Writing ... or Just Practicing?

Here in England, architects (the kind who design houses and office blocks) seem to have a pretty poor reputation. Other than the "stars" who win prizes for designing skyscrapers, or weird shopping centers that look like an armadillo that wandered into a chrome-plating factory, they seem to be universally reviled. Perhaps it’s the same in the US. I remember once hearing the quip "Don't tell my mother I'm an architect, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse". That sounds like a US-ism if you ask me. Read More...

(OK, need a good, hard-hitting, gritty opening sentence this week to get people interested. Here we go...). Last week I went shopping. (Hmmm... not quite the impact I wanted, but press on regardless). I wanted a new battery for my camera, so I popped into a local specialist. "Hi," I said breezily, "I need a battery for an Olympus 1010 Stylus camera". "OK," replied the obviously knowledgeable young man behind the counter, "just fill in this form". Read More...

At last I can document something that might, possibly, be of marginal use to those one or two readers who mistakenly stray into the quagmire of my unrelated weekly ramblings. For the last few months I've been fulfilling my new role as an out-of-sight-and-out-of-mind remote documentation engineer (that's a documentation engineer who's remote, not an engineer who writes remote documentation - though, having read some of my scribblings, you might dispute that assertion). Anyway, recently I was beamed up to the mother-ship to spend a couple of weeks onsite at Redmond. I suspect they just wanted to see if the weird English guy they accidently offered a job to actually does exist. Read More...

They probably won't invite me over to Redmond again. After telling me for weeks about the wonderful summer weather there, it rained for most of the two weeks I was on site. Not many people would suggest that I have a magnetic personality, but it sure looks like the English weather followed me across the pond. We even had hail one day (in the middle of August), followed by a small tornado. And I'd taken shorts and sun cream with me. But I suppose after it rained almost the whole time during my last two trips, I should expect it. Maybe I can earn a few dollars extra by selling people my travel plans so they can plan their holidays around my trips to Redmond. Read More...