I just picked up tickets to go see Eddi Reader in Southampton this Thursday, November 3rd. You may remember her as the heart of the band Fairground Attraction back in the 80s, perhaps with their best known single “Perfect” as the memory hook. Since then she’s been developing an impressive solo career, recognised in 2006 [...]
Filed under: Music | Tagged: Southampton | Comments Off
In the Place de la Bastille in Paris, this statue stands at the top of a column commemorating the citizens of France who took up arms to finally rid themselves of a hereditary monarchy. Despite accepting its reinstatement a few years before, the king was creating unjust, self-serving laws without accountability and the citizens mounted [...]
Watching an interesting TED Talk by Amber Case, I was reminded of a long-term guiding principle I have followed when faced with novelty. It’s an old idea that’s embedded deep in many traditions. The pithy summary says “there’s nothing new under the sun”, and it’s found notably in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes that’s shared [...]
Filed under: Censorship | Comments Off
About a decade ago I started a “spool” of the comments I had been making on my personal website (which had been running since the late 90s – I actually started editing web pages in 1992, for IBM’s Person to Person product). It became a regular feature, and I decided I needed to manage it [...]
Today has been a beautiful day in Paris, spent walking and talking in the brilliant autumnal sunlight with dear and charming friends – which has been the theme for the whole weekend, actually. The distance between here and the things that usually hold my attention could hardly be greater and it’s an unusual but welcome [...]
Next week I will be speaking at the fOSSa conference in Lyon, France. The theme for the day is “openness” and I have the day’s closing slot. Here’s the abstract I’ve sent: Our society – government, laws, economy, businesses, education – all evolved in response to the hub-and-spoke economy of the industrial revolution and its [...]
Filed under: Events, Open Source | Tagged: France | Comments Off
If you found my article in ComputerWorldUK yesterday too long and/or complicated, this campaign web site is the perfect alternative: Free Justin Bieber.
Filed under: Issues | 2 Comments »
Filtering “pornography” without any way to define what it is can only harm our society, and seeing it proposed is yet another reminder that the “Ecclesiastes Principle” still holds true. You can read about this on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Censorship, ComputerWorldUK | Comments Off
Quick LazyWeb request: If anyone knows of a handy tool that makes it easy to build tab-sweep blog posts (you know, the ones where you list the title of each page open across the tabs on your browser, link to them and add a commentary), please tell me. I used to use the post-a-daily-blog feature [...]
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Last week I was in Paris as a guest of The Document Foundation to speak at their first annual LibreOffice Conference. It was my honour to make the opening remarks at the opening reception, hosted by the government of the Paris region. You can read my remarks on ComputerWorldUK.
Filed under: Events | Comments Off
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All views expressed on this blog are those of Simon Phipps and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other entity, including current and former employers. See my full disclosure of interests.
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