Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

Some time ago it occured to me that the stalls in Birmingham’s outdoor market resembled table-tennis tables, and what a waste it was that they were unused a lot of the time. I made the mistake of thinking this out loud in front of Nikki Pugh, who has a habit of making things come true: [...]

A couple of times I have voiced on Twitter my frustration with the arm rests on Chiltern trains. It hadn’t occured to me that the company might be listening. Since nothing happened the first time I tweeted, I suspect that Chiltern were not using Twitter then. However, when I tweeted again recently… “I’ve asked before [...]

I’ve been lookikng for a good audio sharing service for a while, and stumbled across Audiofarm. You can choose to grant your files ‘preview only’ playback or Creative Commons licencing. It would be great if the site also offered some annotation features and codes for embedding into web pages as well as the sharing options [...]

We often make the mistake of assuming that learning how to use a tool will somehow make us good at the job the tool was designed for. I believe our efforts are better spent on first learning the skills and then choosing the tools. Take Quark Xpress, an industrial-strength tool for graphic design professionals. Professionals. In [...]

Obviously I haven’t deliberately included a link to a 500 Internal Server Error: even I’m not that random. There is something very strange going on here. Something – and I suspect it’s related to the Postalicious plugin – automatically posted this post to my blog. I have since added this text (clearly) because a) it [...]

I find it exceptionally difficult to believe that I have any skills of note, and keep meaning to force myself to try and audit them just to check. So here I’ve spelled out what I do in my day job, and some of the challenges I’ve faced. Although I’m still not sure I know any [...]

I’ve been trying out ConnectTweet, a tool that helps make it easier to tell whose voice is being used in a corporate Twitter stream. ConnectTweet is currently not even in beta testing, so it could change considerably before it’s released. In fact, one purpose of this post is to provide feedback. Why ConnectTweet? A problem [...]

This is just to apologise for being very slack the last few weeks. I’ve been busy, but for some reason also feeling unable to write blog posts. I’ve even sat down with some in mind, but haven’t managed to commit fingers to keyboard. Anyway, I’m about to write one; I just wanted first to acknowledge [...]

Tom Watson MP explains why the Tories really shouldn’t privatise BBC Radio One. “Radio One provides unique high quality content to a young audience. It engages them in important social action campaigns and provides a first class news service, second to none on any other BBC network. That’s before you begin to look at its [...]