Yasmina spent all today rearranging the stuff in the office at home. Interior decoration is a passion and an art, but it’s also a lot of hard work . The simple idea of dropping the shelf down almost to the same level as the desk magically creates a nice huge L shaped desk. Stuff on [...]

Recent reminiscence with friends on Facebook led me to dig out an old CD. The music on it is older than the CD itself, which was burned after copying tapes over from old recording sessions. The story of this song began some time in 94-95 in Chalon sur Saône, where I lived for a year [...]

The French need some kind of pension reform. The current French state budget is seriously in the red at roughly 7.5% of GDP last year, well outside European norms. France have a policy of statutory retirement from the age of 60, for men and women. This is already more advantageous than the UK where it [...]

Why didn’t I think of it before? The Joke Database has been here for a while, in fact it predates this blog by a few years. But now I have a page which you can just keep refreshing to read random jokes which will be selected until you’ve read them all – though duplicates are [...]

With more and more people browsing on iPhones, BlackBerrys and so on, I thought it would be useful to work out how WordPress can render blog posts for mobile screens. I’ve been annoyed on my recent Samsung Corby Pro phone at just how hard it is to read the web properly. A lot of fixed [...]

The world of web fonts has traditionally been limited to Times, Arial and Courier (and various variants thereof like Helvetica which of course came first). Other fonts can be used reasonably safely if you’re careful, or not too picky about certain target platforms displaying exactly the same font. CSS has a rule (@font-face) which allows [...]

I took a picture of a bookshop that I pass on my route to the offices my company has recently moved to in La Défense. I liked the fact that it was a weathered, old shop sign. No doubt it hasn’t been open for years, though it may be caught in a time warp and [...]

As a Brit, I always had something of a thing about the American traffic signs we’d see on TV series imported massively to our screens. In England (and elsewhere in Europe) there is a green man and a red man, the green man active and the red man standing still. It’s perhaps more universal and [...]