Words Dept.: category

The blog has now been fixed. It was offline for a couple of days after someone hacked it and redirected it to something Google didn’t like, which resulted in many seemingly intractable problems. Mercifully, someone pointed me in the direction of Manchester-based Wordpress guru Simon Wheatley, who identified and fixed the problem in about ten [...]

I thought it was about time I mentioned that I’m quitting my job and going back to university. I will be finishing at Estates Gazette (which, in case you didn’t know, is where I work) on August 14 and will, from September, be studying for an MA in television documentary production at the University of [...]

I’m becoming moderately obsessed by vintage Penguin paperbacks, mainly for the covers. Like these:

Penguin Crime – a set on Flickr
Penguin Books – a set on Flickr
Penguin & Pelican Collection – a set on Flickr

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The Guardian reckons that people aren’t blogging so much any more, and much prefer the shorter, sweeter option of tweeting and updating their status on Facebook. A lot of it is based on anecdotal evidence but there’s some science behind it, according to Charles Arthur.
NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one [...]

You might have noticed I haven’t written much here recently. That’s because I can’t think of anything interesting to write about. Each post takes quite a lot of time to write and research and, after two years of doing that, in the long run I’m not sure what the point is. Google ranking? Lots of [...]

I went out to John Lewis this lunchtime and bought a new telly. I know there’s a recession on and everything but having spent the New Year staring at the huge new flatscreen TVs owned by family members, I suddenly realised my beloved 26-inch JVC (bought seven years ago for £375 in cash from a shop [...]

As I’ve nothing better to do and 2008 has now definitely finished, I thought I’d provide you with my list of my favourite things from the year just gone. Happy New Year, by the way.
Film
I thought Wall-E was surprisingly deep for a kids film and was also technically flawless. But There Will Be Blood blew [...]

I’m now back from my holidays in Brazil. A great time was had, although I appear inadvertently to have gained half a stone in weight. We did all the tourist stuff (Sugarloaf Mountain, Christ the Redeemer, Maracana stadium, museums, boats, waterfalls etc.) and I learned lots of stuff, such as:

Brazilians like to eat a lot of [...]

I’m going on holiday for the next three weeks and will not be posting anything on Words Dept. until after Christmas and possibly until the New Year. I may, if I can be bothered, post some Twitter updates while in Brazil, which will appear in the little panel on the left.
Until then I wish you, [...]

My two regular readers will be aware of my holiday problems. In short, we (that’s me and my girlfriend) booked a three-week holiday in Thailand several months ago, which we have had to cancel as a result of the closure of Bangkok airport. While the airport has started to handle flights again, the huge backlog [...]