Monkeymagic » Life

118 Brothers

Piers Young — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 15:36:13 +0000

Overheard this snippet between two 8 year olds practising using the internet for research:

“Do you know who ran the first four minute mile?”
“Yes. I don’t need to look it up. It’s the 118 brothers”.

Google and Feedburner – “Eventually”

Piers Young — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 19:52:09 +0000

This, I think, is deeply, deeply rubbish.

Eventually? So far it’s been almost 6 months.

Grr … gle.

Children see. Children do.

Piers Young — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 15:09:22 +0000

OK. So might be fun to respond to Ewan’s challenge. Will certainly be sending a link to the Parent’s Association.

Always nice

Piers Young — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:09:54 +0000

… when a friend gets on TV. However undeservedly. John, my thoughts are with you

Slideshare – 2 years on.

Piers Young — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:51:01 +0000

Had a nice surprise in my mailbox this morning from Slideshare:

“Hi MrYoung,

We’ve noticed that your slideshow on SlideShare has been getting a LOT of views in the last 24 hours. Great job … you must be doing something right.

Why don’t you tweet or blog this? Use the hashtag #bestofslideshare so we can track the conversation.

Congratulations,
-SlideShare Team”

The slideshow in question was one on child safety online and is 18 months old – not exactly hot off the press – so feeling a bit bemused.

Movember

Piers Young — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:41:51 +0000

Pretty soon I’m going to grow a moustache. Not out of personal preference, but as part of Movember. For a month I’m going to be growing, trimming and tending an unsightly sprawl on my top lip in aid of prostate cancer. Dad announced about 2 years ago that he had it, a number family friends have it or have died of it, and Georgia’s father died of it. 1 in 11 UK men can expect to be diagnosed with it at sometime during their life. The moustache feels pretty trivial next to all that, but if anyone feels like donating to a worthy cause (the charity not the tache), I’d be hugely grateful.

If you are feeling generous, you can donate via me here or direct to the charity in the UK (or others worldwide).

Thanks.

Lubricous

Piers Young — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:11:40 +0000

I’m playing around with coding a simple site that pulls in various “of the days” – word of the day, historical happening of the day, quote of the day, joke of the day etc. – so that I can put it up at morning registrations for children to look at (and hopefully discuss).

The only UK English spelling word of the day feed I’ve found is the OED. And their word of the day today is lubricous. I had to look it up. It means:

smooth and glassy; slippery; lewd, wanton, salacious or lecherous

Sheesh. Back to the drawing board. Might have to add things manually.

Government APIs

Piers Young — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:18:36 +0000

From Conor O’Neill:

“Expecting the public service to build webapps for us is a foolâ€™s errand. They would spend â‚¬100m, take five years and it wouldnâ€™t work when it was finished. However, if they make each departmentâ€™s data available along with some simple APIs, then citizens can do it for themselves, or pay someone to do it. Free unlimited access to all APIs for individual or non-commercial use and some small pay-as-you-go for commercial use…

So what data do we want and need? Anything available under Freedom of Information from crime rates per county to court cases to tax revenue by category. If it exists, we want it.”

Yup. Just been looking for what I’d naively hoped were simple things: an API to help me sort out a GP nearby locator, and an API for OFSTED stuff. Ho hum. Am now fervently hoping the Guardian Free Our Data campaign works. Especially given the conclusion of this (very good) report:

In sum, recognition is slowly emerging in Europe that open access to government information is critical to the information society, the scientific endeavor, and economic growth. However, recent trends towards more â€œliberalâ€ policies face opposition. This comes from treasuries as well as from entrepreneurial civil servants in charge of â€œgovernment commercializationâ€ initiatives, who are sometimes tempted to engage in anti-competitive practices. Therefore, these issues require consideration at the highest policy making levels of government.

Profit

Piers Young — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 14:24:31 +0000

John mentioned a lovely little quote at dinner last night, from Hermann Abs (apparently one of the great post-war bankers):

Profit is to business as breathing is to life.

Necessary, but not the point.

Cold spell

Piers Young — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 01:02:48 +0000

On the tube today, on the way to dinner with some friends, I finished a book called The Reavers, by George Macdonald Fraser. A ripping yarn, deeply silly but perfect to curl up with over Christmas.

At dinner, Jane mentioned that she was having to interview people about him. I asked what for, and it turns out she’s doing some work on The Last Word, Radio 4’s obituary program.

GMF died two days ago, and the cold spell feels a lot colder.