confused of calcutta

[Note: This post is a follow-up to my two previous posts on the subject over the last day or so].
I can hear the doubters and scorners now. “We don’t need another tool”. “Why don’t you concentrate on new business models instead of all this tripe?” “I have enough information already”.
So why am I intrigued by [...]

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One of the great advantages of the web is the way it provides ubiquity of access to long-tail information.
Take cricket for example. I am spending Christmas and New Year in New York with my family; on Boxing Day something momentous (well momentous for me anyway) is scheduled to happen, the start of a Test series [...]

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Don’t worry, I haven’t suddenly gone senile. Nor have I decided to endorse traditional shoplifting.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly like shopping. [Except at bookstores, particularly when they're full of second-hand and musty books just waiting to be discovered.] For me the web was a dream come true, allowing me to get [...]

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At first I had no idea what was happening; suddenly, a raft of messages with the letters PEA (in capital letters, as shown) started appearing across my Twitterspace. Laura Athavale Fitton, who’s usually clued up on these things, filled me in on what was happening. [Thanks, Laura].
Short version: Susan Reynolds, “author, painter, designer and Relationship [...]

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It’s been one of those truly lazy days, so I think I’ll start seriously sideways.
Twitter. Hmmm. The first time that I can remember coming across the word “twitter” was when I was reading Wordsworth as a boy. [Yes, I know, I have been Confused a looong time]. Here’s the first stanza of the poem [...]

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What is the first thing that comes into your mind when you come across the word “platform”?
For me, there is only one answer: Howrah Station in Calcutta. Where I first learnt the joy of “platform tickets”, the practice of paying to see your family and friends off somewhere, or that of paying to welcome [...]

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As a child I used to devour statements along the lines of “now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall“. Whenever I was presented with information of sufficient abstraction or scale, I tried to transpose the context or scale in order to help my comprehension. I would look out for [...]

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(Continued from my post yesterday, where I was listing the books I have stashed away to read during the Christmas break, giving reasons where appropriate or relevant).
8. Halting State: Charles Stross. Recommended to me by Kevin Marks as we wandered around Borders on Union Square with Chris Messina, before having dinner at Asia de Cuba [...]

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Yesterday, while working on a reference for a particular post, it came to my attention that O’Reilly have “opensourced” all the back issues of Release 1.0.
To me this is fantastic news. On a cursory glance, every issue from 1983 to 2006 appears to be available for digital download, free of charge. I had been a [...]

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I love this time of year, as everything winds down and I get the chance to spend some real contiguous time with family and close friends. I’ve been very privileged: for many years, we’ve tended to share our vacations with a couple of other families, and the children have all grown up together as a [...]

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