Ian RentonBlog Archive — Page 9
These are some pretty old posts! I don't blog that much any more, but if they are of interest, feel free to browse. Alternatively, you can go back to the homepage to see some more recent stuff.
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By Distant Shores
We sit and eat lunch by the sea, our cars parked up on the sand, engines running, air-con on. In front of us, waves roll into the shore bearing an ocean’s worth of hydrocarbon flotsam. A nylon rope from a Malaysian yacht, perhaps; a Madagascan trawler’s fishing floats, or a...
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And So Into 2014
I could tell, as we headed back to our old haunts in our university town and the car stereo decided to play VNV Nation’s “Beloved”, that it was going to be a reminiscent sort of New Year. For the first time in many years, I spent at least part of...
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NaNoGenMo: A 50,000 Word Target I can Meet
One of the ways in which a number of my friends spend November is participating in National Novel Writing Month, or “NaNoWriMo”. This is its 15th year, in which some 300,000 amateur novelists signed up to write their hearts out over the course of 30 days. It’s ten years since...
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Whatever Happened to the Generic PC?
It doesn’t seem that long ago, perhaps only five or ten years, that you could buy or build your own computer and do whatever you liked with it. If you bought it, it would probably come with an operating system, but if you didn’t like it you could download another...
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Google for your Dinner
I run Google Analytics code on a number of my websites, as I like to know what’s popular—and maybe deserving of attention—compared to those sites and pages that languish unvisited. But while Analytics is handy for confirming the obvious and pointing out a few unexpectedly popular pages, it’s at its...
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Lost in Translation
This morning, a friend of mine linked to a great article on why “If you’re going to live in this country, learn to speak the language” is pretty insensitive. It struck a particular resonance in me, because aside from her emigration, my experience of languages over the last few years...
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The Last Straw for LinkedIn
If you’ve been paying attention to technology-related news recently, you may have noticed that social network LinkedIn has released a new app for iOS devices called “Intro”. It’s a handy tool for people who do a lot of work-related email on their iDevice, as it embeds information from LinkedIn into...
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Another Summer Gone
A young man of twenty-eight summers, I cling to that word “young” as long as I can, though already it is slipping away. As another summer departs, and with it another year, autumn permeates body and soul. A few short weeks ago, the sun shone and our town sweltered in...
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Sharing Isn't Caring
Like many angsty young adults, I spent the last few months of my time at University wondering what would become of the friendships I’d made there — which friends I’d keep in touch with; how often I’d see them. Having lived and worked with many of them, and shared each...
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Your System is Compromised
I’ve spent much of the last few months resolutely not commenting on the NSA spying scandal, Edward Snowden, PRISM and all the other revelations that have been published by the Guardian and the New York Times recently. While 99% of the population continue without knowing or caring what the implications...