I’ve been influenced by a number of piano players. My paternal grandfather and my father both played a lot when I was a child - my father still does. A few of the schoolteachers I admired played a mean piano. Billy Joel, Elton John and Stevie Wonder are musicians I appreciate who sing and accompany […]

Nobody is going to buy a video recorder based on the VHS format this Christmas. Everything will be MiniDV (camcorders), DVD and hard drive based.
In the US, the VHS format was recently declared dead. That’s perhaps a bit premature, it’s rather more of a retirement. VHS tapes will still be active for some years to […]

It’s our “wooden” or “silverware” anniversary today. It feels like it was just yesterday.
Yasmina will get her flowers later in the morning (I hope she won’t read this first). Soon after the wedding I put up our wedding site which is still available. If you’re interested in what it takes for an Englishman resident in […]

In 1993, a young first year undergraduate student walked down the corridor of the French department into a small room with a single computer terminal. It was a UNIX terminal linked to the campus network, and a login prompt blinked on the screen. Next to it, a note saying “login with guest as a username […]

Or getting a WiFi connection.
When I was still at junior school at less than 10 years old, we got our first home computer. It was a ZX81. With 1Kb of RAM, adverts at the time of initial launch in 1981 said it could run a nuclear power station. Since installing a WiFi card in […]

My first full-time permanent job was based in Covent Garden, in the heart of London. I was able to leave the office at lunchtime and walk around the square near the opera house, watching the street mimes and eating my sandwiches. I worked in advertising, and it was a small office. Advertising salesmen have a […]

Back in May 2004, I took a drive up to the Netherlands with Yasmina to visit friends in Utrecht. A big advantage of living in France is that access to most of Europe is overland and most of western Europe is easily accessible. We drove up to Amsterdam one day and toured around the capital […]

I was reading a post some time ago over at Jenerally Speaking and I remembered the first time I heard the story of an old schoolfriend’s tragic death.
That was back in 2003. I never found out the reason why, and the press and the school where he was working as a teacher were discrete […]