Neil Hopcroft

One of the great things about short term contracts is that when you are asked your opinion you are prepared to give it – theres nothing more dangerous than a man who has nothing to lose. Describing an entire team as ‘haphazard’ would, under most other circumstances, be somewhat career limiting. Also, something for the […]

Firstly, Happy Birthday to the mobile phone industry – “The first call was made [on 1/1/1985] from St Katherine’s dock to Vodafone’s head office in Newbury which at the time was over a curry house.” “Thieves take brain remote control” “Numerous people have been questioned by the FBI about this laser beam activity, but no […]

I’m just watching the video for “The Grudge” by Mortiis – its a good deal sillier than I’d really expected from him. Is the rest of his stuff this daft? We’ve made it to 2005, it was welcomed in with a healthy dose of the second most addictive thing to come out of South America […]

Snowman

This morning was spent mostly listening to New Model Army, apparently one of the favorite bands of one of my colleagues. I’d not had him marked as a cloggy somehow, but apparently he shared a house with some of them while he was studying in Bradford (or something). Not sure how this went down with […]

Combining: http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,66146,00.html http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2004/0705/web-finger-07-06-04.asp We get some interesting numbers… 47,000,000 fingerprint records of ‘undesirables’ held by FBI 118,000 visitors to the US 99.6% match accuracy for two finger test against a single print (I’m going to assume false positive and false negative rates are the same since the stats don’t actually show that) So, 4 people […]

“Noodling is an ancient fishing method in which the fisherman wiggles his or her hand underwater near a bed of fish in hopes that a catfish will bite or, even better, swallow his hand” (from jwz, again, perhaps of interest to edling who might need to know that noodling is currently illegal in Missouri…but probably […]

I’ve been pondering trying to consolidate my pension provision (I have about five little pensions, each representing something around two years of contributions, none of which are really worth anything on their own), so I’m trying to figure out what I should do…I’m tempted by the concept of SIPP, but I don’t think the pot […]

Its amazing what you can see if you’ve already decided what you’re looking at, isn’t it? I was accused, earlier this evening, of sneaking some items into the previous buyers shopping….as if I’d choose that non-name junk if I thought I wouldn’t have to pay for it? Pah! Sadly he’d failed to notice there was […]

“Always buy a cheap camera with a big traveler’s check at a drug store” she tells me. “That will be so obviously a tourist move they won’t even look twice. Take pictures, but not of anything that will identify where you are. Don’t even play around with that. A street sign in the background, the […]