Over on the Boris blog, the exciting debate continues on the comments section. Someone calling themself ‘Monkey’ commented that: Howard has made several intelligent manouvres in the past few days. Appearing on Talk Sport (the UK’s most popular radio station,…

Not much fro me today – sorry. As if anyone is reading anyway! Have the ‘flu and it’s vile. Okay, probably not the ‘flu. But a very nasty virus. I am at the same time freezing and sweating, which isn’t…

Rosie Originally uploaded by theclosedcircle. Here’s a recent-ish picture of Rosie the rabbit. Okay, so it’s just an excuse to play with Flickr…

From The Register: Crooked Microsoft worker masterminded $7m racket Blimey!

Only at the FA could a DVD be produced of the greatest ever England players – and they neglect to pick a single black player. FA apologises for DVD ‘oversight’

Got paid today and so a pretty good haul was the order of the day in Waterstone’s: The Master – Colm Toibin The Wind-up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Marakami Love, Sex & Tragedy – Simon Goldhill The Remains of the…

According to the Boris Blog, Mr Johnson’s regular column has been dropped from today’s Torygraph in favour of a rather dull piece by Michael Howard trying to justify his dodgy immigration policy, reproduced here in all its swivel-eyed glory because…

The Guardian have en extract from Murakami’s latest book, Kafka on the Shore.

The first episode of The Rotters’ Club was on BBC2 last night and it was, as I suspected, a disappointment. ono No Komachi and amner discuss it on Palimpsest here – I’ll add my thoughts from here to there when…

Flickr is brilliant. A really great service, easy to use and full of features. It’s basically a place to store digital photos online. You upload the ones you want and Flickr automatically makes them available in a few different web…

Beach Huts at Wells Originally uploaded by theclosedcircle. Just testing posting pictures through Flickr. It seems to work pretty well!

Have been putting some more thought into my idea for a Scrutiny Best Practice booklet. Here’s a draft outline plan: Introduction Preparation, Participation, Partnership A Note on Structures Part One: Preparation Objectives and Outcomes Research Agendas and Reports The Meeting…

The Register reports that Microsoft are planning to stop providing updates to non-genuine versions of its Windows XP operating system as part of its anti-piracy campaign. I’m flagging this up not because I disagree – it seems quite reasonable, really…

As John Self rightly pointed out in an earlier comment, John Sutherland writes well for The Guardian on books, despite being an apparently controversial choice for Chair of the Booker panel this year. Here’s his article in today’s paper. There…

From the BBC News Site – I picked this up from the MSDN Student Flash blog (unfortunatley not as exciting as it sounds…) Blogs are increasingly being used by academics and students. Until a few months ago, the attention paid…

The Google Blog reveals that Google are now offering a video search: Soon there will be. Google Video is a new product that enables you to search an index of transcripts from recent TV programs. It’s just an early-stage beta…

The Oscar nominations are out – see here.

Picked up Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood in Ottaker’s for £1 (!) this lunchtime. I was tipped off by HoneyPotts on Palimpsest. The Guardian have a good profile of Murakami here. I’ll quote the whole thing, as it’s a good read…

Apologies for messing people around – if many people are out there reading this – but I have changed the URL of this blog to rather than having it in the /blog subdirectory. I have included an automatic forwarder…

I have finally finished work on the Scrutiny Handbook. I got my final draft copy back today from the Head of Department, and once I have amended things in line with his comments, we will be ready to go to…