Tools are not everyones cup of tea. You either like taking things apart and building things or you don’t. I’ve spent hours looking at tool catalogues. “Oh there’s a tool for that,” you think to yourself. Usually too late after struggling with the Haynes Book Of Lies and giving up. Countless hours spent with the Capri manual, endless cups of tea in a freezing garage. Ah, those were the days before t’Internet. Now we can browse tools we can’t afford online. There’s even tool blogs. There are a few DIY stores in Shanghai,…

In 1983 Steve Jobs in a characteristically brilliant speech introduced the Mac as the solution to IBM’s dominance in the PC industry. “IBM wants it all.” He says a few times. A clip of the speech is available on YouTube (embedded below):

Consider the following activities:

When developing web sites, one of the things we often have to do is put fixes in the code to work around bugs in Internet Explorer. This is getting better with IE8 and IE7 but IE6 still has a large market share and it’s the worst damn browser in the world for standards compliance®. Typically we make a lovely site, then test in IE6, bang head on desk, fix, test and repeat. Oh the joy. But all of this is nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to the travesty that is the HTML rendering in Outlook 2007.…

Bill Drummond‘s memoir “45” is a great read (Amazon UK, US). It’s about his time with the KLF, producing, music and art and reaching the age of 45. He’s one of the more interesting artists around today. When he was with the KLF they wrote The Manual “HOW TO HAVE A NUMBER ONE – THE EASY WAY”. It has been out of print for a long time but is now available for free on the web.

Hands up if you like receiving junk mail… Let’s count. Oh, no one. Why is it that when a product or service is purchased from a company, the supplying company assumes that this means it is OK for them to send you junk mail? And not only that, it gets better, they also assume it is OK for them to invite 3rd parties to send you junk as well?