Category Archives: Other

Getting The Grammar Right

My New Year’s resolution called for me to improve my grammar over the course of the year and to take a little bit of extra thought about what I’m writing. It’s not going to happen overnight and will be a long process, I’ve almost trained myself out of writing things like “Dell have launched a new laptop” and “Google are the number one search engine” and will catch myself (most of the time!) if I make this mistake. I came across this grammar Nazi blog post that^[1] I think I need to print out and read daily.

20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes | LitReactorhttp://litreactor.com/columns/20-common-grammar-mistakes-that-almost-everyone-gets-wrongBelow are 20 common grammar mistakes I see routinely, not only in editorial queries and submissions, but in print: in HR manuals, blogs, magazines, newspapers, trade journals,…

¹Please let me have got this one right! It’s restrictive, right?

Chimps Have Better Recall Than Humans?

Just watched the video in the link below where a chimpanzee can see a series of numbers flashed on to a computer screen quicker than it takes a human eye to register what it’s seeing and then proceed to recall the exact position where the sequence of numbers appeared. I don’t think even the Rain Man can compete with that! I certainly could have done with some chimp memory back when I was applying for my air force scholarship, apparently my own number recall ability was beyond useless!

BBC Nature – Ape versus machine: Do primates enjoy computer games?http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/16832378A chimp genius can complete a computer memory test in less time than it takes the average person to blink – and much faster than any human rival. But do the world’s…

My New Year’s Resolution

I forgot to publish a New Year’s Resolution, I hope I’m not too late! I’m going to keep it simple this year, so here we go:

1. Learn English proper, like. I’ve been told by many people that I have a wonderful writing style (Naaw, thanks guys!), but I’ve also been told by an equal number of people that my grammar sucks, my girlfriend even told me that a little piece of her dies every time I use an errant “are” instead of “is”. To rectify this (and to save my girlfriend) by the end of 2012, amongst others, I will have finally mastered the common apostrophe, know the exact times when to use the semi-colon, the colon and of course the hyphen and be the foremost expert on the tricky difference between “which” and “that”.

2. Lose another 4kg. It doesn’t sound like much, it doesn’t need to be much, I just need to be lighter at the end of the year than I am now.

3. Turn 29. Well, I need to have at least one resolution that I’ll be able to stick to! I’ve now successfully turned 29

4. Go to bed early. If I’m going to turn 29 this year then I need to stop going to bed at 1am and stop writing blog posts at 12:30am like this one, even if it is a Saturday tomorrow.

That’s all I can think of at the moment, it should be good enough, I’ll see you in 2013 to see how we all got on.

The Battle of The Bulge

The Fastest Foreigner In Chennai

It’s Kinetic Typography

In the last few weeks I’ve found myself getting increasingly addicted to Fiverr.com which is having a negative impact on my social life, bank balance and relationships. If I don’t get my daily Fiverr fix then I turn in to a grumpy old man and start writing blog rants about the state of the world and how we’re all doomed (so smile and get on with it). OK, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration, I was a grumpy old man well before Fiverr came along, but anyway it does mean I’ve been introduced to loads of incredible concepts like this one I’ve just found.

It’s called kinetic typography which is basically a fancy way to say the text moves…yeah, it must be an Americanism. The video below is the best example ever of kinetic typography and the song is very nearly as awesome as the video itself. Give your eyes and ears a three and half minute treat, check this out…

(awesomeness, eh?!)

The Winner

Yesterday I won a competition for a free privileged entry to an international social media seminar that is taking place in Chennai this week with the lead speaker from the famous SEOmoz company (which I’m really excited about!). You know, a lot of people say they never win anything and I am certainly one of them. My girlfriend asked me what the last thing I won was, I racked my brains and the best I could come up with was winning the Most Polite award at the annual Cub Scout (Great Bowden Cub Pack) summer camp when I was 9 years old. Apparently I always remembered to say my “please and thank yous” to Akela and Brown Owl. But I hardly mention that any more and might even take it off my CV under “Achievements”.

Good Job, Dave

Well done, Dave, you have come out victor in another conflict started without consent of the British public and at an estimated cost of £1bn give or take a few hundred million pounds. And I thought Britain was broke and we all (that is, the public at large) had to take it stoically on the chin. £1bn? That’s 5 new schools for you right there.

And now, the evil, but slightly comical goatee-bearded villain is dead. No more long rambling rhetorical speeches for journalists to be smugly condescending about and how comforting it is to know that the unelected Libyan transitional Head of State (who, not forgetting, was this time last year the Justice Minister in the aforesaid villain’s showpiece government) has publicly said that the bastions of humanity will not be forgotten when it comes to handing out those lucrative contracts to rebuild the bombed out country. A score for your party donators British business.

Now, Dave, how about this for an idea? Before we go gallivanting as the knight in shining armour in to yet another conflict with an oil rich state in the name of humanity (while of course neatly side-stepping the inconvenient issues present in non-oil rich failed states), why not ask the public if they want to send our (I’m searching for a better word here) defense forces in to a war zone thousands of miles away by conducting a democratic referendum?

Dave, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say I would rather see the hospitals, schools and council services be better funded rather than spending another £250,000 to send a plane to drop a bomb on Johnny Foreigner, no matter how much oil the country has humanity the people need.

Daylight Robbery On The British Trains

I just purchased a single train ticket to take me from Market Harborough to London St Pancras tomorrow morning at 9am. The whole journey takes about 60 minutes and East Midland Trains, the thieving robbing bastards that they are, see it fit to charge a staggering £50 for the pleasure. It’s not paying for the fuel or staffing costs, it’s more than likely paying for the station refurbishment at St Pancras.

If the Government want more people to take public transport, then they need to sort out the prices of it first because at fifty quid a go it’s only going to be the wealthy people who can afford to not have a car! What’s more, if Network Rail (or whatever the hell it is now) franchise out the lines it means money grabbing companies like East Midland Trains have got the monopoly on that route and have no competition or incentive to keep the prices down.

£50 pounds for a 60 minute train ride. Britain is broken. The country has gone to the dogs. I’m not going to be hanging round here.

Steve Jobs Apple Store Memorial

Took this photo outside the Covent Garden Apple Store in London on Thursday afternoon. Big crowds had gathered outside to pay tribute to the man. I’m not a mac fan myself but you can’t argue with the success Steve brought to Apple when he returned to the company he founded in the mid-90′s. He left the company as one of the biggest in the world when it eclipsed Exxon in August (but then lost some ground) having already succeeded Microsoft and Dell.