A week of activism

I’m not normally a big activist, usually because I’m so busy trying to keep my eye on/organise everything that I don’t get much time to actually take much action as an individual. However, this weekend I managed to lobby my MP over amendments to the Climate Change Bill and all of my MEPs on standards […]

Dropping down to MPhil

For those people who don’t know already, I’ve decided to drop down from my PhD and just do an MPhil this year. I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and there are numerous reasons behind it—though mainly it’s a case of not wanting to do research full time (I enjoy it, but I’m not […]

Good old USA

It’s not often that I praise the United States of America, but one thing which I do like about them is their policy towards making data created by government agencies free of copyright (in most cases) and available for download over the Web. As a result, I can obtain a complete list of geographical names […]

Restaurants in London

Following on my previous post, I’m currently looking for restaurants (or other catering venues) near the centre of London (defined as ‘within walking/short tube distance of Euston’) which can offer a three course meal and wine for over ninety people on a weekday evening. I know there are some Londoners who read my blog, so […]

UKUUG Spring 2009

At the last conference call we had, I somehow managed to be volunteered for the task of running the UKUUG spring conference in 2009. We’re going to be in London this time (usually it’s the same city as the conference organiser, but we’ve used Manchester recently and haven’t had one in London for several years), […]

Richard Stallman talk

Last Thursday, in an event organised with Manchester Free Software and sponsored by the BCS and the IET, we had Richard Stallman give a talk on free software at the University of Manchester. Initially, we hadn’t expected many people to attend the talk, perhaps a hundred or so, and as a result a small room […]

OpenVPN at ManLUG

I gave my “Adventures with OpenVPN” talk at ManLUG today, after a re-jigging of the timetable and several rewrites of my slides in S5. I’d been meaning to give a talk at some point because we haven’t had many speakers recently and I felt it was about time that I chipped in having been a […]

Busy, so very busy

As usual, I’ve been incredibly busy in the last few weeks, mostly working on ideas for my PhD and helping the run the various organisations which I’m involved in. My research seems to be slowly coming together, I have a vague idea of a framework which it should fit into and I’m reasonably confident that […]