I’ve got kids – they’re 7 and 10 – and they’re at that age when they are just starting to spend a bit more time online. The last few months have seemed like a good time to look around and see what other parents are doing, and make some decisions about how best to approach this. The first observation I have … Read more
My good friend @bealers just posted “Make life a side project” and it got me thinking. My first reaction was something along the lines of shutup-you-crazy-person but now I’m veering slightly more to ah-i-think-i-kinda-see-what-you-mean. But not much. The main thing that I reacted to was this notion of “sideness”. Putting life (yeah, we need to talk about what … Read more
For a long, long time, The Bone People was my favourite work of fiction. I haven’t been back to it for a long while, but found a battered copy again recently and have started it again. As I started it I was wondering whether it’d fit into that “I enjoyed it when I was a teenager but … Read more
In fact, as the ever-spot-on Oatmeal says: Printers were sent from Hell to make us miserable. I own a printer. I’d rather not, and I run a mostly paper-free life, but there are still occasions when I need to print stuff – end of year stuff, the odd invoice, a letter or two. Every single … Read more
[Edit: I was interviewed by The Freelance Web about these tips – hear me talk about this stuff over here] So we’re just signing off our accounts for the second year of Thirty8 Digital (crazy business: two years? Where the hell did that go?). Things have been brilliant so far ~clutches hard at large piece … Read more
I’m 17,000 or so words into my first novel and I realise I’ve been suffering a bit of writers’ block. It’s probably been a couple of months if I think about it realistically. I now see I’ve been in avoidance mode, ostriching the fact that I couldn’t get past this particular issue, and it’s been bugging … Read more
Lots of people have heard of Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion Anyone who has worked for any length of time knows this to be true. Looking at it from another angle, you’re never quite finished – yes, you finish projects, empty inboxes, get through to-do lists but there’s … Read more
So the whole NSA thing kicked off and the entire internet is full of commentary, as you’d expect. As with any new piece of news, HUGE REVELATION is followed by some detailed picking apart. (Right now, the biggie seems to be the “what does ‘direct access’ to servers actually mean?” – next up, “Why did … Read more