Dave

Dave

Two new books

I had a look round the Kingo branch of ‘The Works’ (which the carrier bag claims has the website www.theworks.gb.com) today. They seem to stock mainly remaindered stuff, but I got an Ian Rankine three novel omnibus for £4.99 and…

Norfolk Scrutiny Conference

The report I wrote about the Norfolk Scrutiny Conference last week can be found on the Centre for Public Scrutiny website here. Next stop for it will be the Local Government Chronicle and the Scrutiny Champions’ Bullettin. How exciting!

Some not-very-recent reading

Read these yonks ago, but never got round to posting anything on them… A Brief History of the Future – John Naughton This is an excellent study of the origins of the internet, by academic and journalist John Naughton, whose…

Google plans?

Great article in PC Plus this month about Google’s plans to take over the world, kinda. There has been much speculation across the net about the fact that Google have headhunted a couple of Microsoft staff, been very cozy with…

Bloglines

Just come across Bloglines for the first time. It’s basically an RSS feed reader, but which operates within a browser window, so you can pick stuff up from anywhere. This article from the Guardian’s Online section might help explain more…

The US Election

Ohmygod. Another 4 years of George W. Bush as the most powerful man in the world. Well, the second maybe, after Bill Gates. Anyway. Even as a conservative (small ‘c’! small ‘c’!) kind of guy, Bush fills me with loathing.…

Google – Good or evil?

I have always been a fan of Google – and that’s not just the websearch. I use their email system, their mailing list groups, and of course Blogger, which is now owned by Google. I’d never given much thought to…

The joys of PHP

It is a wonderful thing when something you think might be really complicated turns out to be really simple. On www.davebriggs.net, I have three columns. The left one holds links common to all pages, including the internal site navigation; the…

Developments

Plenty has happened since I last posted. I have had a total re-think of how I am going to ‘do’ davebriggs.net. Instead of going for a graphics-heavy Dreamweaver approach, I’m going to do it in Linux, more or less hand…

More reading…

I have abandoned ‘Consider Phlebas’ with a third of the way to go. At the end of the day, I don’t like SF enough to read nearly 600 pages of the stuff. So, fiction-wise I am reading ‘Lolita’ now, which…

My site / Firefox / Web design

Work is continuing on davebriggs.net – though it is going to take a while to complete as I seem to have a lot on at the moment. Still, the front page is nearing completion, the side bar of my frequently…

Consider Phlebas

This is still going well, and I am hooked into the action scenes. Banks does write well, especially in his early books. Mind you, this is going to have stiff competition as I am going to treat myself to a…

New Site

www.davebriggs.net has been registered and a basic template put in place. Not sure about the colours yet, they might be a bit too dark. I did loads of work on the plan last night so hopefully tonight I will be…

Web plans

My grip on the URL whelp.net is shortly to be ended, and rather than hang onto it I have decided to let it go. It was always my intention that whelp would act as a site for me to do…

Internet hell

I am starting to suffer big time from cacky internet connections. For some reason Gmail is running appallingly slowly, and it hasn’t been possible to check my emails all day. It is only a beta, I guess, and of course…

Current Reading

I am currently reading Consider Phlebas, by Iain ‘M’ Banks. It is the first Science Fiction novel I have read since I was a kid, and I have to say it took quite a long time to get into. The…

Brian Clough 1935 – 2004

Sadly, Brian Clough died yesterday. As a Nottingham Forest fan, he obviously meant a great deal to me from a football perspective, simply for what he achieved with the club. It would appear that 30 years after he first took…