The long-awaited paperless office recedes ever more quickly, at least in most official offices. Here in the home office, however, my printer has sat idle for more than a year, probably because printing at the office has been available. But last week, I needed to print. Usual problems. Ink past its sell-by date. ¹ All of them. Then discover I don’t have a full set of replacements. Order them, and wait for them to arrive. Pull out the old ones, stick in the new ones, throw the old ones in the bin. Discover that the new cartridges are of the wrong region.

Sometimes the Internet turns me into a spoiled child, drumming my heels on the floor and holding my breathe till I turn blue in the face, and all because it won’t give me what I want. And of course it is all the Internet’s fault. If it hadn’t indulged so many of my whims for so long, I wouldn’t find...

Back before there were blogs (honest; I promise this is true) my little company website had a kind of diary of newsletters, updated roughly once a month, and delivered by hard-coded HTML tables. It looked, I fancied, a little like an index card file ¹ with little tabs at the top for the various d...

Technology has not been kind to me today. But people have been great. So I’m going to try and focus on that, and ignore the awfulness that is my printer and the rubbish “service” that my other blogging platform and server are delivering. If I could, I’d migrate that one to Octopress too, as I hav...

The Rome Digest is plugging a translation of Popes, Peasants, and Shepherds: Recipes and Lore from Rome and Lazio. Somewhat sensitised by my earlier efforts to dispel the idea that the herb mentuccia is pennyroyal, I looked inside. Imagine my disappointment when I discovered that the error con...