicester. The dot-com bubble had long since burst and Ericsson had given up on its ambition to rule the world of 3G and was contracting back to Sweden. As a result of this it had already been announced that Ericsson Intracom would be sacrificed as part of this retrenchment. As such I wasn't exactly interested in working too hard, but the test room with its rows of ATM racks and sun workstation was a good place to hide from the general gloom predictable affecting the office downstairs. I think it was in the early afternoon that John came up to the room. Had I, he asked, heard about New York? No I answered. He replied that something had happened at the world trade towers. As luck had it, Ian, the IT admin, had only recently showed me how to bypass the company firewalls to stream IP. As you could probably guess, with the the work force already on the chopping block, there was some serious IT abuse go...