August

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August, the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien once wrote, is a wicked month. For me, it’s always a difficult one. Six years ago today my beloved Sue died, and these days around her anniversary are freighted with memories and an aching sense of loss. This is one of my favourite photographs of her. It was taken in an hotel in Paris in March 1990, on our first trip away together. She said later, before she died, that this had been one of the happiest moments of her life.

One gets over the death of a loved one in the sense that people ‘get over’ the loss of a limb. But, as C.S. Lewis memorably observed in A Grief Observed, “you’ll never be a biped again”.

Right, er wrong angles

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Stephen Heppell was showing me some iPhone Apps this morning and happened to have a Clinometer on his phone. According to Wikipedia, this is “an instrument for measuring angles of slope (or tilt), elevation or inclination of an object with respect to gravity.” So we decided to check the alignment of the support columns in the Berrill Cafe, with this result. Worrying? Or maybe it just needed calibrating.

iPlayer to offer series stacking

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Yep. That’s what it says here

The BBC is to offer viewers the chance to catch up on every episode of some of their favourite series as “series stacking” is introduced to BBC iPlayer and programme sites from 13 September 2008.

Viewers will be able to enjoy any episode, after it has first been broadcast, for the duration of the entire series…

Hurry! Get your personal data on eBay now!

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From BBC NEWS…

A computer containing a million bank customers’ personal data has reportedly been sold on an internet auction site.

The Daily Mail says an ex-worker for archiving firm Graphic Data sold it for £35 on eBay without removing sensitive information from the hard drive.

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and its subsidiary, Natwest, have confirmed their customers’ details were involved.

RBS said Graphic Data had told it the PC had apparently been “inappropriately sold on via a third party”.

It said historical information relating to credit card applications for their bank and others had been on the machine.

The information is said to include account details and in some cases customers’ signatures, mobile phone numbers and mothers’ maiden names.

It is thought the problem came to light when Andrew Chapman, an IT manager from Oxford, bought the computer, noticed and raised the alarm…

Blogging the Convention

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Dave Winer’s there, and he’s not impressed…

Here’s a quick picture of the blogger’s space at the DNC, and after working here for a few minutes I ache to get back on the road. This is a far cry of the space we had at the DNC in 2004. We were in the nosebleed seats, but we had a constant view of the whole scene, the stage, the floor, and could walk around among the other press.

This year we’re on the Administrative level, in a concrete bunker, flourescent lighting, and a view of nothing but TV screens. I’d do better in my office at home. I’m going to have to figure out a way to escape these confines or I’m getting on I-70 tomorrow morning and heading west.

According to the DNC Schedule, there are 15,000 reporters at the event. If that isn’t overkill, then I don’t know what is.

Kelly’s back!

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.. to his column in the Washington Post. First column is a meditation on his time in Oxford (where he was a Reuters Fellow and where, apparently, “all the stores close at 5:30 p.m. and you can’t get a jar of low-fat chunky-style peanut butter to save your life”).

Ah, yes: England. There are worse places to spend a year, though to hear my Stilton-hating teenage daughters tell it, not many. I think in time, after years of quiet reflection and expensive therapy, they will come to appreciate having been rudely plucked from their schools, their friends and their familiar surroundings and deposited in a country where it rains all the time. I did it for them, you see, to broaden their horizons…

Wonder what will happen to his Voxford blog. Apparently he will now be required to blog for the Post. He’s soliciting suggestions for a name for the blog.