Thanks to James Miller (who is as fastidious about apostrophes as I am) for spotting it and forwarding the link.
Kelly’s back!
.. 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.
Ping-pong’s coming home
If ever you doubted that Boris Johnson was a figment of P.G. Wodehouse’s imagination, then see here.
On this day…
… in 1944, Paris was liberated from German occupation.
Through a glass, brightly
A reflection in a bedroom mirror.
The pool
It’s easy to see why the young David Hockney was fascinated by pools.
Apple’s ‘Kill Switch’
Useful Economist.com piece about “the struggle to balance openness and control”.
“I AM RICH” is an iPhone application that made a brief debut on Apple’s software store this month. It cost $999.99 and did nothing more than put a glowing ruby on the iPhone’s screen. Seeing it as cynical rather than practical, Apple yanked it (after eight people bought it).
Apple has fought with developers and killed applications before. Indeed Apple’s boss, Steve Jobs, acknowledged that the iPhone has a “kill switch” that lets the company remotely remove software from people’s handsets. “Hopefully we never have to pull that lever, but we would be irresponsible not to have a lever like that to pull,” he told the Wall Street Journal.
Apple’s corporate culture is famously closed. By closely overseeing their hardware and software, the company believes it can better ensure that everything works properly. Opening their systems to independent developers entails a loss of control that they find hard to handle. Other companies can sympathise…
The article also mentions Jonathan Zittrain’s book.
Urban living
Moules ‘n Boules
Every Friday evening in the Summer, villagers and guests in Cotignac gather to eat moules marinières and (afterwards) play Boules. The latter is not for the faint-hearted. Think of it as the French equivalent to croquet: banal in appearance and vicious in reality.