The War, Ken Burns’s new series about the Second World War. Premiered on PBS tonight. Wonder how long it will take to get the DVD over here.
Daily Archives: September 23, 2007
Dash it!
Hmmm… First it was the apostrophe. Now it’s the hyphen that is under threat…
The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has knocked the hyphens out of 16,000 words, many of them two-word compound nouns. Fig-leaf is now fig leaf, pot-belly is now pot belly, pigeon-hole has finally achieved one word status as pigeonhole and leap-frog is feeling whole again as leapfrog…
Thanks to James Miller, who notices these things.
Ad Blocking and the future
This morning’s Observer column…
I have seen the future, and it’s scary. Well, scary for some, anyway. I installed Adblock Plus from adblockplus.org. This is a plug-in – ie, a small program that adds some specified capability to an internet browser. Its purpose is to strip out all the ads that today litter many web pages. I installed the Firefox version and, believe me, it does what it says on the tin…
Stephen Fry ‘s blog
I heard that Jeeves, er Stephen Fry, had a blog and tried to reach it the other day, only to find that its hosting server had been blown over by the demand. I forgot to go back until I read Martin Weller’s comments on it.
So I tried again and was transfixed by the first post, which is a startlingly erudite essay on a syndrome familiar to all geeks — the tendency to believe that sometime, somewhere someone will invent the Gadget that will help us sort out our lives. Stephen Fry is rich enough to buy anything the moment it appears on the market, and by God he has.
“I have”, he writes,
“over the past twenty years been passionately addicted to all manner of digital devices, Mac-friendly or not; I have gorged myself on electronic gismos, computer accessories, toys, gadgets and what-have-yous of all descriptions, but most especially what are now known as SmartPhones. PDAs, Wireless PIMs, call them what you will. My motto is:
I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought.”
He’s VERY knowledgeable about this stuff. In fact he reminds me of Douglas Adams, who was as excited about the Macintosh as I was when it appeared. I remember once visiting him in his house in — I think — Islington and being overcome with envy after being taken round a lovely airy attic room stuffed full of Apple gear. Stephen Fry’s place in Norfolk must be much the same.