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...

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short order cook
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...

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A graph showing a steep decline in visits to this website

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...

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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...

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Kiva is probably the most succesful thing in existence to allow ordinary folks to lend money to other ordinary folks. I've been a member since early 2008, and I think it's a really good idea, which is not to say that Kiva is a particularly good implementation. In fact, we've had our differences. But I keep "reinvesting". I suspect in part because it is, or was, the only game in town. That and inertia. But maybe the time has come to overcome my inertia.

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