Phorm have set up a website to battle those people who it perceives as people who are against it, which it has begun by smearing these people as ‘privacy pirates’. Over the last year Phorm has been the subject of a smear campaign orchestrated by a small but dedicated band of online “privacy pirates” who [...]

I was ambling through my site statistics, which I keep a vague eye on, and thought I’d share with you some of the things people are searching for before they end up at ThePickards… +absinthe pissing +blood — I rather feel that someone who has been drinking so much absinthe that they are now pissing [...]

Yes, it’s that time of year again, when the Goldfish turns BADD. If that makes absolutely no sense at all, then I’ll explain. The Goldfish is a fellow blogger who organises Blogging Against Disablism Day. The premise is quite simple: basically, you blog about disability, disability issues, disability politics, or something or other related to [...]

Recap: Phorm is a company which seeks to offer targeted advertising by monitoring browser behaviour — they scan websites to see what they contain and they monitor users’ browsing behaviour to see which sites they visit, in order to serve up what they believe will be more effective advertising. Some people have privacy concerns over [...]

Well, I’ve been here before and showed the various site designs for ThePickards back in February 2007. However, as that was more than two years ago, and I’ve launched a new design since, I think I’m allowed to be self-indulgent once again. So, to begin, ThePickards has existed as a domain since around March 2005, [...]

One of the odd things about writing a blog is that I express my personal views and opinions to the world, generally with humour, sarcasm and stuff added into the mix. Anyone who reads my blog regularly will therefore — and quite reasonably, I think — think that they know me. They know what I [...]

Some of the more observant of you who actually visit this site (as opposed to say, those of you reading via a feed reader) may have noticed that I have changed the look of the site. That’s not to dismiss Mike Cherim’s Seabeast theme in any way, shape or form. It’s a lovely theme and [...]

The G20 meeting — the annual meeting of finance ministers and bank governors of the world’s top 20 economies — is to be held in London this year, more specifically in April. It will no doubt be attended by the standard media types, the standard politicos and so on. Precisely the sort of thing I [...]

Just a few comments on the all-round goodness of WordPress 2.7.1. What didn’t I like about wordpress? I didn’t like the PITA that it was to upgrade wordpress when a new version came out. Previously you had to back everything up, download and extract the new files, overwrite your existing files in a particular manner, [...]

Over at ConservativeHome, there is a post entitled should councillors twitter?, which mentions the Cllr Tweeps website which keeps a list of all of the twittering councillors. The post basically describes twittering as micro-blogging, the poster admits to being on twitter but using it mostly to follow what other people say, rather than taking much [...]