ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

So the prankster who spent all of his life winding other people up has now passed on. I was never that much of a fan to be honest, but can’t help but notice that twenty years ago, whenever the TV news was ready to announce that “somebody famous has died”, that for the most part […]

Read: Beadle is no longer about »

I’m a regular reader of the Sophos Labs’ Blog where I get to be kept informed about latest virus threats, email chain letters and the like (this last through regular reviewing of Sophos Labs’ Most Recent and Prevalent Hoaxes).
And two things struck me today.
Firstly, that someone has written a trojan (for the non-techies, a […]

Read: From Sophos To Spam »

I’ve been contemplating what is going to happen in 2008, and assuming that my plans for world domination from a secret nuclear hollowed-out volcanic Pacific base continue to be thwarted (partly owing to the fact that I don’t as yet have a secret nuclear hollowed-out volcanic Pacific base), I thought instead I’d give a run-down […]

Read: 2008: Year of the Browser »

Just imagine a purely hypothetical scenario where some of your colleagues are returning to work after their first game in a new five-a-side football league for employees of your organisation. Innocently, you ask how they got on, only to be met with rather flinty looks and the information that they had managed to lose by […]

Read: And I thought Newcastle were bad… »

Bogota museum celebrates lazinessBBC News
I was going to go, but in the end I couldn’t be bothered…

Read: It had to be said… »

Jeremy Clarkson published details of his bank account, sort code, and even told people how to find his address. He did this to prove that the loss of 25 million HMRC Child Benefit data records was a “fuss about nothing”.
All you’ll be able to do with them is put money into my account. Not take […]

Read: Clarkson = knacker »

We’ve got two cats. A very big ginger one called Einstein — who is good at sleeping, eating, sleeping, disappearing for a couple of days at a time, sleeping and eviscerating small animals, and a big grey one called Darwin — who is good at purring extremely loudly (I’m not joking - sometimes you can […]

Read: Cardboard Cats »

And I don’t mean warm water, I mean water at what must presumably be around freezing point.
To explain what I mean, consider the following scenario. There is a sudden snowstorm, lasting about half an hour. If the ground was previously wet (e.g. it had been raining earlier), the snow will melt. If not, the snow […]

Read: Why does water melt snow? »

aka “Taxi for Allardyce?”
I’ve watched Newcastle play a lot of crap football over the years. In fact, mostly, I’ve watched Newcastle play crap football — badly — over the years, with a couple of exceptions during the Keegan and Robson eras, so why should I expect any better?
Firstly, the fact that the team hasn’t historically […]

Read: The Balding Sword Of Damocles »

Many people I know — generally a bunch of relatively well educated and IT literate people look down somewhat on “social networking applications” such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and all that sort of stuff. The Blognescenti would rather carefully craft their own posts through some blogging engine (ideally not blogger) and serve them up to […]

Read: Facebook vs Web Snobbery »