my love affair with GSM hardware

September 25, 2011 in GSM

Even more trivial than the last one! Some mobiles I loved. Samsung ??? This was the first of them all in 2000-2001. A weird reverse-clamshell design that very rapidly developed dodgy contacts in the joint. But eh, I had a real, lasting relationship and I could send her texts from the union! Siemens c55i Neat [...]

it wasn’t Thursday, and still isn’t, so…

September 25, 2011 in music

So there was this thread with music. It went like this, and then like this, and this, then this, this, this, and finally this. Also a fair amount of stuff about shwi-vet Erik Lund and the most popular man in Britain. But mostly music. Meanwhile, someone defined a last.fm tag for “oh yeah this is [...]

…like it’s 2008!

September 25, 2011 in aviation, Viktor

Having fixed the Viktorfeed, I notice with some pleasure that the activity levels continue to decline. It looks like the last gang in town is “Reliable Unique Services”, ICAO:RLB, an alias for Rus Aviation, operating five Il-76, a couple of which served with various version of Click Airways.

Sometimes history is written by the losers

September 25, 2011 in economics, politics

A good post on the notion of “hard Keynesianism” raises some important questions about the recent past of the Labour Party. Hard Keynesianism is the doctrine that, if the government should run a deficit when there’s a negative output-gap and therefore unemployment, it should run a surplus when there’s a positive output-gap and therefore inflation. [...]

is there a Corby trouser press, miniature kettle, and teabags in Room 101?

September 25, 2011 in Met, politics, press, surveillance

A couple of News of the World things. Just before the Met dropped their effort to bully the Grauniad with the Official Secrets Act, they ran this story about the disastrous attempt to use a supergrass in the Daniel Morgan case. Is this a coincidence? And this quote reads like a Ballardised version of Le [...]

he’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy

September 25, 2011 in politics

Did anyone else read this and this and get the horrible feeling that Maurice Glasman is over-promoted, and likely to crash in some really embarrassing way, even more than he has done already? It reminds me a bit of Tony Blair at his elevenarife worst or one of those people who are caught pretending to [...]

is this normal?

September 25, 2011 in press

It seems that the Islington Gazette‘s usually very funny problem page isn’t coming back from their recent re-design. Perhaps I should write and tell them I have a problem.

a restraining influence on the rate of retrogression

September 25, 2011 in lobbying

So, I had a drink with the most popular man in England on Thursday. Something which came up in the conversation was that apparently, some UK and European central institutions’ press offices are handing out “tokens” to lobbyists. Tokens? This meant nothing to me, but apparently what was meant is that they are counting meetings [...]

the worst thing that can happen is actually pretty bad

September 18, 2011 in politics

This is wrong, not just for the methodological reasons given. The problem is more serious. What’s so great about optimal decisions after all? Absolute optimality has costs. Specifically, even if consultation doesn’t help you achieve an optimal decision, it may help avoid a decision that is dramatically pessimal for some particular person or group of [...]

tagged!

September 18, 2011 in tags

Term-extraction algorithms have the disturbing property of making things sound more interesting than they really are. These are WordPress’s suggested tags for the last blog post: community organisers, multilateral agreement on investment, plymouth argyle, james purnell, crash investigation Way more fun than just another future of the Labour Party post. This is of course inherent [...]