Dave

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…

Interesting page on the use of blogs by MPs: A lot of the people that you reach via a weblog will post comments on a weblog of their own and link to you in the process. Some weblogs have an…

The Campaign to save Wells Hospital has a website here.

This looks like it would be an interesting read, and a very good review. I’ve emphasised one important part for me. Do the right thing For once, here is some advice that Conservatives might find useful. David Cameron on Kieron…

The Rotters’ Club is being screened on BBC 2 on Wednesday at 9.00pm. It has been adapted by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais and stars the godawful Sarah Lancashire. Here’s the interview with Coe from the BBC site: What…

I registered for Yahoo! for the first time today, largely for the Calendar function which is attached to the E-Mail page. It came out very well in a recent PCPlus review of Calendaring software. The E-Mail addy I got was…

On this post I wondered what I should call this blog. I’ve stuck with The Closed Circle – from the recent Jonathan Coe novel – which was the name of my previous Blogger effort. It is, at least, suitably vague.…

From Saturday’s Guardian: When he died in 2001, WG Sebald left behind a remarkable, unpublished account of his travels in Corsica. In a vivid extract from this final unfinished work, he explores the island’s ancient forests – and recalls a…