Wordle

Wordle is a little application that produces a word cloud of a section of text. This is how my PhD abstract is rendered...very interesting...

Friendfeed

Just a quick note to say that I have collated all my social networking thingies together into one feed using Friendfeed. My Friendfeed contains this blog, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and one or two other applications. So, if you're interested, feel free to follow me...

Doing my bit for Char-i-dee, mate!

Here is a photo of my new bike I have purchased with the intention of ridding myself of the rather substantial waistline I have acquired over the past couple of years.



I purchased it from the Cycle Stop charity, which offers employment opportunities to long-term unemployed people.

Yes, my desk (in the background) is a mess.

The perils of prototypes

This made me chuckle.

Well and truly poked

Well, I've finally done it. A little later than everyone else, but never mind! Yes, in addition to (re-)starting a blog, I joined everyone else on Facebook almost to the day that it turned 5 years old.

I had my reasons for not joining before - like many, I felt that I was already in touch with the people I wanted to be in touch with. I didn't, however, subscribe to some of the weird and wonderful conspiracy theories that others have come up with for not joining.

I've now caught the bug, and have just lost almost an entire weekend catching up with old school and workmates, most of whom are just as I remember albeit, like me, having wrinkled slightly over the past fifteen years! Strangely, very few of the mates I met at university appear to be on, I've no idea why. It sounds rather quaint now, but when I graduated from my undergraduate degree back in 1998, none of us had mobile phones or e-mail addresses - I remember writing and posting loads of letters to fellow ex-students about my first job!

Twa pehs...

As a native Dundonian, one of my current favourite blogs is Retro Dundee which, rather than concentrate on photos showing how the city looked 50 - 100 years ago (as many historical sites tend to do), this concentrates on Dundee from the 1960s to the 1980s, the latter of which was the decade in which I grew up. It really is incredible how much Dundee has changed in such a relatively short period of time - the Overgate Centre for one!